5
Moving through the land seeking of God’s bounty.
QUR’AN 73:20
THE QUR’AN EXPLICITLY speaks to al Nas, all humanity. In Islam, all human beings are chosen. “One single community” is the description of humankind in the Qur’an.1 The universal message of Islam recognizes no human or geographic boundaries. There is no ethnicity, tribe, or other human grouping exalted above others. To guide personal and communal life and to resolve conflicts, God sent “messengers with glad tidings and warnings along with the Book in truth.” The messengers all brought insights into the human connections that the Qur’an exalts. By God’s grace, those messengers sent to al Nas (the common people) showed the way to “the truth.” None is excluded from the invitation to follow “the straight path,” although the Qur’an recognizes that not all will choose it. The affirmation of God’s intent that humanity should display diversity comes with the admonition that there should be no compulsion in questions of religious faith. The embrace of pluralism could not be more explicit. The Qur’an pronounces simply and directly that “they have their faith and you have yours.”2
Those who do respond to Islam’s message regard the Prophet Muhammad as the last of the line of these messengers from God to humanity. The Seal of the Prophets, as he is named in the Qur’an, opened the Islamic path to all of humanity.3 By his example in building the first community of Muslims, he also clarified the ways in which Muslims would be a distinctive element in the human community. Throughout the ages, the Qur’anic revelation and the efforts of believers to interpret its meaning have given spiritual and cultural coherence to those worldwide who embrace Islam’s call. In every age, the strength of the worldwide connection finds simple human measures. Through some fourteen centuries and to the present day, for example, it has been possible for a Muslim to travel through the ancient pathways of Dar al Islam (the world of Islam) and revel in the human variety without ever feeling a stranger. Ibn Battuta in the fourteenth century left such a record. In his work one experiences the worldwide reach of Islam in his day. The Information Revolution has undoubtedly made some aspects of such a venture more accessible. However, electronic connections cannot give us the internal understandings of what those connections mean as only the traveler on the ground can. Today, the prominent Egyptian journalist Fahmi Huwaidi is providing such a contemporary account. Such personal and direct witnesses speak to the coherence of the ummah (Islamic community) through the ages. At the same time, they affirm that crossing from Dar al Islam to the world beyond has never for Muslims meant leaving the company of human beings who are also God’s creations. Muslims are called to recognize that God’s world is a plural world. They are called to strengthen the coherence of the ummah in a larger world of human difference.
The Prophet, himself a traveler, represents in body, mind, and spirit the distinctive features of the community of Muslims. The Prophet was a husband, a father, and a fighter for justice. For Muslims he is the exemplary human being in all three guises. Islamic scholars entertain a simple and compelling explanation for Islam’s ability to win adherents on all the world’s continents. Islam, they judge, looks to enhancing and uplifting the human character. However, it never goes against it. Islam of the Qur’an is uniquely compatible with human nature. In all their complexities and contradictions human beings are God’s creations. For Islamic scholars, it is no cause for surprise that God’s word reflects an understanding of the essential characteristics of humanity. Islamic communities, wherever they take root, explicitly order themselves in ways to meet the needs of the human body, mind, and spirit. There are no contradictions between demands of the faith and the intrinsic nature of men and women. In Islam, there are no unrealistic demands for celibacy or turning of the other cheek when attacked and dispossessed. Qur’anic verses explicitly allow Muslims, even during Ramadan when fasting is enjoined, to have sex after breaking the fast, while numerous verses also affirm the moral right of self-defense.
Islam raises human beings above all other creations for their capacity to worship God with awareness of all that such worship means. They are called to make Him part of all aspects of their lives from the most private to the most social. The instincts and needs of the body are to be respected. God is a presence in even the most intimate of human connections. Communities of Muslims are saturated with Islam in all personal matters, just as they are in social, economic, and political dimensions of human community. God has set high expectations for the work of the human mind. Men and women from different cultures and geographies are invited to use their thought and imagination to look beyond surface differences to see the imprint of God on all his creations. They are called to use their splendid capacity for reason to understand the human heart, the social world, and the larger natural world and universe beyond. God filled the social world and the world of nature with his “signs.” They point to mysteries to be explored and wonders to challenge the mind. No individual can accomplish such tasks alone. For this mission, human beings must build communities that allow them to work together on the daunting common projects that God has assigned them. To sustain themselves in struggles to build better selves in a better world, Muslims embed reminders of God’s presence in the time and space dimensions of their communal lives. As all who live in the Islamic world know, the words of the Qur’an are spoken into their ears throughout the day. Verses appear before their eyes in an endless stream.
The Qur’an calls on scholars to travel the world to seek wisdom (talab al ‘ilm) to guide this human task of completing God’s work on Earth. It is part of the lore of wisdom that surrounds the person of the Prophet that we should “search for knowledge even as far as China.”4 Such work requires strong and healthy bodies that are not denied essential needs. It demands minds that are creative and innovative but always aware of the limits as well as the glories of reason. Creative human spirits must soar and exalt in capabilities, while never losing sight of the truth that it is God, and not man, who is to be worshipped. The boldest and most ingenious of human achievements are viewed in this same way. Spiritual guides, scientist of all kinds, political leaders, and generators of wealth and prosperity are all to be appreciated, but they are not to be deified. New discoveries in science and technology and the wondrous devices they generate are manmade; they are to be celebrated and used but never venerated. Such is the Qur’anic message to men and women in all times and places: God alone is to be worshipped.
Dar al Islam is structured neither as a political unit nor a singular civilization. It is rather an interconnected community of believers in the revelation. All are strugglers to interpret its meaning. Islamic communities are always communities of interpretation. The common translation of the Arabic phrase Dar al Islam as the “Islamic world” misleads to the degree that it suggests a delimited geographic entity. An older phrase, “abode of Islam,” comes closer but is simply too archaic in English. It can also be understood to connote a fixed rather than variable place. For that reason, the phrase Dar al Islam is best left untranslated. It refers simply to those very different places in God’s world where Islam is to be found and where communities of Muslims have established themselves.
From the time of the Prophet, Islamic communities have been diverse communities in a plural world. Islam embraces human variety and the complexities of human nature as expressions of God’s deliberate creation. The Qur’an tells us that God chose to make humanity a heterogeneous community. God also conveys his intention that Muslims are to share the world he created with non-Muslims. The Qur’an is clear: “If the Lord had so willed, He could surely have made all mankind the same; they will not cease to differ.”5
The Prophet with his companions built the first community of Muslims in this world of intended difference. They have inspired and guided the efforts of those who have followed across the globe. Struggles for Islamic community engage the full range of human experience, from the most intimate to the most global. Each effort to build community and to make rich personal and social lives possible inevitably bears the distinctive marks of particular circumstances. At the same time, each search for community also reflects the shared characteristics that flow from the higher purposes and values of the Qur’an and that are exemplified by that first community of Muslims.
Non-Muslims have always had a rightful place in the communities Muslims establish, as well as in the larger world outside their boundaries. Islamic scholars highlight the invaluable contributions non-Muslims have made through the centuries to the development of Dar al Islam.6 They are judged to have done so not least by their very presence that represents the blessings of human variety. During the times of the great Islamic empires, with their myriad of ethnicities, religions, and languages, Qur’anic values shaped shared ways of thinking and feeling that transcended all such differences. Connections of mind, body, and spirit have made it possible for the worldwide Islamic community of revelation and interpretation to sustain itself through the ages as a networked system of believers. The human failings of particular Muslims, no matter how frequent or egregious, cannot abrogate this demanding Qur’anic vision of a plural human community of Muslims.
Binding the Ummah
Across the centuries, durable yet flexible ties have woven together the lives of those who live within the embrace of the ummah. At times these threads have been strong and vibrant, as they were when Ibn Battuta made his journeys in the fourteenth century. At other times they have weakened and faded. The early and middle decades of the twentieth century, before the fourth surge of Islamic Renewal, represented such a time. Although the character and salience of the ties that bind have varied, there has been one constant: the presence of the holy Qur’an. God’s final message to humanity, articulated in a language of incomparable beauty, enjoys an uncorrupted presence wherever Arabic is understood. The ulema (Islamic scholars) have sought to understand the Message, as well as the larger world within which it works its effects. Their quest has always been for knowledge of the text and its changing worldly context. Scholars have sought to deepen understanding of the values and higher purposes of the Qur’an. No less important have been the efforts of the best among them to know as much as could be known of the natural and social world where those values and purposes find expression. Through the centuries, talab al ‘ilm has led scholars to crisscross Islamic lands. By their interactions with merchants, saints, and simple travelers along the pathways of Dar al Islam, they have acted as the human threads that bind the community. Islamic scholars continue to do so today. The life force making the Islamic community real and resilient has always been these threaded patterns of human interaction that Islam inspires.
Ibn Battuta represented this life force and the extraordinary human connections it is capable of generating in a compelling way. As a rahal (traveler), Ibn Battuta visited more of the fourteenth-century ummah than any other man of his time. Ibn Battuta’s travels began in 1325 in a completely conventional way. He set out from his home in Tangiers in present-day Morocco to make the pilgrimage to Mecca. From Mecca and Medina, he made his way to Yemen, Mogadishu, Africa, and Oman. He then voyaged across Anatolia and on to Persia, Afghanistan, and India, where he worked for several years. Travels down the Indian coast took him to the Maldive Islands for a year and a half, and then on to Ceylon, Bengal, Sumatra, Java, and finally China. Ibn Battuta eventually returned home to Morocco across the Middle East but not directly, visiting Timbuktu in west Africa and Granada in al Andalus on the way. In all, Ibn Battuta logged an estimated 75,000 miles over the course of some twenty-four years. His Travels, as no other single work, brings the fourteenth-century ummah clearly into view.7
Ibn Battuta’s record highlighted the character of the human interactions that defined the ummah. The caliphate, often more symbolic than real, expressed the ambitious aspiration for the political unity of the far-flung and loosely connected communities of the ummah. That political unity has never been realized. The modern era brought the dissolution of the caliphate. It has also seen the undermining of the traditional learning centers that educated the ulema. Both blows signaled a weakening of the ummah. They should have been calamities, but they were not: Instead, these setbacks made possible creative rethinking about the nature of the contemporary ummah and of the human networks that sustain it.
Muslims around the world responded in innovative ways to the setbacks suffered. Their responses fuel the contemporary Islamic Renewal. The Renewal illustrates for our time the way diverse and informal human networks, rather than formal structures, sustain the ummah. Muslims today have invented entirely new forms of organization, mobilization, and enactment, such as the original Egyptian “society” of Muslim Brothers of Hassan al Banna, the “intellectual school” of Egypt’s New Islamic scholars, or the “study circles” of the Turkish followers of Said Nursi. These associations are loosely organized around commitments, leadership, and organizational poles at a far less formal level than either the earlier caliphate structure or contemporary social movements or parties. Only some of such poles of emergent cohesion are political. Moreover, those that do have a political character are by no means the most important. The selective attention to things political comes at a high cost to understanding al Tagdid al Islami.8 Today the networks of the ummah do include Islamic political groups, movements, and parties, but they are in no way limited to them. Far more varied collaborative activities give substance to the Islamic Renewal. They center as well on religious, professional, cultural, economic, and social justice commitments. Their efficacy depends not simply on ideas or structures held in common. Great passions, complex feelings, and shared sensibilities have an importance that is just as important. The psychological dimension, inaccessible to external observation, may well be the most cohesive of all. The ummah has an interior life.
The Information Revolution and the Ummah
The new technologies of the Information Revolution have been enthusiastically embraced by Islamic groupings of all kinds. They mesh naturally with the borderless character of the ummah. They have been useful in enhancing the flexible ties on multiple levels that such decentered organizational patterns require. Centrist Islamic intellectuals, guided by the New Islamic scholars, have counseled reassuringly and accurately that the new information and communication channels complement rather than subvert older unifying forms. They recognize that the new technologies can provide accelerated connections and more expansive linkages. They explain that technology, too, is part of God’s world and always has been.
It is neither an innovation nor a surprise that the networks of the ummah in a global age constitute themselves in ways that make use of the new possibilities the Information Revolution has brought. These contemporary changes in the nature of the Islamic networks that bind the ummah are important to note. However, it is unhelpful to exaggerate the ways they transform the character of the worldwide Islamic community.9 Dar al Islam is not flat. It does not present itself as a blank surface on which modern technologies of communication and power can inscribe new beginnings, incommensurate with what has come before. The ummah has historical, cultural, and spiritual depth. It has an astounding continuity, to which the work of Islamic scholars, merchants, and simple travelers, like Ibn Battuta, through the centuries testifies.
Islam is always about infusing a spiritual dimension into the practices that bind across the full spectrum of human possibilities. Collective struggles to interpret the Qur’an and the relationship of its message to contemporary realities forge powerful bonds that are physical, intellectual, and spiritual. Islamic communities have always been realized in struggles of interpretation: What does the revelation mean in our time and place? What does Islam mean for my day-to-day interactions, and how can I live day in and day out? Meanings and emotions held in common and experienced collectively permeate Islamic communities. The practice of Islam brings God fully into the individual lives of believers and into the most intimate spaces of their personal lives. At the same time Islam responds to human social needs by fostering a sense of sillat (connectedness) to others in communities that strive to organize themselves in what they understand to be the ways God intended for humanity. In Arabic the root of sillat is the same as the word for prayer. Divine intentions for humanity extend into all areas of human life, from the public spaces of politics and economics to the private spheres of friendship, family, and sexuality.
In the most general terms, the universal drive for human connections of all kinds displays a relentless capacity to articulate itself anew for each generation and for every age. Such renewals are invariably experienced as more distinctive than they really are and not just by Muslims. Young people everywhere claim sex as their own secret discovery. Who among us, in our youth, could entertain the thought for long that our parents or, more unthinkable still, our grandparents, actually have sex? These irreverent thoughts came to mind when working my way through the overgrown literature on globalization and its impact on human affairs. An unwarranted breathlessness characterizes even the best and most thoughtful work about the new information technologies and electronic linkages they make possible. The argument is made that these innovations have precipitated an unprecedented break in human history. Now, suddenly, everything has changed. A new epoch is upon us. This assessment is extended to Dar al Islam. Muslims, a leading Western scholar of Islam has announced, must now come to terms with a “globalized Islam,” as though that challenge were a new one. In keeping with this view, Muslims are called to “the search for a new ummah.”10
Islam and Sexuality
The truth is that our parents, like our grandparents, did have sex. So, too, did earlier generations, including the Muslims among them. Indeed, few of the world’s cultures have as rich and sophisticated a literature exploring human sexuality, and the complex behaviors and emotions that surround it, as medieval Islamic thought. After all, the ummah is sustained by the resilient threads of human connectivity in all its forms, including the most physical. There is no domain of human experience that lies beyond Islam. As with all else, the Qur’an helps most in understanding why. One of the most beautiful Qur’anic verses makes God’s purpose clear:
O mankind! We created you from a single (pair) of male and female, and made you into nations and tribes, that ye may know each other (not that ye may despise each other). Verily, the most honored of you in the sight of God is (he who is) most righteous of you. And God has full knowledge and is well acquainted (with all things).11
God is the only singular in Islam. The Prophet Muhammad is seen in the company of the long line of prophets. He is surrounded by his companions, wives, and children. One cannot be a Muslim alone. God’s command to humankind to “know each other” extends to human connections of all kinds, including the sexual.
Human sexuality has an honored place in the moral universe of Islam. It is regarded as no less important than air, water, and food. Sexual behaviors are understood to make a critical contribution to human physical and psychological well-being that goes beyond procreation. Authoritative Islamic texts provide abundant resources for appreciation of the spiritual dimensions of human sexuality and the pleasures it brings, without stigma or a sense of shame. Discussion of the appropriate boundaries of those pleasures has continued through the ages, many of which are detailed in the Qur’an. The discussions are complex, but two firm conclusions inevitably emerge. First, boundaries in some form for sexual expression consistently provide important guidance, although different communities of Muslims have calibrated them differently. Second, the strange notion of celibacy has no place in Islam.
Qur’anic insights into both the physical characteristics of the human body and the higher purposes of the human spirit are both integral to the classical heritage. So, too, is an understanding of the connections between the two. Human beings, the great medieval thinkers understood, are endowed with the startling power to connect the purely physical with the higher realms of the spirit. Medieval scholars explored these connections in matters cosmic and personal. The power of the human mind, Abu Hamed al Ghazali (1058–1111) explains, extends to an improbable capacity to move the body without activating the muscles or touching. The two realms of mind and body are linked in powerful ways that only seem to be mysterious because we are not mindful of the small miracles of everyday existence. Ghazali made the point in a wonderfully playful way. In dialogue with the philosophers, Ghazali discusses a class of miracles that even the most skeptical of philosophers accept. Ghazali summarizes that when the mind conjures up an image, the body may respond to it. A vision of tasty food may cause the mouth to salivate, although no actual food or even the smell of food is present. Similarly, and even more decisively, is the situation where “a man imagines sexual intercourse and the faculty responds by making his penis erect.”12 Both men and women understand and appreciate that very human miracle, especially in those dreaded times when things do not go as they are supposed to.
A great deal of the nuance and sophistication of medieval discussions of sexuality has been lost. The Egyptian Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz was subject to a steady stream of criticism over the course of his career for the sexual themes woven into his novels. Representations of vigorous heterosexuality, homosexuality, and sexual transgressions of various kinds are threaded through his major novels. Mahfouz treats sexuality as a normal part of the human personal and social experience. Belal Fadl, the contemporary Egyptian writer and social commentator, makes the point that when viewed in the context of the classical heritage, Mahfouz’s treatment of sexuality is, in fact, greatly understated. Fadl invokes, in particular, the work of the distinguished scholar Jalal al Din al Suyuti (c. 1445–1505).13 He comments wryly that contemporary conventions, foreign to the classical heritage, make it unwise to even mention the title of his most important work on human sexuality!14 Al Suyuti was no minor or marginal figure. A prolific Sufi scholar, he was the author of hundreds of published works. He produced major studies in fiqh (legal reasoning, based on interpretation of Qur’an and Sunnah) and Shari’ah (the provisions from Qur’an and Sunnah to regulate human behavior). He also wrote in candid ways on sexuality. His work is suffused with an intense and learned interest in what can only be called the arts of sexual expression. There is explicit discussion of the most adroit movements in sexual performance. There is also very sensitive attention to the emotional and spiritual dimensions of the sexual experience.
Sexuality has a sacred character in Islam. Al Suyuti is not the outlier he may appear to be, although his treatment is more explicit and detailed than most. The Prophet Muhammad charted the way. Quite unlike Jesus, the Prophet appears as a figure who balanced spiritual and worldly things. While Muhammad’s role as a fighter is often emphasized, it should not overwhelm his equally compelling image as a husband and father. The Prophet is reported to have loved perfume, food, and women best. He judged the sexual union of husband and wife an act of worship for which each would earn sadaqa (a divine reward). Sexual intercourse, the Prophet reportedly advised, must be approached in ways consistent with its spiritual character. There are hadiths that attribute to Prophet Muhammad some very explicit advice on how men should approach their wives. While the hadiths themselves come with weak authority, they are consistent with the Qur’anic embrace of human sexuality and the fully human character of the Prophet himself. In one such hadith the Prophet warns men that “none of you should fall upon his wife like an animal; but let there first be a messenger between you.” The men ask the Prophet, “And what is that messenger?” He replies, “Kisses and words.” The Prophet finds two things unacceptable in male they are also linked by the shared experiences, values, and feelings of the people who move through them.
Islam considers communal life itself sacred. Political, economic, social, and sexual affairs are not a distraction from the faith; rather, they are important components of a lived spirituality. The experience of building community and the conduct of its affairs in accord with Islam provide intimations of the sacred. All who live in such a community find reflections of the divine through the day-to-day experience of pleasure, kindness, justice, and generosity, rather than through faith and prayer alone. Mosques do demarcate a sacred space in Islam. It is not, however, a space apart: All the Earth for Muslims is a mosque. Nor do mosques bring spirituality to the community. Rather, they express the spirituality that a community of Muslims makes possible. For this reason, their particular architecture does not matter greatly. Across Dar al Islam mosques in all manner of styles can be found. Aside from mosques, which do require a certain level of material investment and often official approval, any small group of Muslims can create a zawiya (small informal mosque) on any street in any neighborhood. Spirituality does not reside in external forms. Whatever the forms, there is always an excess of meaning that exceeds the externalities of architectural structures. It is the unseen interiors that define the experience of Islam for believers.
Networks from the Inside: Ibn Battuta and the Pragmatic Alternative
Expectations of access to the interior of networks must be kept realistic and modest. The access will inevitably be incomplete. It will come, if it comes at all, through knowledgeable insiders like Ibn Battuta and Fahmi Huwaidi. We need these fellow travelers at our side as we move through the Islamic networks we seek to understand. We must rely on these traveling companions to provide interpretations along the way of what we are seeing and hearing. Travel literature represents one of the great Arab cultural attainments. It provides a venerable template for pragmatic work of this kind.
Islam suffuses the pathways along which Ibn Battuta travels and the varied human interactions he enjoys along the way. My own infatuation with the great rahal is not, I have come to understand, quite as unusual for Westerners as I once imagined. Anthropologists in recent decades have come to recognize Ibn Battuta’s Travels as a foundational work for anthropology as a field.18 In quite unexpected ways, as we shall see in Chapter 6, the work of this fourteenth-century traveler provides a useful point of entry to contemporary anthropological literature.
The Learned Networks of Medieval Islam
The most helpful fellow travelers are invariably figures on the move who experience as much of the networks of their community as possible. One needs to get to know them and appreciate all the slants and biases that color their point of view. The dazzling scholarship of the medieval world of Islam adds a multitude of just such critical and highly individualized human voices to external mappings of ancient networks. Ibn Battuta does not travel alone. Muslim scholars, mystics, and merchants in great numbers moved through the networks of medieval Islam. Many left records of their passage. Some have given us their personal and deeply felt accounts of thoughts and feelings, doubts and certainties, as they lived their lives passing through these inherited pathways. These cultural treasures of the medieval era give life to the networks of that time of Islamic ascendancy. They have provided instruction for the sensibilities of generations of Muslims in all areas of life, from probity in commerce to an appreciation for meaningful sexual experience. They give substance to notions of belonging to the worldwide community of Muslims. For the purposes at hand, these records of complex and rewarding human interactions, widely shared throughout the ummah, provide helpful inoculation against any notion that a networked global Islam is either a mirage or a product of the new information technologies.
Some of these primary accounts from the classical age rise to the level of great and enduring works of scholarship. All of the major medieval Islam thinkers, including Ibn Sina, Ibn Rushd, Hamed al Ghazali, and Ibn Khaldun, include in their writings references to their own very extensive personal and professional travels. They comment as well on the movement of books and ideas across the great expanses of the medieval ummah. In doing so they give us an internal view of how the networks actually functioned in human terms. Through their writings we see how the networks are experienced by real people to whom one can relate on a variety of levels across the centuries. The gifted analyst Ibn Khaldun, for example, offered his services to rulers first in Tunis and then in Cairo, where he worked for more than twenty years. We can register these facts in the life of the great scholar. However, we can also grieve with Ibn Khaldun when he tells us that he lost his entire family at sea just off the coast of Alexandria when the boat bringing them to Egypt from the Maghreb sank.
Great debates animated intellectual, religious, and cultural life as controversial ideas, concepts, and ways of thinking traveled through the classic networks. Ibn Rushd famously argued for scientific rationalism and confidence that the universe was governed by laws of cause and effect. Abu Hamed al Ghazali opposed him vigorously with a mystical “occasionalism” that saw the necessary hand of God in each effect. Their debate echoes through the ages, as a clash of real personalities as well as ideas. Great questions of the day circulated through the networks of the learned. They continue to resonate with educated Muslims today: How should we engage the great Greek thinkers like Aristotle and Plato, the sources for so much that eventually defined the West, from the perspective of the Islamic revelation? How should we integrate foundational notions of prophecy with the legacy of Greek rationalism? How should we interpret the revelation in ways suitable to the diverse circumstances of the ummah? What should we do about provocative and unconventional ideas and the subversive circles of intellectuals and activists who advocated them? How should we insulate and protect the unlettered masses from the potentially subversive thinking of the learned?
More than the exploration of an exhausting stream of philosophical and theological question was involved in the exchanges that animated Dar al Islam, however: Practical matters were also in play. Islamic intellectuals shared the findings of astronomy that had direct and immediate consequences for the everyday practice of the faith. Exactly when would the fasting for Ramadan begin? Medical learning saved lives. A sophisticated interest in scientific experimentation, rather than just theorization, made its way through the networks. The results have been momentous for human history. The experimental method is an Islamic invention. Islamic scholars built on the speculative work of the Greeks, going beyond it to pave the way for the experimental laboratories of modern scientific and technological research.
The flow of goods and services from one end of the ummah to the other gave the networks a very down-to-earth function. The classical scholars themselves displayed a wide range of interests that went far beyond theology to philosophy, mathematics, and medicine. Political insights and bureaucratic skills were also among the most important intellectual goods traded and shared. So, too, were notions of the beautiful and the place of the arts in Islamic communities. The great rahala (travelers) traded their firsthand knowledge of conditions and customs in the various lands through which they moved for influence and wealth at the courts of the powerful.
The Grand Theory of Ibn Khaldun
I first encountered the work of this galaxy of impressive Islamic intellectuals and the diverse world of ideas and cultures they inhabited in graduate school, where we read from the classics. Among the very small cohort of graduate students at Harvard interested in the Islamic world in the mid-1960s, Ibn Khaldun attracted the most attention, notably for the generalizing thrust of his thinking. Ibn Khaldun believed that humanity had a natural need to identify with a group and its leadership. The strength of such group feeling was the essential determinate of the rise and fall of dynasties. In his well-known view, a small group with ‘asabiyya (high energy and group cohesiveness) would arise periodically to replace declining, dynastic structures. They would win mass support and sweep away the old order, only to suffer the same fate themselves when the inevitable decline of their own ‘asabiyya set in. Ibn Khaldun put his dazzling intelligence at the service of a string of rulers, including those in Tunis and then in Cairo.
Such findings seemed neither strange nor irrelevant when I first encountered them. The mid-1960s in America was a time for comparable sweeping theories that aimed for the status of science for politics and economics at major U.S. academic centers. It was also a time for preparation for the practical tasks of imperial rulership, although the matter was never put so bluntly. American scholars, nevertheless, did go about readying themselves and their students for the new American world responsibilities, the euphemism used in those days for empire. This period was one of great confidence in models of political and economic development, applicable in all times and places. Although cast in universal terms, these development studies were in fact distillations of the Western, and particularly the American, experience. The distinctive histories and cultures of underdeveloped or developing countries inevitably came into view as obstinate social and cultural materials to be transformed. Area studies programs were launched during these same years to serve Cold War ends. They emphasized language and culture. Such area programs did attract smaller cadres of students who were encouraged to study abroad. Everyone understood that the programs were considered second tier in terms of academic standing. Moreover, students in them were explicitly warned of the dangers of “going native,” even though there were those who did develop attachments to the peoples and cultures they studied. For most, however, it did not take long to figure out that the skills acquired would be important primarily for assessing what went wrong with societies that had failed to develop along the lines of the most powerful Western states. It was considered important to have just enough command of the language and just enough familiarity with the culture for the contemptuous project of understanding the “moral basis of backward societies,” as one highly influential study put the matter.19 In this climate of hubris, lessons learned from a marginal, poor Italian village would illuminate the vast geography of empire where the United States had inherited responsibilities from the great European empires. The thought that American scholars and their graduate students might learn anything at all from the histories and contemporary experiences of such failed peoples, particularly the Muslims among them, almost never surfaced. What was needed was general theory that would justify the benevolent transformations of the modernization that America’s dominant world position would facilitate. A smattering of “local knowledge” was judged helpful in a very secondary way to tailor the general remedies to specific circumstances. Given his own entanglements with the ruling powers of his day, Ibn Khaldun could reasonably be seen as an Islamic scholar on whose shoulders one could stand.
Moving through the Fourteenth-Century Ummah with Ibn Battuta
My own inclinations ran in a contrary direction. Islamic studies, with emphasis on language, literature, culture, and history, provided an important refuge from my power-drenched studies in political and economic development. In those early years of my first encounter with the classic Islamic thinkers, I was not inclined to give my spare time and affections to yet another abstract theorizer, even one with the dazzling intelligence of Ibn Khaldun. In the end, like his modern counterparts, he seemed to have his primary interest in abstract notions of power and its imperial uses.20
It was the far less abstract and far more human Ibn Battuta whom I found most engaging. My reasons for the attraction, then as now, go against the tenor of the time. For me, Ibn Battuta was a kindred spirit. He generally seemed to be getting the most out of his present circumstances, rather than seeing the present simply as a way station to some imagined and more attractive future. At the same time, Ibn Battuta embraced his immediate situation with just the right hint of dissatisfaction, always looking around corners, endlessly curious about unexplored pathways, given to dawdling, ready at all times to take a new and unplanned direction, always wonderfully unfocused. Ibn Battuta’s mind wandered. So did he. I was all too eager to follow him.
Wealth, influence, and social standing mattered to Ibn Battuta, too much so for my taste. I always wished he paid more attention to ordinary people and was less impressed by riches and social status. However, the acquisition of wealth and power did not define Ibn Battuta’s life in practice. In fact, he put a great deal more effort and energy into living in interesting and pleasurable ways. He found the special challenges of doing so with people quite different from himself very much to his liking. He never seemed to mind the fact that all his personal adventures took place in foreign circumstances he could never hope to understood fully. Ibn Battuta reveled in the unknowns of his everyday life. He taught me to do the same. In terms of sheer intellectual firepower, Ibn Battuta was no match for Ibn Khaldun. His attraction rested on his overwhelming drive to see as much of the world as possible and to make pragmatic sense of what he saw and experienced. The great cities of the medieval ummah come alive in Ibn Battuta’s writings. I can never visit any of them now without feeling his presence and experiencing with him a sense of the grandeur of the architecture, notably the schools and the mosques, and of the pervasive spiritual impact of Islam that soaks into every crack and crevice of those precious stones. Those cities, like a string of pearls, serve as lustrous markers for an inevitable itinerary. The improbable sense of connectedness across such a vast territory creates an irresistible compulsion to see them all. Each of the ancient Islamic cities is precious in its own way, but none beckons more irresistibly than Cairo.
Lingering in Cairo
Cairo is for Ibn Battuta, as it is for me, the inescapable gateway to the Islamic world. The description of Cairo in the Travels is quite extraordinary for its sheer poetry.21 The description resonates through the ages. Cairo remains Cairo. In the Travels, we see the venerable mosques and the extraordinary number of schools. We feel the crush of the population and the impossible animation of the streets. We learn of the riches that the land of Egypt yields. More importantly, Ibn Battuta captures the intangible ways in which Egyptians have given their capital a distinctive character that defines the city to this day. It is that definition, in turn, that provides the most durable meaning to the notion of an Egyptian identity, despite the fact that no other Egyptian city, especially not Alexandria, shares its character. In Arabic “Cairo” to Egyptians from other parts of the country is known as Misr, which is the Arabic word for Egypt as well as the capital. In the vernacular, the city and the country are one.
Cairo, Ibn Battuta tells us, is a city that makes the stranger feel that he is not a stranger at all. The people of the city embrace all. In Cairo, there is a place for the weak and a place for the strong. Cairo offers exactly what you are looking for, from the wise to the ignorant, from the upright to shady characters of all kinds, from the serious to the superficial, from the limited to those of immense intelligence, and from those who do good to those who do far less than good. In Cairo, every life event inspires a party, organized or impromptu. The youth of the city are its greatest treasure. Cairo as the heart of Egypt, Ibn Battuta reports, wins the heart of all the nations of Dar al Islam and beyond.22 Egypt looms large in Ibn Battuta’s account even after he has left the Nile Valley. Then, as now, one encounters educated Egyptians everywhere throughout the lands where Arabs live. They contribute their talents to the lives of brothers and sisters in all parts of the ummah. When locals learned that Ibn Battuta was coming from the land of the Arabs, their first questions were invariably about Egypt.
Ibn Battuta’s descriptions provide no great single finding, no key to unlock the mysteries of human affairs. He had nothing to offer that could rival Ibn Khaldun’s notion of ‘asabiyya, for example. I found that a great relief. His complexly detailed work illuminated the lives of diverse others. He raised questions about specific problems in particular sites. He seemed mercifully to have no interest at all in providing sweeping answers for all times and places to highly speculative questions about the fate of human societies.
The sheer expanse of the world of Islam he traversed leaves a lasting impression. Ibn Battuta’s travels through Islamic lands helped define my own itinerary for a lifetime of voyages, as yet incomplete. Just last year, I followed Ibn Battuta to Ras al Barr at the tip of the delta in Egypt, where the Nile empties into the Mediterranean.23 I first read his description from the Travels of that magical site. I did find that amazing sliver of land where you can see the fresh water of the river on one side and the salt water of the sea on the other, just as he promised. I have no doubt from his description that Ibn Battuta had stood on my very same spot.24
However, the urge to simply map Ibn Battuta’s extraordinary lifelong travels through these lands should be resisted. Maps are always misleading. They are particularly inappropriate representations of Ibn Battuta’s travels. They impress for the wrong reasons. Maps suggest purpose. Yet the great rahal often has only the dimmest idea where he is headed. He is never lost just because he is never quite sure where he is going. To travel with him demands a readiness to reverse course, circle back, or head in an entirely new direction, all without evident purpose. The extent of his travels, and the destinations eventually reached, matter far less than the adventures along the uncharted ways.
Writing this book provided my excuse to return to Ibn Battuta’s Travels in its entirety. My early encounters with Ibn Battuta were limited to excerpts from his massive work. I read them first in advanced Arabic-language classes and then in history and politics courses on the medieval Islamic world. Unlike those sad occasions when positive first impressions are betrayed by later intimacy, knowing Ibn Battuta more fully has only confirmed my appreciation for his work and for what it suggests for my own. The full text of Travels runs some 700 pages.25 The author emerges clearly with all his imperfections, contradictions, and complexities. The contrast to the more conventional and quite boring Marco Polo could not be starker. Marco Polo gives us a didactic geography, and we learn little about the sensibilities of the man. In contrast, Ibn Battuta was a man of robust body and mind, and his expansive personality is imprinted on every page. Ibn Battuta responded to the pleasures of the mind and traveled to the ends of the Earth to meet the great scholars of his time, although he himself was no scholar. He pursued Sufi mystics and sought to learn from them the secrets that came to them from their soul searching, although the great rahal was no mystic. Ibn Battuta experienced as well and without contradiction the pleasures of the body. He described quite matter-of-factly the attractions of the intoxicants of wine, power, and wealth, although sex in an array of forms appears quite clearly to have been his drug of choice.
Ibn Battuta never failed to comment on the beauty of mosques and madrasas (Islamic schools) that adorned the cities of the ummah. Yet the focus on the monuments to faith and learning did not exhaust his sense of the beautiful. Beautiful people, especially girls and women but men and boys as well, captured his attention and stirred his passions. He took obvious pleasure in describing in rich detail the sources of their attractiveness and the effect it had on others. Given the breadth and depth of the attractions he experienced, it did not surprise me to learn that Ibn Battuta made himself something of an expert on various aphrodisiacs as well as on sexual practices and positions. At one point, Ibn Battuta reports that a beautiful young gariya (female indentured servant) brings an impressive price of one dinar, while a particularly handsome young male servant commands two.26 He went to great lengths to make these bonded servants a part of his life wherever his voyages led him. Ibn Battuta thought nothing of delaying a voyage to search for a favorite ghulam (male bonded servant) who had mysteriously disappeared. Nor does he display any unease about the obvious intensity of the attachment.27
Ibn Battuta genuinely wanted to know how others on other shores went about their own experience of living. He wanted to learn about their search for knowledge, their quest for spiritual serenity, and their experiments with the shared pleasures of the mind and body. It was Ibn Battuta’s reaction to the tremendous human variety of the far-flung world he encountered that appealed most to me. It was his ability to move with a modicum of success through these varied human spaces that left the most enduring impression.
Responsive Openness and the Wonders of the Ummah
Ibn Battuta brings to his travels an attitude of mind and heart best characterized as responsive openness. An unwarranted confidence allowed Ibn Battuta to act as though his understanding of the world was right in its essentials. No matter how exotic to his eyes the setting, this intrepid traveler clung to the expectation that, for all their surface differences, his varied interlocutors saw the world in terms close enough to his own roughly accurate understandings to make mutual comprehension and joint actions possible. Ibn Battuta simply took it for granted that those he met did have a fundamental grasp of their own situation. He also believed that they had the capacity to explain with stories or illustrate with actions the meaning of their beliefs and behaviors to a stranger, willing to listen carefully and linger long enough to really see and hear. In short, his adventures were always those of a man with a resilient capacity to learn from his encounters with others who captured his attention. He struggled to see them as clearly as possible, to hear their voices, and to grasp the essentials of what they had to say. Through Ibn Battuta’s stories, we come to know the ways in which he understands the cultural specifics in which he inevitably becomes entangled. We gain insight as well into the larger lessons about the durability of a shared Islamic culture as an independent yet flexible determinate of identities.
At Home in Distant Places
Arriving in a new place in some distant land, Ibn Battuta regales his readers with the often quite startling customs and beliefs he encounters, including novel practices and ideas about Islam. With the catalogue of cultural distinctions and anomalies fully elaborated, he invariably ends his preliminary assessment of the strange new land and its people with the phrase “and they are Muslims.”28 Comforted by that thought, Ibn Battuta gets down to the practical business of setting up a personal and professional life as a qadi (judge who decides cases in accord with Shari’ah). He does so without undue emphasis on the novelty of his circumstances and the special difficulties it presents. His priorities are timeless. The qadi must find employment or make himself available for the patronage of some high personage. With a means of support secured, he then sets about setting up his household. To feel at home and at peace, emotional and sexual needs must be satisfied. All manner of customs in strange lands pique his curiosity, although none more than the sexual practices of the local populations.
Sex, in theory and practice, seems at times to be an all-consuming preoccupation. Ibn Battuta cheerfully assumes his readers have parallel drives. He unabashedly shares his discoveries. Afghanistan, the rahal reports, is a country of exceptionally beautiful and sensual women. He comments on their exquisite features, particularly their well-shaped noses and luxuriant eyebrows. The sensuality of Afghan women, the qadi notes, expresses itself in knowledge of a range of sexual positions that the experienced rahal reports never having encountered anywhere else.29 In Turkey Ibn Battuta is fascinated by the hold that Queen Taitughli has on her husband, the sultan. She is the sultan’s favorite wife and dominates his court. Several courtiers supply Ibn Battuta with what he finds to be a compelling explanation for the power she wields. The sultan sleeps more frequently in her chambers than with all the rest of his wives. From two well-placed courtiers, Ibn Battuta learns that the sultan himself reports that sleeping with his favored wife is like always sleeping with a virgin, despite the children she has borne. Ibn Battuta pursues the matter and learns from friends at court that there are reportedly women with a similar anatomy in China. That critical intelligence is filed away. Ibn Battuta later writes of his travels to several Chinese cities. With disappointment, he reports that he registered no success in finding Chinese women with those special anatomical gifts.30
Ibn Battuta’s robust interest in sex does not preclude serious attention to the search for knowledge and spiritual enlightenment. Both scholars and saints consistently play their roles in the life he creates in each new site. Moreover, Ibn Battuta’s voyages give him the opportunity to see women as more than beautiful adornments and sources of sexual pleasure. He shows no hesitation in reporting these discoveries as well. In the lands of the Turks, Ibn Battuta comments on the extraordinary levels of respect and power that women enjoy. They have, he reports with some disbelief, “a higher place in society than the men.”31 Such revelations could not have come easily to a Maliki scholar from north Africa, where the roles of women at court, especially in political matters, were far more indirect and almost never public. At times Ibn Battuta is clearly taken aback, as when he once observed a well-dressed, unveiled Turkish woman entering the bazaar in the company of her husband. He comments that her male companion might well have been mistaken for her servant.32 The impressionable qadi cannot fail to notice the great wealth enjoyed by the wives of the sultan and the extravagant ways they displayed it. Ibn Battuta also notes just how much respect the sultan himself shows to his most senior wife. When she enters the golden tent, he reports that “the Sultan advances to the entrance of the pavilion to meet her, salutes her, takes her by the hand, and only after she has mounted to the couch and taken her seat does he himself sit down. All this is done in full view of those present, and without any use of veils.”33
As Ibn Battuta moves through the diverse spaces of Dar al Islam, he inevitably encounters beliefs and behaviors of which he disapproves. He is a reformer by nature. His accounts of these struggles, at times in public arenas but more often in the most intimate spaces of his private life, are among the most revealing and engaging in his Travels. The specific, grounded details speak to larger and more abstract issues of the role of cultural and religious identity in everyday life.
Ibn Battuta found a great deal to admire in the lives of the Muslims of the Maldive Islands, where he remained for the unusually long period of a year and a half. He comments appreciatively on the fealty of the Muslim inhabitants of the island to their formal religious obligations. He openly admires their honesty in social interactions and probity in their everyday commercial interactions. His descriptions leave no doubt of the sincerity of his admiration. This backdrop of appreciation only serves to highlight Ibn Battuta’s private dismay that the married men and women of the Maldives regularly establish intimate relationships with “friends” of the opposite sex, whom they entertain privately in their homes when their spouses are away. Ibn Battuta reports his astonishment at visiting the most respected qadi in an important city to find him entertaining a beautiful young woman “friend,” without the slightest hint of impropriety. To the contrary, the local qadi mentions that he had recently made the pilgrimage to Mecca with his young friend. The woman is openly amused by Ibn Battuta’s discomfort that she has been invited to join them. Her distinguished “friend,” for his part, seems quite mystified by Ibn Battuta’s response to the circumstance.
Ibn Battuta learns that such behavior is quite unexceptional. On another occasion, he visits a second distinguished personage at home. In the background, a woman and man are conversing intimately on a daybed. When Ibn Battuta inquires as to the identity of the woman, his host explains that she is his wife. Who is the man, inquires Ibn Battuta. Her “friend,” he learns. Ibn Battuta’s host is a man who has lived in Arab lands where customs are so different. The qadi, therefore, inquires why his host is not disconcerted by such behavior. The man replies calmly that the women of his country are quite different from those in Arab lands. In the islands, he explains, such interactions are perfectly acceptable. Later, the scholar sends Ibn Battuta several invitations to visit again. They are quietly ignored. But what is most revealing is the way Ibn Battuta tells the story. He clearly disapproves. However, he also notes just how well established these cultural practices are. At no point does it occur to him that these Muslims could be induced to change their ways to bring them more in line with the views of a qadi from north Africa.
Ibn Battuta is quite delighted on the Maldive Islands with the cleanliness and order of the most important city. He is also struck by the personal dignity and beauty of its inhabitants. However, he has a very hard time adjusting to the local habits of dress. The women of the islands, he reports, do not cover their breasts. Ibn Battuta makes a great effort to persuade the local notables and Islamic scholars that such behavior does not comport with the modesty that good Muslim women should observe. The male notables are quite unconvinced by his arguments, and the women of the islands find them even less persuasive. The best that Ibn Battuta can accomplish is insistence that all women who enter his courtroom cover their breasts or be denied entry. In their other activities, the women remained free to dress as they saw fit. For the qadi it is a small victory. Yet Ibn Battuta seems content that it represents the maximum change he can effect. Ibn Battuta always accepted with equanimity the idea that he could never understand other Muslims’ lives or their stories in quite the same way as they did.
In his own more intimate personal spaces, Ibn Battuta is just as unsuccessful in imposing his notion of preferred behavior when it conflicts with established custom. The women who are so important in his life repeatedly resist his efforts to change their behavior. For the most part, they do so successfully. He accepts their victories. In one instance, he reports that neither his wives nor his female bonded servants are persuaded by his arguments that they should cover more of their bodies. We can almost hear in his accounts echoes of the voices of the women themselves. They chide him for insisting on their wearing clothing that will make them a mockery before family and friends. They object forcefully that the clothes would conceal their beauty. Ibn Battuta’s argument for the costliness and elegance of the fabrics he provides carries no weight with women. They tell him that all the draping only diminishes the natural beauty that God has bestowed on them!34
We also learn that by local custom women do not eat in the presence of their husbands. Ibn Battuta is baffled by the custom and exerts all manner of pressure on his wives to set it aside. He appreciates the attentive care that his wives give him. However, he wishes to enjoy their company as wives and not simply as cooks and caregivers. With some of the women, he has a measure of success. They do agree to take their meals in his company. With others, all his efforts have no effect at all. Once again, he simply learns to live with the way these individual women chose to interpret the latitude of the local custom.35
Not all the assessments of Ibn Battuta’s encounters are his own. Travels also provides instructive glimpses of the ways in which the behavior and beliefs of the qadi are themselves evaluated by others, and the evaluations are not always favorable. As a strict Maliki qadi, Ibn Battuta seeks to impose the penalty of amputation of the hand that his literalist reading of Shari’ah mandates for a crime of theft. Not all Muslims, he learned in a dramatic way, agreed. The stunned qadi reports that when he pronounced his verdict, several witnesses in his courtroom fainted. Clearly, the strict enforcement of al hudud (punishments provided for in Shari’ah) was unacceptable to local sensibilities.36 Ibn Battuta’s story reminds us that apparently fixed aspects of Islam are subject to varying understandings and applications. All of these incidents, and countless others like them, establish not only that cultural differences are real within Dar al Islam but also that they are durable and actively resistant to change. Understanding cultural difference may be essential for a process of reform or change, but it is no guarantee that reforms will succeed.
Crossing Boundaries: India and China
The Travels does take us on several occasions to the furthest borders of Dar al Islam and beyond. Ibn Battuta approaches his adventures outside the lands of Islam with exactly the same attitude of responsive openness to the people he encounters. He appears just as confident that his basic understandings of the world will hold true, even when he crosses civilizational boundaries. There is nothing in Ibn Battuta’s account to suggest that leaving the world of Islam means that one has left civilization, per se, or the company of men and women who are fully human. Moreover, he expects that the non-Muslims whom he encounters will have a reasonable understanding of how their society and culture work. Ibn Battuta remains confident that they will be perfectly capable of explaining their customs and beliefs to a stranger who comes to live among them. There will be work and there will be wives and lovers in these non-Muslim lands. In short, to leave Dar al Islam is not to leave the company of human beings who live in comprehensible and broadly acceptable ways. Although the reach for understanding may be longer and some of the surprises greater, Ibn Battuta’s accounts make it clear that nothing fundamentally new is required of him to make his way among non-Muslims.
The Travels contains memorable descriptions of non-Islamic lands, including particularly vivid ones from India and China that stand out for their complexity and sophistication. For such contextualized descriptions, anthropologists like the phrase “thick description,” borrowed from the philosopher Gilbert Ryle and popularized by Clifford Geertz. The label works here only in the suggestion of the importance of context. Characters and their actions can be understood only in the moral and physical environment within which they live. However, Ibn Battuta’s contextual descriptions are fluid rather than thick. They are not built of layers that can be peeled away. They are rather shifting constellations of elements, all surfaces, on which human experiences take place. Meaning emerges from one constellation of these elements, only to be destabilized by a competing arrangement that reveals a quite different yet equally compelling understanding of what is going on. That rearrangement, in turn, may suffer the same fate. Truth, for Ibn Battuta, resides on the surfaces on which we live. It is always plural. At play on those surfaces are shifting constellations of meanings. They are available to experience but always elude definitive description, “thick” or otherwise.
In India, Ibn Battuta takes us to the site of a Hindu suttee (widow self-immolation ceremony). He guides us to the event through multiple points of entry. We arrive on horseback with a group of other travelers, not all of whom fully understand what is about to happen. This first approach initially has the feel of attending a village folk festival. We blend into an assembled crowd with a sense of anticipation. Gradually, particular characters begin to emerge out of the crowd. A group from the family of the deceased husband expresses very public grief for the loss of a son. Their mourning lends a sense of the solemnity to what is about to transpire. They have come to ensure that their rights and family honor are respected.
As Ibn Battuta takes us closer to the immolation site, the men responsible for building and maintaining the fire come into clearer view. Established rituals guide the way they tend the fire. At one point the men throw sesame seeds into the flames in what seems to be a symbolic gesture of feeding. In fact, the purpose is as practical as it is symbolic: The oil in the seeds excites the flames and augments the heat of the blaze. At this point, the fearsome fire itself becomes the central character in the scene.
That dominance of the fire is eclipsed only with the arrival of the widow. She is dressed in her finest, as though for a wedding ceremony. Her family is arrayed around her. They evince pride that the honor of their family, too, will be vindicated. The crowd is silenced and awed by the widow’s presence. Moving closer to the site, she calmly removes her jewelry and passes it to the women who accompany her. As she approaches the site, the men tending the fire hold up a screen to shield her gaze from the fearsome flames. Their gesture is meant to be protective. The widow, with quiet disdain, pushes the shield aside. She calmly acknowledges the full force of the fire. Her self-assured glance at the keepers of the fire announces that she has accepted her fate. She moves toward the flames, ready for what is to come. Ibn Battuta, however, has reached his breaking point. He can bear no more. But for the intervention of his friends, he would have fallen from his horse to the ground. The description breaks off abruptly.37
Ibn Battuta accepts the reality of cultural difference. He is never indifferent as to its meaning and consequences. He nevertheless believes that the beliefs and actions of those from another culture can be brought into view. He accepts with equanimity the notion that knowledge of others will always be incomplete. He also understands that knowing does not mean approval or acceptance; it just means that one has a sense of what other human beings are up to. Knowledge of that kind generates confidence that one can successfully navigate difference, and sharpen one’s own sense of self in the process.
The descriptions of Ibn Battuta’s experiences in China are equally instructive. He learned from his travels that the borders between civilizations are very real. Still, he shows us that Islam finds them permeable. In China, he discovers large communities of Muslims. Dar al Islam, he teaches, is multicivilizational. The demographic sea of the Han Chinese presents to him human beings whose cultural world, like that of the Indian subcontinent, is radically different from his own. It emerges in his descriptions as no less human for that. In the end, China is a place with which Ibn Battuta chooses to minimize his interactions. He withdraws more than is his custom into protected personal spaces to flee from “unacceptable” sights and sounds.38 Still, his curiosity about this quite different culture drives a characteristic quest for at least minimal understanding. While he finds certain aspects of Chinese culture intolerable, he finds other dimensions of thought and behavior not only acceptable but admirable. He manages to find in Chinese culture values he shares. Ibn Battuta praises the impressive cleanliness of the Chinese, a virtue important as an ideal to Muslims everywhere. He is also greatly impressed by the public orderliness of Chinese cities and the relative absence of crime. In the arts, too, Ibn Battuta finds things to celebrate. He judges Chinese porcelain and ceramics to be among the finest he has ever seen.
My admiration for Ibn Battuta’s work is not blind. I am quite aware of the limitations of this particular exemplar of the great Arab and Islamic travel literature. I know that the sober Ibn Khaldun, for one, thought him a liar, although the harsh judgment invoked telling criticism. In the Muqaddimah Ibn Khaldun reports
One day I met the Sultan’s famous vizier, Faris ibn Wadrar. I talked to him about this matter and intimated to him that I did not believe the man’s stories, because people in the dynasty were in general inclined to consider him a liar. Whereupon the vizier Faris said to me: “Be careful not to reject such information about the condition of dynasties, because you have not seen such things yourself.”
Ibn Battuta had other defenders as well. Muhammad ibn Marzu, a famous scholar in the city of Fez where Ibn Battuta composed his work, cleared the rahal of the charges of lying and declared that “I know of no other person who has journeyed through so many lands as (he did) on his travels, and he was withal generous and well-doing.”39
At times, Ibn Battuta did make grand and sweeping statements, unsubstantiated by the facts at hand. You just have to learn to scale down the hyperbole and keep things real. Clearly, the pearl divers Ibn Battuta observed in the Arabian Gulf could not actually hold their breath for two hours or more, although Ibn Battuta’s observations of their diving techniques are quite accurate.40 And I suspect that Cairo did not really have the astonishing number of mosques that he claimed to have seen, although I suspect the skyline was dominated by a forest of minarets. I do not doubt that the city then, as now despite contemporary ravages, was quite magnificent. Undoubtedly, the rulers for whom Ibn Battuta worked, particularly in some of the more remote sites he visited, appreciated his services and were reluctant to see the qadi from the Arab lands of the Prophet Muhammad move on. However, it seems unlikely that the tears of dismay of one such minister actually splashed on his shoes, as Ibn Battuta reports.41 Despite the evidence for his outsized libido, I am particularly skeptical of Ibn Battuta’s claims that he managed to uphold his conjugal duties to the eight women, four wives and four gawari, who depended on him during his time in the Maldives. I have no doubt Ibn Battuta worked out a clever system of rotation. Nor do I question that he consumed the maximum of a certain fish that he firmly believed to be an aphrodisiac. Ibn Battuta himself certainly acknowledges no inadequacies: Male performance illusions reverberate through the ages.42
Learning from the Great Rahal
Ibn Battuta after all these centuries repays the effort to think and to travel with him. He has lessons, still important today, on how to live with human difference. Like many Americans, Christopher Columbus was quite naturally one of my boyhood heroes. How devastating to get to know him better as an adult! Columbus, history soberly records, was a marauding adventurer in the worst of the Western tradition of the quest for gold, God, and glory. His record of theft, enslavement, and murder is quite appalling. What an embarrassment it is to have identified with him. How disconcerting to have the myths of the innocent voyages of discovery of the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria imprinted forever in your mind. The contrast to Ibn Battuta as an iconic figure is stark and revealing. Ibn Battuta did little harm as he roamed the world in a quest for knowledge, and for more worldly pleasures as well. His adventures were not all of the mind or the soul, and I have always found him all the more engaging for just that reason.
What makes Ibn Battuta so important for anthropology is that the knowledge he sought was practical and grounded knowledge of how other human beings live their own distinctive lives. Moreover, Ibn Battuta sought to understand the men and women he encountered well enough to live among them in peace. He invariably joined with them in pursuit of a measure of happiness and pleasure that could be shared. What makes Ibn Battuta’s classic so durable and so instructive is that he does not simply describe the various networks that link the diverse parts of the ummah of his day. He lives through them and shares that life experience with his readers in the most intimate and vivid ways. Then he moves on.
The lessons from Ibn Battuta’s work are in the details, and often the most intimate details of how social and personal spaces are shared. We learn, for example, precisely how cultures differ on the most basic questions of how basic human needs are fulfilled in diverse cultural contexts. Moreover, we learn with Ibn Battuta that variations within cultures also have great and often overlooked significance. Such differences are durable and highly resistant to change. They have considerable weight in influencing human behavior. They have a profound effect on feelings and sensibilities. They are not easily changed or altered in fundamental ways. Yet, for all the resilience of cultural differences, Ibn Battuta teaches that they do not preclude conversation and cooperation, although they may require some ingenuity and even boldness. In a diverse but connected social world, like the ummah, accommodation to important and deep differences must be made. Or, to put the matter in a more positive way, the acceptance of pluralism is a necessity. Islamic civilization has no enthusiasm whatsoever for the idea of a melting pot for human beings. Ibn Battuta, over six centuries ago, observed and recorded the mechanisms by which constructive accommodation could come about in matters large and small. These same mechanisms are still operative in Dar al Islam, as the voyages through Dar al Islam today by the Egyptian journalist Fahmi Huwaidi make clear. Human differences challenge mutual understanding. However, they do not end the possibilities of productive interactions of all kinds. The Qur’an, as we have seen, makes it clear that an exalted humanity must be both plural and productive. Muslims, indeed all human beings everywhere and in all times, are charged to cooperate in building the world in ways that celebrate human diversity as one of God’s gifts. The practical lessons of Ibn Battuta’s work all point in that direction. They are as relevant today as when he wrote his Travels in 1355.