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Encyclopedia Britannica - Main :: I27-INV |
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IBN BATUTA , i.e. ABU ABDULLAH MAHOMMED, surnamed IBN BATUTA (1304-1378), the greatest of Moslem travellers, was born at Tangier in 1304. He entered on his travels at twenty-one (1325) and closed them in 1355. He began by traversing the coast of the Mediterranean from Tangier to Alexandria, finding time to marry two wives on the road. After some stay at Cairo, then probably the greatest city in the world (excluding China), and an unsuccessful attempt to reach Mecca from Aidhab on the west coast of the Red Sea, he visited Palestine, Aleppo and Damascus. He then made the pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina, and visited the shrine of Ali at Mashhad-Ali, travelling thence to Basra, and across the mountains of Khuzistan to Isfahan, thence to Shiraz and back to Kufa and Bagdad. After an excursion to Mosul and Diarbekr, he made the haj a second time, staying at Mecca three years. He next sailed down the Red Sea to Aden (then a place of great trade), the singular position of which he describes, noticing its dependence for water-supply upon the great cisterns restored in modern times. He continued his voyage down the African coast, visiting, among other places, Mombasa and Quiloa (Kilwa). Returning north he passed by the chief
the Indus, on his own statement, in September, 1333. This closes the first part of his narrative. From Sind, which he traversed to the sea and back again, he proceeded to Multan, and eventually, on the invitation of Mahommed Tughlak, the reigning sovereign,to Delhi. Mahommed was a singular character, full of pretence at least to many accomplishments and virtues, the founder of public charities, and a profuse patron of scholars, but a parricide, a fratricide, and as madly capricious, bloodthirsty and unjust as Caligula. " No day did his palace gate fail to witness the elevation
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pilgrimage to the " Footmark of our Father Adam." Thence he betook himself to Maabar (the Coromandel coast), where he joined a Mussulman adventurer, residing at Madura, who had made himself master of much of that region. After once more visiting Malabar, Canara and the Maldives, he departed for Bengal, a voyage of forty-three days, landing at Sadkawan (Chittagong). In Bengal he visited the famous Moslem saint Shaykh Jalaluddin, whose shrine (Shah Jalal at Silhet) is still maintained. Returning to the delta, he took ship at Sunarganw (near Dacca
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raging, so that two thousand four hundred died in one day. Revisiting Jerusalem and Cairo he made the- haj a fourth time, and finally reappeared at Fez (visiting Sardinia en route) on the 8th of November 1349, after twenty-four years' absence. Morocco, he felt, was, after all, the best of countries. "The did:erns of the West are but little; but then you get more forthem." After going home to Tangier, Ibn Batuta crossed into Spain and made the round of Andalusia, including Gibraltar, which had just then stood a siege from the " Roman tyrant Adfunus " (Alphonso XI. of Castile, 1312-1350). In 1352 the restless man started for Central Africa, passing by the oases of the Sahara (where the houses were built of rock-salt, as Herodotus tells, and roofed with camel skins) to Timbuktu and Gogo on the Niger, a river which he calls the Nile, believing it to flow down into Egypt, an opinion maintained by some up to the date of Lander's discovery. Being then recalled by his own king, he returned to Fez (early in 13;4) via Takadda, Haggar and Tuat. Thus ended his twenty-eight years ' wanderings which in their main lines alone exceeded 75,000 M. By royal order he dictated his narrative to 1\,Iahommed Ibn Juzai, who concludes the work, 13th of December 1355 (A.D.) with the declaration: " This Shaykh is the traveller of our age; and he who should call him the traveller of the whole body of Islam would not exceed the truth." Ibn Batuta died in 1378, aged seventy-three.Ibn Batuta's travels have only been known in Europe during the 19th century; at first merely by Arabic abridgments in the Gotha and Cambridge libraries. Notices or extracts had been published by Seetzen (c. 1808), Kosegarten (1818), Apetz (1819), and Burckhardt (1819), when in 1829 Dr S. Lee published for the Oriental Translation Fund a version from the abridged MSS. at Cambridge , which attracted much interest
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