Customer Reviews

The Adventures of Ibn Battuta: A Muslim Traveler of the Fourteenth Century, Revised Edition, with a New Preface

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It is incredible to think that back in the 1300's one person could have traveled from Morocco through North and East Africa, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Turkey, the Crimea, India, Ceylon, Indonesia and China. I get tired just writing about it! But this is what Ibn Battuta did. When you think of how difficult (and dangerous!) it was to travel back in those days, it is just amazing. What makes this book especially fascinating is the look it provides into Muslim society. Here was a man who journeyed thousands of miles over many, many years but who only very rarely felt himself to be a stranger in a strange land. In some places Islam was in the majority and in some places it was the minority but Ibn Battuta was always able to find educated Moslems similar to himself who could provide a place to live, food to eat, clothes to wear and money to spend. Very importantly also, they could provide spiritual support to a person very far from home. This book is best when it settles down in one place for an extended period, such as when Ibn Battuta journeyed to Medina and Mecca. This is the most important trip a Moslem takes during an entire lifetime and it is expected, health and finances permitting, that a believer will make the trip at least once in a lifetime. Medina is where the tomb of The Prophet is and Mecca was His birthplace. Mr. Dunn provides a physical description of the landscape of both places so that you can almost feel you are there and he also gives a fascinating description of the logistics of the journey as this is a trip that thousands of people would take each year and a solid support system was needed to provide transportation and food and water, etc. The religious ceremonies that a person was required to go through once in the Holy Cities is also given in great detail. The book is also very good when Ibn Battuta settles down in India for awhile and gets a nice, cushy government job working for a despot who sounds as though he was probably psychotic! You could be in his favor one minute but apparently if you looked at him the wrong way he might decide on the spur of the moment to have you executed. He would also come up with grandiose ideas to rearrange the entire society which would usually wind up making everyone miserable, if not dead. Kind of sounds pretty familiar, doesn't it? I guess some things don't change over the centuries..... Anyway, the only drawback to this book is that Mr. Dunn is trying to cram a lot of travel into a 300 page book so that some of the time you feel as though you are being given the "bum's rush" on one of those modern package trips where they shuttle you through 14 cities in 14 days. After awhile some of the itinerary starts to become one, big blur. It makes you wish that Mr. Dunn would have decided to write a longer book where things could have proceeded at a more leisurely pace. But this book is a good starting point and it gave me a glimpse into a world I knew very little about but would like to learn more of.

Centuries-old travelogues tend to have this archaic, dusty sort of air about them. We can't identify with the people who wrote them because the language in no way resembles ours. This is of course the fault of those who translate those documents. Then too, travellers of medieval times or earlier tended to write about things not so much of interest today. In THE ADVENTURES OF IBN BATTUTA, Ross E. Dunn has successfully avoided these problems by writing ABOUT the 14th century North African traveller, Ibn Battuta, not just translating his book. Ibn Battuta (1304-1368) travelled around the civilized world of his day. Surprisingly enough for Eurocentric folks, the term "civilized" only included Spain at that time. It did, however, include most of the Islamic regions on earth, plus India and China. Dunn includes chapters on Tangier, North Africa, Egypt-Syria-Palestine, Mecca, Persia and Iraq, Yemen, Oman, and East Africa, Constantinople, Anatolia, Central Asia, India and the Maldives, China, Spain, and Mali---across the Sahara in West Africa. In each, he gives a picture of the times in that particular place, what Ibn Battuta said he saw and what he must have seen or experienced but didn't mention. Dunn recounts many of the Moroccan's interesting adventures, from being jailed in Delhi to trying as a judge to forbid Maldivian women going topless in public. Dunn also places Ibn Battuta in a framework of a hemisphere-wide Islamic civilization and as an ambitious semi-scholar who was perhaps not so well studied as he wanted people to believe. So, not only is this book a record of Ibn Battuta's life and voyages, it is a very interesting commentary on a large part of the world in the 14th century and the life story of a particular individual. If you like history, if you are interested in what was happening in the world beyond Europe in the days when "knights were bold" [and illiterate], read this book. It comes with good maps and some black and white photographs of places that might still look a bit like what they did in Ibn Battuta's time.

In 1325 the young Morrocan Ibn Battuta left his home to make the pilgrimage to Mecca. On the way, he became enamoured with travel and travelled half the world, from North Africa to China, before returning to his home in 1349. His record of his journeys, the Rihla, is difficult to read and chaotically organised, leading historian Ross E. Dunn to present Ibn Battuta's story in a more accessible format. THE ADVENTURES OF IBN BATTUTA is an extremely interesting book, and I recommend it highly to anyone interested in world history.

Battuta's memoirs often lack detail, so Dunn has put his travels in context by bringing in outside information. Thus, before covering Battuta's travels over the steppe of Northern Asia, he explains how the Mongols came to acquire so much territory and then convert to Islam.

Another interesting part of Battuta's story is how Europeans and inhabitants of the Middle East interacted in the 14th century. Battuta gives an anecdote about a stay in a Muslim town in the Crimean where Italian traders had an outpost. Hearing the Italian's churchbells, which sounded to him like a diabolic cacophony, he and his friends immediately ran to the roof and began to make the muezzin call to prayer. Luckily, there was no violent conflict from this culture class. Dunn's background information also gives interesting details of European activity in Asia during the late Middle Ages. I didn't know that Venetian and Genoese merchants travelled and resided as far east as Tabriz (in modern-day Iran) until I read THE ADVENTURES OF IBN BATTUTA.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book, even more than reading Marco Polo. Battuta logged over 70,000 miles, some of it through dangerous regions, and as far as from Morocco to China and back. Travel that far was an astonishing feat for that period. It offers very interesting insights into the Muslim world of the 14th century. The author also attempts to paint a realistic picture of Battuta as a man of his times. I particularly enjoyed the descriptions of Battuta's pilgrimage to Mecca and his experiences in India. One thing I think some Western readers might also gain from this book is a greater appreciation and understanding of the Muslim world in general and the Arab world in particular.

I suspect that the highly negative reviews of this book were written by readers who read the first 100 pages, found them tedious, and stopped. They should have stayed the course, for the narrative improves as Ibn Battuta makes his way eastward to India and the Far East.

The reason it gets better is that Professor Dunn knows a great deal about that part of the world, and presents a fascinating discussion of its history and economics. While Europe was suffering through the Middle Ages, the Middle and Far East were the centers of civilization.

The interesting question is "What went wrong?" Why did these same countries freeze, while Europe entered the Renaissance? But that's the topic of other books.

After reading Alexander von Humboldt's work on travels in South America, I got a taste for reading first impressions of world travelers. This book is NOT that sort of book.

Ross Dunn's work is best for studying Islam at the height of its prestige in the 14th century, but it is a frustrating read. The nature of a Rihla is to be a literary glorification of Islam; therefore Ibn Battuta set down his information in a non-chronological, non-anthropological manner (he does not describe regular people or regular events). Ibn Battuta's book (we learn by sifting through Dunn's work) was meant to describe the powerful Islamic rulers and their courts, to impress intellectuals and, let's face it, to brag a bit. Therefore, it does not tell us much about everyday life in the 1300's. It's a shame.

In fact, much of the book seems only glancingly related to the title character, because Dunn has filled in the blanks, so to speak. The non-chronological nature of the Rihla has led Dunn to deviate from the known travels and dabble in hypothetical itineraries. Dunn is knowledgeable and relates much color and detail from his own travels - a valuable addition.

While Ibn Battuta (and Dunn) establish 14th century Muslim world rule as infinitely sublime and a precursor to one-world governance, in any other context IB would be described as rigid, priggish and puritanical. His fawning subservience to powerful, violent rulers is distasteful. Was the man an obsequious, social climbing toady? It is hard to escape that conclusion.

Ibn Battuta's preferences would be called "parochial" if they were held by, for example, a US senator from the South. His personality reeks of the cultural superiority of the then-elitists, and it is off-putting. He disdains all society, all ideas, but his own and that of the social spheres above his.

The best part of the book is the lengthy section on Islamic India. It is interesting, cohesive, suspenseful, and a good jumping-off point for Muhammad Yunus's excellent book "Banker to the Poor." Beginning on page 190, there is a very readable depiction of the horror behind "hope and change" politics, including brash opportunism, utter submission to the will of the sultan, and the insatiable needs of the governing class.

*** for great accompanying visuals, consider the book "Mansa Musa" by Khephra Burns. It explores the kingdom of Mali, the wastes of the desert, and Cairo.

For the reader interested in understanding the context of ibn Battuta's travels, this is an invaluable reference. Ross juxtaposes the thread of Battuta's journey with the cultural and political history of the regions Battuta explores. The maps are also tremendously helpful and the occassional b&w photo add flavor. The writing style is accessible and enjoyable.

BUT if you want to hear ibn Battuta's story in his own voice, look elsewhere! Ironically, you will not find much of ibn Battuta's voice here. While Ross does use extensive quotes from the tales of many medieval travelers, ibn Battuta's own narrative does not dominate the tone. It seems Ross believes his reader will hold two books in hand, his own and The Travels of ibn Battutah, edited by Tim McKintosh-Smith. And this is exactly what I would recommend to anyone intrigued by this oh-so-intriguing tale.

This should almost be required reading in colleges, especially with the current geopolitical situation. It isn't just a translation of Ibn Battuta's book, it's at least 50% background material on the places he visited & the people he met with considerable historical info from before, during, and after Ibn's travels. The writing is excellent and easy to get through. It easily ranks next to Plutarch (in a good translation) and Gibbon for it's grand overview of a largely unknown area of history & the world (at least in the West).

This was such a good book, I bought and started the Dover Pub. version of the actual text. Big mistake. That is such a dated translation & offered so little extra compared to Ross' version (not to mention being being very hard to follow, even though I'm much more knowledgeable about the muslim world than your average American), that I gave it away to a Palestinian acquantance after reading the 1st 50 pages. Maybe the 2nd or 3rd time I haven't finished a book, ever, no matter how little I was enjoying it.

Stick with this version unless you really feel the need to read Ibn's actual words & try a non-Dover version if you do. That's a little tough anyway because most of the others only cover parts of the book. Even if you do try another version, I really recommend you read this one first to make the real work more meaningful and understandable unless you're an expert on the Islamic world.

My only complaint is that it might have had a little more of Ibn's actual words instead of paraphrases and summaries, but I feel this is actually a plus after trying to read the real text. Ibn was a contemporary of Marco Polo who actually travelled further and did most of his travels as an insider in muslim societies (at least at the government level), so he got to know the society better and was accepted as a co-religionist. Like Polo, Ibn however, suffers from the same flaws in the actual text. There's a lot of "I went to x, the people follow religion y, the climate is z, I saw building a, the local produce is b...". Ross' version cuts out all the dry midaeval travelogue filler and makes all the information crystal clear.

Do yourself a favor and try this book. Ross is an Islamic Studies professor who obviously knows his stuff & has practiced a few thousand times in a classroom setting on presenting it in a way that makes for interesting and easy reading.

Even though Ibn Battuta over the course of his lifetime (and this book) travelled all over the muslim world, it seems as if he didn't do too much. Regardless of that, this book is a well written account of the muslim world at this time; making Battuta not so much a character but a tour guide in one of the best travel books ever. If you're looking for an exciting adventure story, this is not the book for you; but if you're looking for a relatively painless way of learning some ancient muslim history and sociology this is the book for you.

As its title would suggest, this book is about Ibn Battuta, a Muslim voyager who ranged far and wide across the Dar al-Islam (Muslim world), travelling more or less continuously from 1325 - 1354. Setting out from his home in Tangier on what might have been a fairly standard hajj, or pilgrimage to Mecca, Ibn Battuta just kept on going for 29 years. In the course of these wanderings he sojourned in North Africa, Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Iraq, Persia, the east coast of Africa as far south as Tanzania, Oman and the Persian Gulf region, Asia Minor, West Central Asia, Transoxiana, Kurasan, Afghanistan, India, the Maldives, Ceylon, Bengal, the coast of Burma, Sumatra, and China. After returning to Morocco, his wanderlust still was not exhausted, and he made an additional journey through the Muslim kingdom of Granada before undertaking a crossing of the Sahara to Mali and Timbuktu.

Imagining what these exotic parts of the world must have been like at that time, I was fully anticipating an engrossing page-turner. After all, the Rihla (the original literary account of the travels) bears the promising title, "A Gift to the Observers Concerning the Curiosities of the Cities and the Marvels Encountered in Travels".

Be forewarned - if you're looking for marvels, look somewhere else. Trust me, they're not to be found here. This book is at best mildly interesting for the most persistent of readers.

In this regard, it needs to be said that this is not a translation of the actual text of the Rihla. Recognizing that that material is often "puzzlingly organized, archaic, and to some degree unintelligible", Ross Dunn's objective was "to bring Ibn Battuta's adventure to general readers and to interpret it within the rich trans-hemispheric cultural setting of medieval Islam".

If this is what he was trying to accomplish, a generous characterization would be that he's been only partially successful.

Notwithstanding his efforts, the basic problem seems to lie with Ibn Battuta and his literary collaborator Ibn Juzayy. Ibn Battua's quirky motivation for his travels causes him to be silent about much of the world around him, instead dwelling endlessly on the puffery of erudite Muslim protocol in the various regions that he visited. Ibn Juzayy, on the other hand, plagiarized significant sections of the book from the works of other earlier travelers. Astonishingly this is generally not considered to be a shortcoming of the work. As Dunn puts it, "Islamic literary theory regarded what we would call plagiarism with a wide latitude of tolerance. It was not considered improper to quote from or paraphrase other writers without citing them, even when the ideas or information such writers contributed might be partially or wholly disguised".

In any case, this apparently was sometimes necessary, since, as it turns out, Ibn Battuta did not really visit some of the important places he claims to have travelled to. More puzzling is the fact that Ibn Juzayy copied the descriptions of Damascus, Mecca and Medina (places that Ibn Battuta definitely did visit) verbatim from the work of a 12 century Andalusian traveler named Ibn Jubayr.

Are you really sure you want to read this book?

If so, be my guest...