The Medieval Period:
Three Classic Muslim
Travelers
1050–1326
The Persian Naser-e Khosraw (1003–1077), the Iberian Ibn Jubayr (1145– 1217), and the Moroccan Ibn Battuta (1303 or 1304–1368 or 1369) were all civil servants, educated men, and devout Muslims. Although separated by centuries, they are often grouped as near contemporaries inhabiting phases of a single age, Islam’s expansive Middle Period. This epoch has been called the Golden Age of Muslim travel, partly through the efforts of these authors. To enjoy them, a reader may want to understand the lines along which the Islamic world developed after Muhammad’s death.
As Western readers are generally aware, early Islam (620–800) spread quickly in two directions, from Mecca northeast to Afghanistan on the one hand and west to Morocco and Spain on the other. It remains less well known that during the next six centuries, Islam did not endure a long Dark Age like Europe’s. As a religion and as a social order, it went on steadily expanding into Africa, India, and Asia, bearing with it a legal system, a trading network, and a coherent way of life. By all accounts, this gradual, often chaotic elaboration resulted in Earth’s first global culture. It created a composite civilization, a vast Eurasian common ground across which pilgrims, traders, merchants, and bureaucrats traveled with surprising ease.
It was a thoroughly Muslim world they moved through, a loosely cohesive network with many capitals. In Arabia, the remote, sacred city of Mecca retained its status as a pilgrim center, and hajjis continued to flock there every year, but by the eighth century real political power had drained away to more accessible cities, like Damascus and Baghdad. About two centuries later, when our first author, Naser-e Khosraw, was on the road, power shifted once again, to Cairo. By then, however, the classical notion of an empire ruled from a single capital was already giving way to what the American historian Marshall Hodgson has described as a constantly expanding international society governed by numerous independent Muslim powers.
Centers like Baghdad and Cairo continued to hold sway in the Near East, but beyond them in every direction for many thousands of miles lay other regions of political and mercantile influence, including full-fledged Muslim empires in Spain, North Africa, and India. As our travelers keep reminding us, these regions boasted great capitals too—Córdoba, Tunis, Delhi; yet 90 percent of humanity lived outside them, in towns and villages along the roads. Scholars today reject the ingrained Western view that this expansion was accomplished by military force. In most regions and in most cases, the local populations seem to have willingly adopted a system that taxed them less and offered new options. Generally speaking, Islam proved adaptable and attractive in both urban and pastoral settings across three continents.
The forces nourishing this far-flung network were not political, commercial, or even urban. The real unifying factors were a common social pattern, expressed in the daily traditions of Islam (prayer, ablution, diet, and manners); a common book, the Quran; and a common set of laws, the Sharia, which stresses fair trade. Commerce between, say, Tangier, Cairo, Damascus, and Delhi was further supported by a complex system of caravan and sea routes for transferring goods over many thousands of miles. Throughout the Near East, the Hajj roads were the arteries of this system. During a three-month season every year, they were swollen with pilgrims from all points on the compass carrying goods to pay their way to Mecca, bearing news between the provinces. Because everyone knew someone who had been there and because it was the birthplace of their faith, Mecca, forbidden, mysterious to the West, was always the best-known Muslim city. Any urban ten-year-old, whether in Persia or Morocco, would have been familiar with the pilgrim rites, would in all likelihood have heard some returning uncle or aunt describe the Hajj. In the villages, too, Mecca captured the imagination of the people whether or not they had been there, whether or not they were especially devout.
In Ibn Battuta’s fourteenth century, the Hajj was already an organized adventure. At appointed times and for a modest price pilgrims arriving at Cairo, Damascus, or Baghdad would set out together on specific roads, traveling in official caravans scheduled to deliver them to Mecca in time to undertake the appointed rites. The hajjis came from all parts of the Eastern Hemisphere, spoke dozens of different languages, and dressed distinctively. They set out as small families. A few would have some village or city in common, but for the most part they traveled as strangers. In this sense, one’s announced intention to perform the Hajj was like keeping a rendezvous at an appointed place with a few hundred thousand people you did not know yet. In a world where clan and blood were emphasized, this aspect of Hajj travel overruled the more usual loyalties, proving Muhammad’s point again each year, that Muslim people are bound together by something greater than tribe or race. In addition to strangeness, the Hajj exposed pilgrims to real danger, too. In times of political upheaval, travelers literally risked their lives to get to Mecca. Given the heat, the desert roads, the threat of Bedouin highwaymen and violent Crusaders, to plan to arrive at all was an act of faith—as we shall see.
These huge caravans from the capitals were like cities on the move. Supported and defended by regional rulers, they traveled in stages through treeless regions, over sandy wastes dotted with oases and encampments. To the social historian, their logistical feats indicate high organizational sophistication. The routes themselves were achievements. The nine-hundred-mile Baghdad Road from Kufa to Medina, for example, dates back to pre-Islamic times. By the mid-ninth century, however, the route was marked with milestones and offered fifty-four major way stations, with cisterns, reservoirs or wells, fire-signal towers, hostels, and fortresses paid for from the Abbasid caliphal treasury. Like other main routes from Suez and Damascus, the Baghdad Road developed revictualing stations too, to which local traders rode out to sell their produce. As Ibn Battuta tells us, each caravan had its own administration. An annually appointed leader, or amir, oversaw a collection of high officials who in turn governed a complex pilgrim-service industry of cameleers, medics, water carriers, torch bearers, cooks, fireworks experts, scouts, guides, battalions of soldiers, and of course musicians. Besides the main arterial routes from Cairo, Damascus, and Baghdad, other trails were well traveled too—south up the Nile through Egypt, then across the Red Sea from Aydhab, or north through mountainous Yemen, for example. (See Fig. 6.)
Most of these routes are depicted (and redepicted) in these pages. Some of the best descriptive writing of the age is trained on the Meccan caravans. Their annual treks were spectacles, steeped in the symbols of nomadic culture: sweeping trains of silent camels pacing down the sands at night, lit by swaying lanterns, to the faint accompaniment of tambourines. Beguiling today, such scenes must have been even more attractive to urban Muslim readers of the period. The Hajj authors wrote to entertain, but also to forewarn prospective pilgrims, for the caravans were mortal affairs rife with risk and ever-present danger: scarce water, desiccating winds, marauding thieves, and the bleached bones of last year’s unfortunates dotting the wayside. The routes demanded description because they held so many pitfalls. Armed escorts as protection from raiders were a must. In 1051, Naser-e Khosraw, returning home from Mecca, diverged from the security of the Baghdad caravan and barely lived to write about it. A century later, in southern Egypt, Ibn Jubayr, our second traveler, remarked on the “many hells that strew the road” to Mecca. Still later, Ibn Battuta mentions an escort of “a hundred or more cavalry and a troop of archers” attached to his Libyan caravan. It should not cause surprise that half the accounts in this book were written in part to warn and protect later pilgrims.
In our opening section, the eleventh and twelfth centuries of the Earlier Middle Period form the stage for a power struggle between two distinct branches of Islam, the Sunni and the Shi’ite. Both groups emerged from a rift in the Muslim community thirty years after Muhammad’s death. They are distinguished by opposing views of succession. The larger, Sunni branch preferred an elective process for each new caliph; Shi’ites, on the other hand, believed the leadership belongs to the Prophet’s nephew and son-in-law, Ali, and to his heirs. By 945, however, the post of khalifah (caliph, or successor to the Prophet), once the spiritual and temporal ruler of Islam, was being reduced to a figurehead in a greatly expanding Muslim world that could no longer be controlled from one Arab center. The caliph came to preside over an idea, the overall unity of the Muslim world, while sultans (the overlords of sometimes quite extensive regions) and amirs (who governed more local territories) assumed the reins of practical government completely. Supported by a fourth force, the military, these broad divisions of power became the norm almost everywhere until 1500. Through most of the Earlier Middle Period (945–1250), the central Arab region was split between two powers: a Sunni Abbasid Empire, centered in Baghdad, and an emerging Shi’ite power, the Fatimid Caliphate (961–1171), with the new city of Cairo as its capital. Their long, uneven contest to establish a single, stable dominion from Morocco to the Iranian plateau shaped the whole period.
Mecca influenced and was affected by this struggle. First as the Fatimid rule gained ascendancy in the eleventh century and again as the Abbasids recovered it after 1170, each of these titanic urban powers pressed to have its sovereignty confirmed in Mecca—a poor, provincial, inclement desert city with nothing but the Hajj to recommend it. The Meccan trade could not have interested such rich mercantile centers; apart from the Hajj, it was probably negligible, anyway. Rather, they sought the wholly symbolic power conferred by Meccan recognition and the charisma derived from serving as protectors of Islam’s most sacred shrine. Without acknowledgment from the heartland, the caliph’s title “Commander of the Faithful” lacked moral force among his subjects. Mecca’s seal of approval was also crucial because at one time or another almost everybody went there from every part of the vaunted caliph’s realm. In exchange for recognition in the mosque there (expressed by blessing the ruler’s name at Friday prayers), the imperial treasuries gave liberally to the local rulers (the sharifs) and to the mosques in Mecca and Medina. They also pursued the important task of protecting the pilgrim roads.
Our first two accounts depict the ins and outs of this arrangement. In the opening selection, Naser-e Khosraw, a Shi’ite, attends a Hajj in 1047. It is largely supported by the Shi’ite ruler in Egypt, al-Mustansir. A century later, as power swings back in the Abbasid direction, Ibn Jubayr arrives in Cairo, too, to find a Sunni controlled city and a Sunni supported Hajj in the Hijaz. A revolution in government has taken place; the Hijaz and many other lands have shifted hands. Yet during both periods, the same strategic alliance remains in place between Mecca and the region’s prevailing power. Each regime has had its sovereignty proclaimed in the Sacred City in return for support and security. From about 1180 on, the Meccan sharifs were supposed to use part of these funds to mollify the Hijazi raiding clans and so reduce their plundering of pilgrims. The basic outlines of this arrangement continued for centuries. Under the Mamluks (1250–1517), the armed guards of the caravans were greatly augmented. Under Ottoman rule (1517–1924), the protection of the Hajj caravans became a major budgetary item, equal to waging a large, annual war.
Who were the sharifs? Ibn Battuta tells us that when he first arrived in Mecca, the town’s co-governors were brothers, sons of a previous ruler, Abu Numayy Qitada. The Qitada line went back more than a century, to the days of Abu Aziz “al-Nabigha” Qitada, ruler of Yanbu and a Hashimite, a member of the Prophet’s clan. Al-Nabigha means “the Genius,” a nickname he probably earned after sending his son at the head of an army to seize Mecca on May 3, 1201. Certainly this stroke of political wisdom served his descendants. From that date, the Qitada line flowed forward for seven more centuries. The last sharif (Husayn ibn Ali, reigned 1908–24) was both a Qitada and a Hashimite. In all that time, the line remained unbroken. The dynasties of Abu Numayy I (1255–1425), the Barakats (1425–1524), Abu Numayy II with his several clans (1524–1636), and Sharif Ghalib and his relations (1771–1881) each lasted a century or more. Their reigns, however, were anything but stable. For one thing, each sharif bore many sons, who often became mortal enemies, sometimes of Shakespearean proportions. Externally, too, the pressures toward disintegration were enormous, with Egyptian, then Turkish, forces occasionally garrisoning the city, sometimes for decades, over the centuries.
Like petty rulers anywhere, the Qitadas held on by adroitness and guile, but also by passing down from father to son their founder’s deathbed advice on how to govern. There were, they believed, five principles by which the ruler of such a poor province might prevail: First, he must take advantage of the unassailable remoteness of the Hijaz, barricading himself inside it as if in a fortress, and not risk his limited strength in foreign struggles. Second, he ought always to maintain a shrewd balance between the centers of power to the north (Cairo and Baghdad) while looking south to Yemen for true allies. Third, he should permit the name of the foreign sultan strong enough to impose it to be mentioned in prayers at the Holy Mosque, as a symbol of sovereignty. Fourth, he should obtain grants and presents from richer Muslim rulers in order to maintain the Holy Places and the roads. Last, he must be careful to hold down pilgrim taxes to tolerable limits. This last rule, placing a check on noble greed, was largely dishonored; yet by sticking to the rest of the prescription, the Qitadas managed to reign over Mecca into the twentieth century. Although the deathbed scene is probably apocryphal, their ancient code pretty well sums up the best course open to a family hoping to maintain a throne in Mecca.
These early accounts are not reports of visits to an exotic city. Nor are they works of pure geography, like The Book of Routes and Provinces by Ibn Khurdadhbih (died 893 or 894) or The Book of Earth’s Roads (ca. 977) by Ibn Hawkal. Whereas those books state correctly that the Sinai Road to Mecca was composed of thirty-four stages, each twenty-eight to thirty miles long, they do not report how the caravan appeared or give the pomp and feel of the procession. Readers must turn to the travelers for that. Yet this is not adventure literature either, or exploration. These authors are aware of their destination; they possess knowledge about the place before they set out. Nor is it commerce or curiosity that draws them. The underlying goal of these first travelers is spiritual and penitent in nature. They are not just out to see the world (though they see quite a lot of it). Principally, they are going to Mecca to fulfill a vow and to experience God more deeply. That is one salient difference between, say, Ibn Battuta and Marco Polo.
Matters of interwoven texts, not to say plagiarism, abound in this literature from the start. Ibn Jubayr, for example, a twelfth-century Arab from Spain, knew Naser-e Khosraw’s Hajj book very well, although it was written in Persian a century earlier. He quotes from it, as he quotes from Azraqi and other early historians of Mecca. A century and a half later Ibn Battuta quotes all three, even incorporating swatches of Ibn Jubayr’s account in his own descriptions. The cribbing and quoting starts early. It continues through the nineteenth century (see especially Burckhardt [1814] and Burton [1853]), as both Muslim and non-Muslim travelers redeploy the very small shelf of their predecessors.
These ancient accounts continue to be published, drawn upon, and read because they shed valuable light on the human workings of pilgrim travel and because people still enjoy reading them. Ibn Jubayr’s, the most compact in space and time, describes a round-trip of about two years—the average span of the journey before trains and airplanes. A century earlier, Naser-e Khosraw recorded a round-trip, too, but his journey lasted seven years and was mystically motivated. The last and longest account in this section, by Ibn Battuta, starts as a conventional Hajj report, then opens out into a description of the world. The editorial comments introducing these first three authors are somewhat longer than in later sections of the book because they present concepts that are foundational. Topics essential to the later record—the caliphate, Sunni and Shi’ite Islam, and the expansion of the Muslim world—are first presented here.
These initial selections are by medieval authors writing for a Muslim audience. Their notion of life’s necessities, their definitions of comfort and roadside attractions, are their own. Their cities seem less dangerous than ours, their roads more precarious. Their narrative voice may strike us oddly, too. Even Ibn Battuta, perhaps the most personal, can seem withdrawn when compared to more contemporary writers, for whom the private psyche is more naturally a matter of public record. The pace of travel differs too. The first private carriage on the Hajj does not appear in writing until the early 1800s. Meanwhile, the nearest thing to a conveyance, the camel-borne shugduf, is a saddled-mounted tent to deflect the sun. Ibn Jubayr described such conveyances in 1184. Sir Richard Burton could still recommend them almost seven centuries later. Inside Arabia until the 1930s, the speed of pilgrim travel was determined not by wheels but by padding feet.