The Adventures of Ibn Battuta: A Muslim Traveler of the Fourteenth Century (43 page)

After staying in Calicut for an unspecified time, perhaps some months, he met up with a sea captain from Honavar named Ibrahim and took passage on his ship bound for Ceylon and Ma’bar by way of the Maldives.
²³
The idea of visiting this outlying tropical archipelago on his way to the Bay of Bengal was not such an erratic scheme as it might appear, even though the islands lay about 400 miles west and a bit south of Ceylon. Sea-going ships trading eastbound from the Arabian Sea could not sail through the Palk Strait that divided the subcontinent from Ceylon owing to the extremely shallow reef called Adam’s Bridge that traversed the channel. Rather, they had to go around the southern tip of Ceylon. For traffic moving both east and west, the Maldive atolls were close enough to this route to be drawn into the international commerce between the western and the eastern seas. Shuttle trade between Malabar and the Maldives seems to have been very regular in medieval times. Moreover, the islands exported two commodities that were of major importance in the trans-hemispheric economy. One was coir, or coconut fiber rope, used to stitch together the hulls of the western ocean dhows. The other was the shells of the little marine gastropod called the cowrie, which were used as currency as far east as Malaysia and as far west as the African Sudan.

The people of the Maldives (Dhibat al-Mahal) were a brown-skinned fishing and sea-trading folk. They spoke Divehi, a language closely related to Sinhalese, evidence of ancient seaborne migrations from Ceylon. About the middle of the twelfth century they had been converted from Buddhism to Islam. In the
Rihla
Ibn Battuta recounts the legend, told even today by old men of the islands, of Abu l’Barakat, a pious Berber from the Maghrib who rid the land of a terrible demon (
jinni
) and brought the people to the faith of the Prophet.
²⁴
Each month the fiend had arisen from the sea and demanded a young virgin to ravish and kill. When Abu l’Barakat arrived in the islands and heard about the
situation, he offered to go to the idol house where the sacrifice took place and substitute himself for the girl. He seated himself in the temple and recited the Qur’an through the night. As he expected, the demon refused to approach him out of fear of the Sacred Word. When Abu l’Barakat repeated this feat a second time a month later, the king of the islands razed the infidel shrines and ordered that the new faith be propagated among his subjects. Behind the veil of this heroic myth may be discerned the coming and going of Muslim merchants in the Maldives from as early as Abbasid times and the incorporation of the islands into the commercial network of the western ocean. Since North African and Andalusian Muslims seem to have been more active in the India trade in the eleventh and twelfth centuries than they were later on, there was nothing implausible about a Berber turning up to introduce the faith.
²⁵

Approaching the Maldives from Malabar, Ibn Battuta may have blinked in wonder at the sight of tall coconut palms apparently growing directly out of the sea. He was to discover that the islands rise barely a few feet above the surface of the ocean and that not a single hill is to be found on any of them. Stretching 475 miles north to south like a string of white gems, the Maldives are divided into about twenty ring-shaped coral atolls. Each of these clusters of islands and tiny islets is grouped more or less around a central lagoon. With the help of a Maldivian pilot who knew his way through the dangerous reefs that surrounded the islands, Captain Ibrahim put ashore at Kinalos Island in the northerly atoll of Malosmadulu.
²⁶
As usual, the visiting
faqih
immediately found lodging with one of the literate men of the place.

For all the tropical charm of the Maldives and their people, Ibn Battuta had no other intention than to play the tourist for a few weeks and get on with his planned itinerary. As soon as he arrived, however, he got fair warning that a different fate lay ahead. The islands were politically united, and had been since pre-Islamic times, under a hereditary king who ruled in a reasonably benign spirit in collaboration with his extended royal family and a small class of titled noblemen. The Maldives had no real towns, but the center of government was on the mile-long island of Male located about midway in the chain of atolls. At the time Ibn Battuta arrived, the monarch happened to be a woman, Rehendi Kabadi Kilege, called Khadija, the nineteenth in the line of Muslim rulers. Female succession to the throne was unusual in Maldivian history,
and in fact Sultana Khadija’s administration was thoroughly dominated by her husband, the Grand Vizier Jamal al-Din (not the same man of course as the Sultan of Honavar). Aside from island governors and other secular officials, the queen appointed Muslim judges and mosque dignitaries and expected them to uphold the standards of the
shari’a
.

However, the man who held the position of chief
qadi
at that time was not given much credit for ability. No sooner had Ibn Battuta set foot on Kinalos and revealed himself to be a scholar of refinement and worldly experience than one of the educated men there told him he had better not go to Male if he did not want the grand vizier to appoint him as judge and oblige him to stay on indefinitely. Ibn Battuta was no doubt better qualified for this job than he had been for his magistracy in Delhi. Not only was Arabic, rather than Persian, the language of jurisprudence and literate prestige in the islands, but the Maliki
madhhab
, Ibn Battuta’s own legal school, was practiced. The existence of a Maliki community in the Indian Ocean is odd, but if the men who introduced Islam to the Maldives were North Africans, they would have brought their Maliki learning with them. (In the sixteenth century the islanders would shift to the Shafi’i
madhhab
, which made more sense in the context of sustained maritime connections with Malabar and the other Muslim lands around the Arabian Sea.
²⁷
)

Anchoring his ship off Kinalos Island probably some time in December 1343,
²⁸
Captain Ibrahim hired a small lateen-rigged boat of the sort the Maldivians used in inter-island trade and set off for Male with Ibn Battuta and several unnamed companions aboard. As soon as they arrived, they went the short walk to the wooden, thatched-roof palace to be introduced to Queen Khadija and Grand Vizier Jamal al-Din. Captain Ibrahim, who had been in the islands before, guided the other visitors in the peculiarities of Maldivian ceremonial:

When we arrived in the council-hall — that is, the
dar
— we sat down in the lobbies near the third entrance . . . Then came Captain Ibrahim. He brought ten garments, bowed in the direction of the queen and threw one of the garments down. Then he bowed to the grand vizier and likewise threw another garment down; subsequently he threw the rest . . . Then they brought us betel and rose-water, which is a mark of honor with them. The grand vizier lodged us in a house and sent us a repast consisting
of a large bowl of rice surrounded by dishes of salted meat, fowl, quail, and fish.

Ibn Battuta had learned by experience that Muslim rulers whose kingdoms lay in the outer periphery of the Dar al-Islam were always avid to attract the services of
’ulama
with previous links to the great cities and colleges of the central lands. He had also learned that once a scholar developed a public reputation for pious learning, his royal benefactor might use more than simple persuasion to prevent him from moving somewhere else. In order to forestall any complications over his own timely departure, Ibn Battuta decided to say nothing to the Maldivians about his legal background and enlisted Captain Ibrahim to honor the secret. The sultans of Delhi had never had the slightest authority, symbolic or otherwise, in the Maldives, but the small-time nobility of the islands nevertheless looked upon the empire with fear and awe. Any former high official of the sultanate who turned up in the atolls would have to carry a heavy load of distinction and might even stir up a certain apprehension.

For about the first ten days of his visit Ibn Battuta managed to preserve his secret, as he and his companions explored the coconut groves of the island and enjoyed the hospitality of the government. But then a ship arrived from Ceylon carrying a group of Arab and Persian Sufis. Some of them happened to know Ibn Battuta from his Delhi years and immediately let the cat out of the bag. The Moroccan visitor, the queen and her court were told, had been an important
qadi
in the service of the mighty Muhammad Tughluq. The grand vizier was delighted at the news. Here was a celebrity who should be specially honored and must not be allowed to escape the islands too easily or too soon!

To his dismay, but also, the tone of the
Rihla
makes clear, to his vain satisfaction, Ibn Battuta was suddenly the center of attention. At first Jamal al-Din tried to flatter him into staying on Male with gifts and preferments. He invited him to the nightly feasts of Ramadan in the queen’s palace. He gave him a piece of land and offered to build him a house on it. He sent him slave girls, pearls, and golden jewelry. Ibn Battuta accepted all this fuss with grim courtesy, but he was in no mood to revise his travel plans, even less so when he fell seriously ill for some weeks, possibly with the malaria that was endemic in the islands.
²⁹
As soon as he recovered sufficiently to move about, he tried to hire passage on an outbound
ship, but Jamal al-Din made it impossible for him by obstructing the financial arrangements. Finally he had to conclude that the grand vizier was going to keep him on Male whether he liked it or not. Under such circumstances as these, it was better to negotiate his fate voluntarily than to be coerced into service. Presenting himself before Jamal al-Din, he gave his word that he would remain in the islands indefinitely, making the condition, however, that he would not go about Male on foot and that the Maldivian custom of allowing only the vizier to appear publicly on horseback (the queen rode in a litter) would in his case have to be set aside.

The brashness of this demand was the first sign that Ibn Battuta’s sojourn in the Maldives was to be unlike any of his other traveling adventures. His years in India reveal plainly that he had political ambition. But there he had been a relatively small fish in a large, shark-infested pond. Among the ingenuous Maldivians, however, his prestigious connections to the sultanate gave him a status of eminence out of all proportion to the power he had actually exercised in Delhi. Once he agreed to stay in the islands, he seems to have determined to capitalize on his reputation and throw himself into politics. To be sure, the upper-class factional quarrels of this remote equatorial paradise had something of a comic opera quality about them in contrast to the majestic affairs of the sultanate or the Mongol kingdoms. Nevertheless, Ibn Battuta became a very big man in the Maldives for a few fleeting months, and he is at pains to have the reader of the
Rihla
understand that this was the case. Even though the account of his involvement is disjointed, incomplete, and ambiguous, he reveals more about his personal social and political relations there than he does in connection with any of his other experiences, including his years in Delhi. There is no reason to doubt that he became deeply enmeshed in the rivalries of the Maldivian nobility, even to the point where, if things had gone his way, he might have ended his traveling career there in a position of lasting power.

In February 1344, probably less than two months after his arrival, he married a woman of noble status.
³⁰
She was the widow of Sultan Jalal al-Din ’Umar, who was the father (by another marriage) and a predecessor of Queen Khadija. This noblewoman also had a daughter who was married to a son of the grand vizier. Marriage among the governing families of the Maldives was as much a political tool as it was in any other kingdom in that age. Ibn Battuta, like other scholars who circulated among the cities and
princely courts of Islam, sought marriage as a way of gaining admission to local elite circles and securing a base of social and political support. By wedding this woman (whose name is never mentioned in the
Rihla
, though he says he found her society “delightful”), he allied himself to both the royal family and the household of the grand vizier.

Jamal al-Din had in fact urged the marriage on him and as soon as it was consummated invited his new cousin to fill the office of chief judge of the realm. Ibn Battuta pleads rather coyly in the
Rihla
that “Jamal al-Din compelled me against my will to accept the
qadi
’s post,” but he hardly discouraged his own candidacy when he criticized the incumbent judge for being “absolutely no good at anything.” Ibn Battuta makes it plain that once he got the job he used the office to wield considerably more power over other men than he ever had in his opulent sinecure in Delhi:

All sentences proceed from the
qadi
, who is the most influential man with them, and his orders are carried out like those of the sultan or even more punctiliously. He sits on a carpet in the council-hall and has three islands, the income which he appropriates for his personal use according to an old custom.

In the absence of any independent observation, we cannot know how much he may have inflated his power in the islands for the benefit of admiring readers of the
Rihla
. He claims, in any case, to have gone about his judicial practice in the same spirit of orthodox zeal that had prompted him to expose the errant bath operators in that Nile town of Upper Egypt 18 years earlier. “When I became
qadi
,” he reports triumphantly, “I strove with all my might to establish the rule of law,” implying that the Maldivian bumpkins had much to learn about rigorous canonical standards and that he was just the man to rid the kingdom of “bad customs.” Among his reforms, he ordered that any man who failed to attend Friday prayer was to be “whipped and publicly disgraced.” He strove to abolish the local custom that required a divorced woman to stay in the house of her former husband until she married again; he had at least 25 men found guilty of this practice “whipped and paraded round the bazaars.” At least once he sentenced a thief to have his right hand severed, a standard
shari’a
judgment that nonetheless caused several Maldivians present in the council hall to faint dead away. In one matter, however, the populace refused to conform to his idea of scriptural propriety. Most of the women, he relates,