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 of some abject to affluence and the torture and murder of some living soul.” He appointed the traveller to be kazi of Delhi, with a present of 12,000 silver dinars (rupees), and an annual salary of the same amount, besides an assignment of village lands. In the sultan’s service Ibn Batuta remained eight years; but his good fortune stimulated his natural extravagance, and his debts soon amounted to four or five times his salary. At last he fell into disfavour and retired from court, only to be summoned again on a congenial duty. The emperor of China, last of the Mongol dynasty, had sent a mission to Delhi, and the Moor was to accompany the return embassy (1342). The party travelled through central India to Cambay and thence sailed to Calicut, classed by the traveller with the neighbouring Kaulam (Quilon), Alexandria, Sudak in the Crimea, and Zayton (Amoy harbour) in China, as one of the greatest trading havens in the world—an interesting enumeration from one who had seen them all. The mission party was to embark in Chinese junks (the word used) and smaller vessels, but that carrying the other envoys and the presents, which started before Ibn Batuta was ready, was wrecked totally; the vessel that he had engaged went off with his property, and he was left on the beach of Calicut. Not daring to return to Delhi, he remained about Honore and other cities of the western coast, taking part in various adventures, among others the capture of Sindabur (Goa), and visiting the Maldive Islands, where he became kazi, and married four wives, and of which he has left the best medieval account, hardly surpassed by any modern. In August 1344 he left the Maldives for Ceylon; here he made the 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) on a junk bound for Java (i.e. Java Minor of Marco Polo, or Sumatra). Touching the coast of Arakan or Burma, he reached Sumatra in forty days, and was provided with a junk for China by Malik al Dhahir, a zealous disciple of Islam, which had recently spread among the states on the northern coast of that island. Calling (apparently) at Cambodia on his way, Ibn Batuta reached China at Zayton (Amoy harbour), famous from Marco Polo; he also visited Sin Kalan or Canton, and professes to have been in Khansa (Kinsay of Marco Polo, i.e. Hangchau), and Khanbalik (Cambaluc or Peking). The truth of his visit to these two cities, and especially to the last, has been questioned. The traveller’s history, not least in China, singularly illustrates the free masonry of Islam, and its power of carrying a Moslem doctor over the known world of Asia and Africa. On his way home he saw the great bird Rukh (evidently, from his description, an island lifted by refraction); revisited Sumatra, Malabar, Oman, Persia, Bagdad, and crossed the great desert to Palmyra and Damascus, where he got his first news of home, and heard of his father’s death fifteen years before. Diverging to Hamath and Aleppo, on his return to Damascus, he found the Black Death 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 dirhems of the West are but little; but then you get more for them.” 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 1354) 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 Mahommed 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. The French capture of Constantina afforded MSS. of the complete work, one of them the autograph of Ibn Juzai. And from these, after versions of fragments by various French scholars, was derived at last (1858–1859) the standard edition and translation of the whole by M. Défrémery and Dr Sanguinetti, in 4 vols. See also Sir Henry Yule, Cathay, ii. 397-526; C. Raymond Beazley, Dawn of Modern Geography, iii. 535-538. Though there are some singular chronological difficulties in the narrative, and a good many cursory inaccuracies and exaggerations, there is no part of it except, perhaps, certain portions of the journeys in north China, which is open to doubt. The accounts of the Maldive Islands, and of the Negro countries on the Niger, are replete with interesting and accurate particulars. The former agrees surprisingly with that given by the only other foreign resident we know of, Pyrard de la Val, two hundred and fifty years later. Ibn Batuta’s statements and anecdotes regarding the showy virtues and solid vices of Sultan Muhammad Tughlak are in entire agreement with Indian historians, and add many fresh details. (H. Y.; C. R. B.)
IBN DURAID [Abū Bakr Mahommed ibn ul-Ḥasan ibn
Duraid ul-Azdī] (837–934), Arabian poet and philologist, was
born at Baṣra of south Arabian stock. At his native place he was
trained under various teachers, but fled in 871 to Oman at the
time Baṣra was attacked by the negroes, known as the Zanj,
under Muhallabī. After living twelve years in Oman he went to
Persia, and, under the protection of the governor, ʽAbdallāh ibn
Mahommed ibn Mīkāl, and his son, Ismaʽīl, wrote his chief works.
In 920 he went to Bagdad, where he received a pension from the
caliph Moqtadir.
The Maqsūra, a poem in praise of Ibn Mīkāl and his son, has been edited by A. Haitsma (1773) E. Scheidius (1786) and N. Boyesen (1828). Various commentaries on the poem exist in MS. (cf. C. Brockelmann, Gesch. der ar. Lit., i. 211 ff., Weimar, 1898), The Jamhara fi-l-Lugha is a large dictionary written in Persian but not printed. Another work is the Kitāb ul-Ishtiqāq (“Book of Etymology”), edited by F. Wüstenfeld (Göttingen, 1854); it was written in opposition to the anti-Arabian party to show the etymological connexion of the Arabian tribal names. (G. W. T.)
IBN FARADĪ [Abū–l-Walīd ʽAbdallāh ibn ul-Faradi] (962–1012),
Arabian historian, was born at Cordova and studied law
and tradition. In 992 he made the pilgrimage and proceeded to
Egypt and Kairawān, studying in these places. After his return
in 1009 he became cadi in Valencia, and was killed at Cordova
when the Berbers took the city.
His chief work is the History of the Learned Men of Andalusia, edited by F. Codera (Madrid, 1891–1892). He wrote also a history of the poets of Andalusia. (G. W. T.)
IBN FĀRID [Abū–l-Qāsim ʽUmar ibn ul-Fāriḍ] (1181–1235), Arabian poet, was born in Cairo, lived for some time in Mecca and died in Cairo. His poetry is entirely Sufic, and he was esteemed the greatest mystic poet of the Arabs. Some of his poems are said to have been written in ecstasies. His diwan has been published with commentary at Beirūt, 1887, &c.; with the commentaries of Burīnī (d. 1615) and ‘Abdul-Ghānī (d. 1730) at Marseilles, 1853, and at Cairo; and with the commentary of Rushayyid Ghālib
