Between Islam and Christendom: Ibn Battuta’s Travels in Asia Minor and the North

Abstract

This chapter uses one section of Ibn Battuta’s Rihla to search out a different, more gritty, and uncomfortable cosmopolitanism than was the cosmopolitan fantasy of affable detachment by which postimperial Western subjects declared themselves Citizens of the World.¹ Such detachment was less workable in 1325, when the Maghribi scholar Ibn Battuta began his twenty-nine-year odyssey though the multitudinous cities and territories of the Islamicate world, their contact zones, and, twice, beyond their borders. In the Anatolian leg of Ibn Battuta’s journey into a Christian-Muslim contact zone, the Muslim traveler goes from a state of aversion against Christianity so profound that the mere sound of church bells sends him into a panicked prayer session, to eventually a state of fascination with Christian devotional forms, churches, monasteries, and liturgical performance. By the time he reaches Constantinople on an embassy that he begged to join against the wishes of the issuing sovereign, Ibn Battuta has become a Muslim tourist on Christian territory. In Constantinople, Ibn Battuta actively seeks out the sights of the city, and he is disappointed when certain precincts and encounters are barred to him because he is a Muslim. For instance, he waxes eloquent about the courtyards of the Hagia Sophia, though he cannot enter the actual church because the attendants “allow no person to enter it unless he prostrates himself to the huge cross at their place, which they claim to be a relic of the wood on which the double of Jesus (on whom be peace) was crucified” (2:510).²

This chapter analyzes the difficult and even transforming cosmopolitanism resulting from Ibn Battuta’s contact with various Islamic and non-Islamic cultures in his travels.

Citations are from the following editions and translations: H. A. R. Gibb, trans., The Travels of Ibn Battuta: A.D. 1325–1354, 4 vols. (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers, 2004) with reference to the Arabic edition: Ibn Battuta, Rihlat Ihn Battuta (Beirut: Dar al-Nafa’is, 1997) and to Ross E. Dunn’s indispensible contextualization: The Adventures of Ibn Battuta: A Muslim Traveler of the 14th Century, rev. ed. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986, 2005). Translations, unless bracketed, are Gibb’s.