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Writing Set - Ottoman 19th century |
Unlike the modern Western tourist, IB often visited important tombs and holy places. In the Muslim world, this tradition continues :
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Tomb of Mahmud II (plaque) |
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Tomb of Mahmud II (Istanbul) |
Having studied Classical Arabic at Oxford (the language of the Qur'an) Tim Makintosh-Smith left home and settled in the Yemeni capital of San'a. Living openly as a Christian, he never set foot in a mosque.
Serendipititiously chancing upon IB's memoir, Makintosh-Smith decided to follow IB's trail across northern Africa, over the Arabian peninsula, down the African coast, up through Istanbul and across Asia to India and China. Unlike Sir Richard Burton, he made no attempt to pass himself off as a Muslim and thus gave Mecca a pass.
Although Constantinople remained Christian and did not fall to the Turks until 1453, Muslims lived in the city and IB was able to visit. Makintosh-Smith paid a visit to the monastic Church of Christ of the Chora (now a museum), built a decade before IB's arrival. Although there is no firm proof of IB's presence, surely knew of it:
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Mosaic in the Church of Christ of the Chora. Note that although the tesserae appear to be of gold, they are actually of glass-coated gold leaf. |
The only church IB is known to have entered is Justinian's Hagia Sophia, its splendour much reduced during the sack of the city in 1204 under Enrico Dandolo's crusaders, but still magnificent. Converted into a mosque under Muslim rule (1453) and turned into a museum by Ataturk, Mackintosh-Smith marvels at the juxtaposition of Islam and Christianity. Where else would one expect to see an image of Mary and the infant Jesus accompanied by giant roundels dedicated to Allah and Mohammad, His prophet?
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Hagia Sophia - A Byzantine Mary and Jesus |
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Hagia Sophia - Two of the many Arabic roundels |
TIMELINE (some dates approximate and/or disputed)
356 BC Alexander the Great is born in Pella, heart of an expanding Macedonian kingdom.
323 BC Alexander, aged 33, dies in Babylon following a banquet.
476 Fall of the Western Roman Empire.
537 The Hagia Sophia basilica is built by Justinian I, emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire.
610 Beginning of the Qur'an through the revelations received by Muhammad, then aged 40.
632 Death of Muhammad (founder of Islam).
c 697 Establishment of the Venetian Republic.
711 - 718 The Moors conquer Christian Spain.
c 910 Development of paper money in China.
c 1000 Leif Ericsson visits three (location disputed) sites in North America, one of which he names Vinland.
1204 Sack of Constantinople by crusaders under the command of Venetian doge Enrico Dandolo.
1206 Temujin unites the Mongol tribes and takes the name Genghis Khan.
1215 King John of England fixes his seal to the Great Charter, or Magna Carta, in a meadow called Runnymede.
1260 Election of Kublai Khan, a grandson of Genghis Khan, as Great Khan of the Mongols.
1271 Marco Polo and his two uncles depart for China.
1298 Marco Polo, now in a Genoan prison, is convinced by a fellow prisoner to narrate his adventures.
c 1300 Flying buttresses begin to appear on the exterior of Gothic cathedrals.
c 1300 Bankers in northern Italy develop double-entry bookkeeping.
1304 IB is born in Tangiers to parents of Berber descent.
1306 Robert de Bruce is crowned king of the Scots at Scone.
1307 Edward II becomes king of England on the death of his father, Edward I.
c 1307 Dante, exiled from Florence, begins work on The Divine Comedy, completing it 14 years later, just before his death.
1309 The papacy moves temporarily to Avignon for an unexpected seventy-year stay.
c 1320 Florence, now an international financial centre, sees the Bardi and Peruzzi families becoming bankers to the rulers of Europe.
1325 IB sets out on his haj to Mecca.
1326 IB arrives in Egyptian Alexandria (part of the Bahri Mamluk empire).
1327 French-born Isabella forces her husband Edward II to renounce the English throne in favour of their 15-year-old son, Edward III.
1331 IB visits Mogadishu (Somalia's modern capital), then at its zenith, under the rule of Somali Sultan, Abu Bakr ibn Sayx 'Umar.
1332 or 1334 IB arives in Constantinople, meeting emperor Andronikos III Palaiologos and visiting the Hagia Sophia.
1334 IB begins an 8-year stint in India.
c 1336 Establishment of a Hindu empire in southern India with its capital at Vijayanagara ("City of Victory").
1337 Philip VI of France confiscates Guienne setting off the Hundred Years' War.
1345 IB arrives in Quanzhou in the Fujian province of China, then under Mongol rule.
c 1345 The Aztecs settle in a lake on an uninhabited island, naming it Tenochtitlan (now covered by Mexico City).
1346 The plague (aka the Black Death) makes its first appearance in China.
1346 The English, using Welsh longbows and infantry, defeats the more numerous but heavily encumbered (by crossbows and heavy cavalry) French forces at Crécy.
c 1349 Boccaccio begins his Decameron, describing the Black Death, now making its way through Europe, in vivid detail.
1354 IB settles in Fez to dictate his memoir A Gift to Those Who Contemplate the Wonders of Cities and the Marvels of Travelling to a scholar whom he had met in Granada, Ibn Juzayy.
1356 The battle of Poitiers ends with the capture of the French king, Jean II.
1368 Chu Yüan-chang ushers in the Ming ("brilliant") dynasty by driving the Mongols from Beijing.
1368 or 1369 Death of IB in Morocco.
1377 Following the death of his grandfather, Edward III, 10-year-old Richard II accedes to the English throne.
c 1387 Chaucer begins the Canterbury Tales, completing only 24 of the planned 100 by the time of his death.
1405 Chinese admiral Zheng He begins the first of seven expeditions west.
1415 Henry V succeeds at Agincourt against a much larger but more heavily armed French force.
1453 Constantinople falls to falls to a 21-year-old Ottoman Turk conqueror, Mehmed II, bringing an end to the Eastern Roman Empire.
1469 Machiavelli, author of The Prince, is born in the Florentine Republic.
1492 The fall of the last Islamic state in Grenada to Fredinand and Isabella (parents of Henry VIII's first wife) ends the Reconquista, the 781-year reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula, freeing up funds for Christopher Columbus to set sail.
1497 John Cabot reaches Newfoundland on his search for a trade route to China.
1501 Italian navigator Amerigo Vespucci sets sail for the New World from Lisbon.
1600 The East India Company is established by Elizabeth I's charter to a "Company of Merchants trading into the East Indies".
1797 Napoleon deposes the last of Venice's doges, putting an end to the Serenissima Repubblica, owner of forts and trade-routes throughout the Mediterranean.
SUGGESTED READING, LISTENING AND VIEWING
1) Author Tim Mackintosh-Smith website
(a) Travels with a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah
This volume covers IB's departure from his home in Tangiers and ends with his arrival in Christian Constantinople. Hardcover published 2001.
(b) The Hall of a Thousand Columns: Hindustan to Malabar with Ibn Battutah
This volume covers IB's Indian adventures and was published in March 2005 (paperback 2006).
c) Landfalls: On the Edge of Islam with Ibn Battutah
This volume covers the Travels from Zanzibar to the Alhambra, via China and Timbuktu. The hardcover was published in August 2010.
2) French translation of IB's diary:
Traduction de l’arabe de C. Defremery et B.R. Sanguinetti (1858)
Un document produit en version numérique par Jean-Marc Simonet, bénévole, professeur retraité de l’enseignement de l’Université de Paris XI-Orsay
a) Volume 1 (De l’Afrique du Nord à La Mecque)
b) Volume 2 (De La Mecque aux steppes russes)
c) Volume 3 (Inde, Extrême-Orient, Espagne & Soudan)
3) The Travels of Ibn Battuta: Translated with Revisions and notes from the Arabic text edited by C Defremery and B R Sanguinetti by H A R Gibb and published by the Hakluyt Society in 5 volumes, the last being an index.
"Founded in 1846, the Hakluyt Society seeks to advance knowledge and education by the publication of scholarly editions of primary records of voyages, travels and other geographical material."
4) BBC Radio show In Our Time episodes covering discussions about the Muslim world around the time of IB. Each episode's web page also includes a short bibliography:
a) Ibn Khaldun. The life and ideas of the 14th-century Arab philosopher.
b) The Abbasid Caliphs. A dynasty that ruled a Muslim empire extending from Tunisia through Egypt, Syria, Arabia, and Persia to Uzbekistan and the frontiers of India from the mid-eighth to the tenth century.
c) Al-Kindi. An Arab philosopher born in the early ninth century. He was heavily influenced by Classical philosophy, supervizing the translation of works by Greeks such as Aristotle into Arabic. He himself wrote more than 250 works on subjects ranging from optics to mathematics, music and astrology.
5) One Man's Odyssey — Heather Jones, 2011. A TIME magazine interactive map comparing the journey of Ibn Battutah with the Chinese admiral Zheng He (his seven voyages west including the Middle East and Africa between 1405 and 1433) and Venetian Marco Polo 24-year trip to China (began 1271).
6) Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World by Nicholas Ostler (2006). A discussion as to how and why languages rise and fall. Includes the story of how Arabic spread and provides the information as to the perils and pitfall's Mackintosh-Smith faced in communicating with the locals in his quest to follow in IB's footsteps.
7) The Lions of Al-Rassan by Guy Gavriel Kay (2005). A fantasy novel set in a fictional medieval Moorish Spain. A good introduction to the best of the lives of Christians, Jews, and Muslims under Islamic rule. For those who enjoy historical fiction with a twist.
8) The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain by Maria Rosa Menocal (2003). A popular well researched history of Spain under Muslim rule explaining how it came to be and why it fell apart.
9) Alexander the Great by Paul Cartledge (2003). The maps make it interesting for a quick comparison of the extent of Alexander's empire to IB's world.
10) Liberty in the Age of Terror: A Defence of Civil Liberties and Enlightenment Values by A C Grayling (2000). A discussion by a popular philosopher regarding Islam (militant and mainstream) and the West as well as for comparing the post-Enlightenment in the West to IB's Muslim world.
11) Journey to Mecca - Story of a traveller Ibn Batutta. Interesting video found on YouTube.
12) Wikipedia articles:
(a) Ibn Battuta. A detailed account of IB's travels, including those places unvisited by Makintosh-Smith with links to articles on many of these. Includes maps and itineraries.
Caravan of pilgrims in Ramleh |
c) Muhammad (the Islamic prophet). The life and legacy of the founder of Islam.
Prophet Muhammed's name with Salat phrase written in Thuluth, an Arabic Calligraphy |
d) Islamic Golden Age. From the mid-8th century Abbasid historical period to the Mongol conquest of Baghdad in 1258.
Silver dirham of the Umayyad Caliphate, minted at Balkh al-Baida in 729-30 |
Maps representing the advance of the Christian Reconquista in the Iberian Peninsula from 790 to 1300 |
f) Al-Andalus. The medieval Muslim ("Moorish") state at its peak consisting of what are now most of today's Spain, Portugal, Andorra, and section of southern France.
Image of a Jewish cantor reading the Passover story in al-Andalus, from a 14th century Spanish Haggadah. |