The Adventures of Ibn Battuta: A Muslim Traveler of the Fourteenth Century by Ross E. Dunn

southern rim of the Sicilian Channel, which joined (and divided) the maritime complexes of the Western and Eastern Mediterranean. Tunis maintained close commercial ties with Egypt by way of Muslim coastal and overland trade and was well placed to serve as a major emporium for Christian merchants of the Western Mediterranean who found it a convenient place to buy exotic goods of the East without themselves venturing on the voyage to Egypt or the Levant.
    What Ibn Battuta recalls about his feelings upon arriving in Tunis is not the elation of a pilgrim who has reached one of the great centers of religious learning along the
hajj
route, but the forlornness of a young man in a strange city:
    The townsfolk came out to welcome the
shaykh
Abu ’Abdallah al-Zubaydi and to welcome Abu al-Tayyib, the son of the
qadi
Abu ’Abdallah al-Nafzawi. On all sides they came forward with greetings and questions to one another, but not a soul said a word of greeting to me, since there was none of them that I knew. I felt so sad at heart on account of my loneliness that I could not restrain the tears that started to my eyes, and wept bitterly.
    In no time at all, however things were looking up:
    One of the pilgrims, realizing the cause of my distress, came up to me with a greeting and friendly welcome, and continued to comfort me with friendly talk until I entered the city, where I lodged in the college of the Booksellers.
    After dodging tribal marauders all along the road from Bijaya, Ibn Battuta managed to arrive in Tunis during a period of relative political calm. The harried Abu Bakr, who had found himself shut out of the citadel of Tunis by rebels three different times since 1321, returned from Constantine and recaptured the city perhaps only a few days ahead of Ibn Battuta’s arrival there. 9 Indeed Abu Bakr probably resumed authority just in time for the ’Id al-Fitr, the feast celebrating the end of Ramadan, the Muslim month of fasting during daylight hours. Ibn Battuta was on hand to witness the sultan fulfill his customary duty of leading “a magnificent procession” of officials, courtiers, and soldiers from the citadel to a special outdoor praying ground (
musalla
) that accommodated the crowds gathered for the prayers marking the Breaking of the Fast. 10
    Ibn Battuta spent about two months in Tunis, arriving some days before 10 September 1325 and leaving in early November. It was common for educated travelers or pilgrims to take lodging temporarily in a college, even though they were not regularly attending lectures. The
madrasa
of the Booksellers where he stayed was one of three colleges in existence in Tunis at that time. 11 His recollections of his first visit to the city are slight, but we might be sure that he spent most of his time in the company of the gentlemen-scholars of the city. He may indeed have had exposure to some of the eminent Maliki
’ulama
of the century. Since the demise of the Almohads, the Maliki school was enjoying as much of a resurgence in Ifriqiya as it was in Morocco. The Hafsid rulers were appointing Maliki scholars to high positions of state and patronizing the
madrasas
, where Maliki juridical texts were the heart of the curriculum.
    If the Tunis elite held out an estimable model of erudition, they were also masters of refined taste and that union of piety and restrained wordliness that Ibn Battuta would exemplify in adulthood. During the previous century Tunis had been a distant refuge for successive waves of Muslims emigrating from Andalusia in thewake of the
reconquista
. Of all the North African cities with populations of Iberian descent, Tunis had the liveliest and most productive. The Andalusians, coming from a civilized tradition that was more polished than that of North Africa, were leaders in the fields of architecture, craftsmanship, horticulture, music, belle-lettres, and the niceties of diplomatic and courtly protocol. An Andalusian strain seems evident in Ibn Battuta’s own mannerly