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

character, and we can wonder what seasoning effect two months in Tunis among such people may have had.
    That he was already showing promise as an intelligent Maliki scholar was evident in the circumstances of his departure from Tunis in November 1325. He had left home a lonely journeyer eager to join up with whoever might tolerate his company. He left Tunis as the appointed
qadi
of a caravan of pilgrims. This was his first official post as an aspiring jurist. Perhaps the honor went to him because no better qualified lawyer was present in the group or because, as he tells us in the narrative, most of the people in the company were Moroccan Berbers. In any case, a
hajj
caravan was a sort of community and required formal leadership: a chief (
amir
) who had all the powers of the captain of a ship, and a
qadi
, who adjudicated disputes and thereby kept peace and order among the travelers.
    The main caravan route led southward along Tunisia’s rich littoral of olive and fruit groves and through a succession of busy maritime cities — Sousse, Sfax, Gabès. Some miles south of Gabès the road turned abruptly eastward with the coast, running between the island of Djerba on one side, the fringe of the Sahara on the other. The next major stop was Tripoli, the last urban outpost of the Hafsid domain.
    The province of Tripolitania, today part of Libya, marked geographically the eastern extremity of the island Maghrib. From here the coastline ran southeastward for more than 400 miles, cutting further and further into the climatic zone of the Sahara until desert and water came together, obliterating entirely the narrow coastal band of fertility. Further on the land juts suddenly northward again into latitudes of higher rainfall. Here was the well-populated region of Cyrenaica with its forests and pasturelands and fallen Roman towns. If Tripolitania was historically and culturally the end of the Maghrib, Cyrenaica was the beginning of the Middle East, the two halves of Libya divided one from the other by several hundred miles of sand and sea.
    Across the breadth of the coastal Libyan countryside Arab herding tribes ruled supreme, and once again Ibn Battuta and his companions courted trouble. Between Gabès and Tripoli a company of archers, no doubt provided by the Hafsid sultan to protect the
hajj
caravan, kept rovers at bay. In Tripoli, however, Ibn Battuta decided to leave the main group, which lingered in the city because of rain and cold, and push on ahead with a small troop of Moroccans, presumably leaving his judgeship, at least temporarily, in the hands of a subordinate. Somewhere near the port town of Surt (Sirte) a band of cameleers tried to attack the little party. But according to the
Rihla
, “the Divine Will diverted them and prevented them from doing us harm that they had intended.” After reaching Cyrenaica in safety, the travelers waited for the rest of the caravan to catch up, then continued, presumably without further incident, toward the Nile.
    Crossing Libya, Ibn Battuta had greater reason than ever to be wary of trouble since he no longer had only himself to consider. While the caravan was in Sfax, he entered into a contract of marriage with the daughter of a Tunisian official in the pilgrim company. When they reached Tripoli, the woman was presented to him. The arrangement ended in failure, however, for Ibn Battuta fell into a dispute with his prospective father-in-law while traveling through Cyrenaica and ended up returning the girl. Undaunted, he then wedded the daughter of another pilgrim, this time a scholar from Fez. Apparently with income from his judicial office he put on a marriage feast “at which I detained the caravan for a whole day, and entertained them all.” The
Rihla
tells us nothing whatsoever about the character of either of these women or Ibn Battuta’s relationship with them. Indeed he would marry several times in the course of his travels, yet neither his wives, nor the slave concubines who