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

were frequently in his train during later periods of his travels, would receive anything other than the scantest mention here and there in the
Rihla
. Wives vanish as casually and as inexplicably from the narrative as they enter it. In the Islamic society of that age a man’s intimate family relations were regarded as no one’s business but his own, and married Muslim women, at least in the Arabic-speaking lands, lived out their lives largely in seclusion. Ibn Battuta’s domestic affairs were not a proper subject for a
rihla
, nor would they be for the biography or autobiography of any public man of that time. Consequently we learn much less than we would like about a significant dimension of Ibn Battuta’s traveling life.
    Sometime in the late winter or spring of 1326 the caravan reached Alexandria at the western end of the Nile Delta. 12 As treks acrossnorthern Africa went, Ibn Battuta managed it in less time than many travelers did, covering the more than 2,000 miles in the space of eight or nine months. If at this point he had been in a hurry to get to the Hijaz, he could have continued across the delta and the Sinai Peninsula, picking up the Egyptian caravan route to Mecca. But the next pilgrimage season was still eight months away, affording him plenty of time to explore the Nile Valley and, and as any serious scholar-pilgrim did, pay his respects to Cairo, which in the first half of the fourteenth century was the reigning intellectual capital of the Arabic-speaking world and the largest city in the hemisphere anywhere west of China.
Notes
    1 . Ibn Khaldun,
The Muqaddimah
, 2nd edn., trans. F. Rosenthal, 3 vols. (Princeton, N.J., 1967), vol. 3, p. 307.
    2 . Robert Brunschvig,
La Berbérie orientale sous les Hafsides des origines à la fin du XVe siècle
, 2 vols. (Paris, 1940, 1947), vol. 2, p. 97.
    3 . M. Canard, “Les relations entre les Merinides et les Mamelouks au XIVe siècle,”
Annales de l’Institut d’Études Orientales
5 (1939): 43.
    4 . Ibn Khaldun,
Histoire des Berbères et des dynasties musulmanes de l’Afrique septentrionale
, trans. Baron de Slane, 4 vols. (Paris, 1925–56), vol. 2, pp. 462–66, vol. 3, pp. 403–05.
    5 . Brunschvig (
Berbèrie orientale
, vol. 1, p. 148n) suggests this hypothesis.
    6 . A. Cherbonneau, “Notice et extraits du voyage d’El-Abdary à travers l’Afrique septentrionale, au VIIe siècle de l’Hegire,”
Journal Asiatique
, 5th ser., 4 (1854): 158. My translation from the French.
    7 . The events of this period are described in Ibn Khaldun,
Histoire des Berberes
, vol. 2, pp. 457–66; and Brunschvig,
Berbèrie orientale
, vol. 1, pp. 144–50.
    8 . Brunschvig,
Berbèrie orientale
, vol. 1, pp. 356–57.
    9 . Ibid., vol. 1, p. 146n.
    10 . Ibid., vol. 2, pp. 301–02; Gb, vol. 1, p. 13n.
    11 . Robert Brunschvig, “Quelques remarques historiques sur les medersas de Tunisie,”
Revue Tunisienne
6 (1931): 261–85. The college of the Booksellers was known in Arabic as the Ma’ridiyya.
    12 . In the
Rihla
IB remembers arriving in Alexandria on 5 April 1326 (1 Jumada I 726). Hrbek (Hr, pp. 417–18) argues that the date was more likely mid February (Rabi’ I 726) on the grounds that the trip from Tripoli to Alexandria should not have taken the three months Ibn Battuta allots to it, considering that no major delays are noted. Hrbek suggests that the journey probably took 40 to 45 days and that acceptance of an earlier arrival date in Alexandria helps to solve chronological problems that arise later on.

3 The Mamluks
    As for the dynasties of our time, the greatest of them is that of the Turks in Egypt. 1
    Ibn Khaldun
    Of the dozens of international ports Ibn Battuta visited in the course of his travels, Alexandria impressed him as among the five most magnificent. There was not one harbor but two, the eastern reserved for Christian ships, the western for Muslim. They were divided by Pharos Island and the colossal lighthouse which loomed over the port and could be seen