Finding Home in the Globe: Traveling in the Medieval Islamic World

Terra Yuqian Zhang

Terra Zhang is a senior at Smith College, studying the history of the medieval Mediterranean and the Middle East and exploring ways to put the study of the past into conversation with the urgencies of the present.

Abstract

This essay derives from my work on the Global Middle Ages, an experiment on the methodological possibilities of writing a global history of the medieval era. The global turn is already happening in many other humanities and social sciences disciplines, with the aim of making those fields more inclusive, open, and welcoming. This change would be especially meaningful for Medieval Studies: given its primarily Latin European and Anglo-Frankish focus, the study of the Middle Ages has been inevitably entangled with ethno-nationalistic agendas, as well as the co-optation by White supremacists who imagined a European past of isolation and racial purity. Putting the conventional Medieval Studies into conversation with other parts of the pre-modern world rejects a monolithic view of the Middle Ages and allows students of the medieval past to understand human experience in interconnected terms rather than as a linear pathway to Western hegemony. Indeed, having reflected on how I was first attracted to Medieval Studies not least because of the prestige that Western intellectual history possessed in my Asian educational background, I realized how much the teleological narratives of Western ascendancy need to change. To achieve this aim, I find a lot of hope in studying the Global Middle Ages. The global nature of this historical inquiry transcends pseudo-national, regional, and cultural boundaries, shedding light on how individuals and communities in the Middle Ages negotiated their intersectional identities in ways no less complex than our own time.

As a slice of the conversations taking place in the still embryonic field of the Global Middle Ages, this essay looks at traveling from the perspective of the medieval Islamic world. For the Muslim travelers, navigating a wide geographical area creates many opportunities for cross-cultural encounters, which challenge the travelers to reconsider their identity now that they are in a context different from “home” — their place of physical and spiritual nurture. I center my discussion on the concept of “home” as it emerges from travel writings and their adjacent genres. What does it mean to be at home, to be away from home, or to meet one’s kinspeople? Can a traveler ever leave her home behind — the memories, practices, and communities that have made her who she is? To answer these questions, I examine the forces of connection and separation between individuals and communities as presented by medieval Muslim authors. At first sight, their experiences in new places give rise to interstitial spaces where cultural differences subside. Nevertheless, we should understand these spaces are zones of friction in which one explores and negotiates with their multivalent identities.

Finding Home Around the Globe: Traveling in the Medieval Islamic World

Travel writings from the Middle Ages present interesting and varied manifestations of the tension between the local and the global. The connectedness between two distant places is often premised upon their shared interests or beliefs, which invites us to consider travel as a global phenomenon. At the same time, this connectivity could be uneven or unfeasible because of local peculiarities. Each individual traveler must navigate the tensions between the global and local worlds, but they are simultaneously an agent who shapes this tension. What they choose to experience in places away from home and the way they react to what they see are deeply inflected by the memories, practices, and communities that have made them who they are. In Zayde Antrim’s terms, these shaping factors are “various forms of physical, social, material, political, or spiritual nurture”¹ that constitute “home.”

Can travelers ever leave “home” behind while being away from their physical place of nurture? With reference to travel writings in the medieval Islamic world, I suggest that every traveler, however unwittingly, takes at least parts of their “home” with themselves while traveling, whether that travel entails cross-cultural human interaction or aims at the pursuit of knowledge. Furthermore, the traveler’s tendency to seek the familiarity of home in faraway places far outweighs the peculiarities of the foreign land that might cause them to jettison the influence of their home. I substantiate my argument by primarily drawing from the travel (ríḥla) writing of the twelfth-century Muslim traveler Ibn Jubayr (1145-1217). I supplement my discussion of the ríḥla genre by considering al-Muqaddasī’s (d. ca. 1000) geographical treatise The Best Divisions for Knowledge of the Regions (Aḥsan al-Taqāsīm fī Maʿrifat al-āqālīm), and the 8th/9th-century “collection of reports” (akhbār) literature Accounts of China and India (Akhbār al-Ṣīn wa-l-Hind) attributed to Abū Zayd al-Sīrāfī. Different from Ibn Jubayr, al-Muqaddasī and al-Sīrāfī appear as analytical and detached presenters of geographical knowledge without revealing much about the private travel experience. Nevertheless, in curating the geographical information that would appeal to potential Muslim travelers, both authors implicitly engage the vantage point of their homes—the cultural background of their Islamic society.

Finding home in cross-cultural encounters

Regardless of a traveler’s upbringing and presumptions, traveling provides a chance for the traveler to witness, experience, and create common grounds between different cultural spheres. Ibn Jubayr, who departed for a pilgrimage to Mecca between 1183 and 1185, wrote his ríḥla when the Muslim and Christian communities traded and interacted with each other despite their ongoing military strife. Considering the Muslim loss of Sicily, parts of the Levant, and parts of the Iberian Peninsula to Christian forces, Ibn Jubayr often depicts the Christians in hostile opposition to his own Muslim community. However, he also records moments in which confessional boundaries blurred. In Damascus, Ibn Jubayr not only marveled at the beauty of Saint Mary’s Church,² but also found the Christian-Muslim relationship surprisingly amicable: around Mount Lebanon, Christians kindly offered food to Muslim hermits,³ praising them for their dedication to God. Trade relations between Christians and Muslims also seemed peaceful here. Muslims and Christians each paid tax on the other’s land, and merchants from both sides were given fair treatment, unperturbed by the military strife happening in nearby regions.⁴ More striking than the peaceful Christian-Muslim relations that Ibn Jubayr witnessed, however, was the destiny that he shared with his fellow Christians passengers when his ship to Messina suffered a lethal storm. Muslim travelers shared what little food they had with the Christian travelers, and both Muslims and Christians experienced hopelessness and a readiness to embrace death at the doorstep of the Last Judgment.⁵ Their religious understanding of the calamity merged; at this very moment, the confessional boundary between them faded.

These brief moments where religious divisions subside seem to offer some hope of cross-cultural understanding and suggest the possibility for travelers to share experiences and sentiments with one another regardless of their different homes or the prevailing religious fragmentation. Nevertheless, outside of these rare episodes, Ibn Jubayr’s ríḥla rarely contains moments in which he was not conscious of his Muslim identity and his hostility against the Christians. In fact, Ibn Jubayr’s initial reverence for King William II’s rescue waned as he continues his account of Sicily: despite King William’s protectiveness of Muslims and the care he displays for the Muslim physicians, astrologers, and jurists in his court, Ibn Jubayr warns that King William’s apparently welcoming attitude towards Muslims was a “seduction.”⁶ Ibn Jubayr clings to his own religious community, treating the Christians as the “other.” He often expresses disgust towards the people of the Cross: after the Christians took Acre from Muslim hands, Acre became a city where pigs (Christians) and crosses abound, and it was “filthy, being full of refuse and excrement.”⁷

What kind of “home” was Ibn Jubayr coming from as he penned these dehumanizing accounts of the Christians? In her discussion on Muslim universalism, Amira Bennison suggests three normative categories by which a Muslim views the world: first, the universal Muslim community (ʾumma); second, the binary between the dominant Muslim land “house of peace” (dar al-Islam) and the outlying non-Muslim land “house of war” (dar al-ḥarb); third, the caliphates.⁸ Clearly, Ibn Jubayr’s “othering” of the Christians arises from his identification of the ʾumma as his place of nurture, belonging, and congeniality. Ibn Jubayr shows sympathy towards every fellow Muslim under the oppression of Christian rule.⁹ He also constantly warns his Muslim readers of the Christians’ impiety and evil, suggesting that his conception of an internally cohesive ʾumma as his home also leads him to view the Christians as a hostile, oppositional community. This binary between dar al-Islam and dar al-ḥarb is clear from Ibn Jubayr’s language in the ríḥla, where he asks simultaneously for God’s protection of every Muslim land and His destruction of the Christian existence in Acre¹ᴼ and Tyre.¹¹

In Ibn Jubayr’s accounts, contacts with people outside of the ʾumma heighten a Muslim traveler’s consciousness of his religious identity as well as his cultural and spiritual nurture.¹² Yet, the meaning of “home” is more fluid and multivalent than the ʾumma or dar al-Islam. Even within the ʾumma, one could attach a greater sense of home to the parts that are more proximate to one’s physical and ideological upbringing, such as a town, a legal school, or a caliphate. Coming from Granada on the western edge of dar al-Islam, Ibn Jubayr had to navigate cultural shocks within the ʾumma caused by Iberia’s distance from the heartland of Islam. When Ibn Jubayr and his company first arrived in Misr (Egypt), they were greeted by the local officers’ interrogations about their motives and their zakat payment rather than hospitality towards the arrival of fellow Muslims from the west.¹³ Ibn Jubayr himself is not free from localism, either. He laments that many living in the Islamic heartland of Hijaz were non-believers and extols the excellence of his home, the Almohad dynasty. To Ibn Jubayr, only the purity of Almohad religious devotion could rectify the state of affairs in Hijaz.¹⁴ Besides his exalted view of the merits of the western Islamic world in the religious sphere, Ibn Jubayr also shows his attachment and adoration for al-Andalus in more mundane matters. He describes the outstanding quality of Spanish foods and fruits over others.¹⁵ This emotional connection he draws to his homeland makes Ibn Jubayr’s outbound travels as much a pilgrimage as they are a search for home. Indeed, Ibn Jubayr even understands Sicily in terms of his hometown: Sicily, as far as her merits are concerned, was the daughter of Spain.¹⁶

Finding home through the pursuit of knowledge

In addition to cross-cultural encounters, we should consider another mode of defining home in the globe: the pursuit of knowledge, or ṭalab al-ʿilm. If cross-cultural encounters provide an external push for a Muslim traveler to reaffirm what home means in face of the unfamiliar, ṭalab al-ʿilm to a greater extent reflects the traveler’s intrinsic motive to strengthen their Muslim identity. In fact, the ríḥla that Ibn Jubayr undertook already incorporated the pursuit of knowledge. Ibn Jubayr deepened his understanding of Islamic history by visiting the tombs of the followers of the Companions, imams, and learned men.¹⁷

Given their motivation for ṭalab al-ʿilm, the traveler-scholars are not only home-finders, but also agents who create home in their destinations. As these traveler-scholars travel to distant places, they carry with themselves a “de facto passport”¹⁸ that consists of their knowledge of the Islamic sciences and communicable skills such as Arabic. The 10th-century geographer al-Muqaddasī is a key example of this practice in action. As a seeker of knowledge, he studied with qāḍīs and jurists and extensively visited scholarly circles,¹⁹ all the while carrying out geographical investigations for his composition of The Best Divisions for Knowledge of the Regions. At the same time, al-Muqaddasī was a disseminator of Islamic learning, delivering the Friday sermon (khuṭba) at the pulpit and teaching at madrasas.²⁰ He wrote that he was given 36 names, including many such as ʾustādh (teacher), zāhid (ascetic), and fāqih (jurist) that signaled his stature as a learned man.²¹ Similarly, Ibn Battuta’s time in Delhi was not only an opportunity to further his own Islamic learning but also a service for the expansion and strengthening of Islam in India. Ross E. Dunn describes Ibn Battuta as a “literate frontiersman” who fulfilled the sultan’s demand for scholars and jurists to staff the newly constructed mosques and schools, as  the newly converted population of India had yet to understand the prestige of Islam due to their distance from the Arabian heartland.²² From the writings of al-Muqaddasī and Ibn Battuta, we can see how travelers are at once seekers of home on a foreign land and makers of home through the reinforcement and expansion of Muslim identity.

Given that some travelers and scholars begin their travels or geographical investigations with a strong sense of their Muslim identity and spiritual nurture, what implication does that have on the knowledge they produce? When examining the geographical treatises written by Muslim travelers containing seemingly objective presentations of geographical knowledge, I suggest that we must account for the writers’ vantage point of their Muslim community, or their home. In al-Muqaddasī’s Best Divisions, for instance, dar al-Islam serves as a necessary reference frame in his narration. al-Muqaddasī’s investigation is confined to dar al-Islam, since he does not find it relevant to discuss the land of the unbelievers (non-Muslims).²³ In his accounts of the great Islamic cities, his extensive citation of Qur’anic accounts and Islamic histories are meant to appeal to potential Muslim travelers and scholars by pointing out city features that are pivotal to a Muslim’s self-definition.²⁴ Likewise, in his compilation of information (akhbār) about China and India, Abū Zayd al-Sīrāfī was quick to notice the absence of date palms in China and India. Al-Sīrāfī brings up this detail likely because of the prevalence of date palms in Arabia and their cultural stature in Islamic culture. While al-Sīrāfī says little about how he or his merchant informants have fared as travelers coping with unfamiliar environments, we can nevertheless see where the traveler stands: what he sees or chooses to see in a land still foreign to Islam only makes sense given what he has left behind — his Islamic upbringing, or his home.²⁵

Conclusion

Travel writings from the medieval Islamic world reveal how, despite the possibility of inter-cultural and inter-religious understanding, the Muslim travelers never really left their home behind. In fact, their travels are critical to the process of finding and making home for themselves around the globe, allowing them to bring parts or the whole of their “physical, social, material, political, or spiritual nurture” with them.

Home, for travelers, is a fluid category. Muslim travelers identify with different homes in different contexts, though the predominant role of Islamic culture in defining this home is undeniable. Their search for home could be extrinsically motivated when they are forced to make sense of a foreign environment, or intrinsically motivated when the search for knowledge and Muslim identity is the very purpose of their travel. Their search for home could manifest in explicit ways when they reach out to fellow religious travelers for support and comfort, or in implicit ways when this home shapes what the traveler or scholar chooses to see and write about.

Each of the individual experiences and perspectives sampled in this essay tells a different story about what “home” is, but they all demonstrate the intimate symbiosis between the global and the local spheres. All these records of travel remind us that global connections happen within the local,²⁶ and the local peculiarities of the traveler’s home frame what they experience in the global.

Endnotes

[1] Zayde Antrim, “Home as Homeland,” in Routes and Realms: The Power of Place in the Early Islamic World (Oxford University Press, 2012), 11–30.

[2] Ibn Jubayr, The Travels of Ibn Jubayr: A Medieval Journey from Cordoba to Jerusalem, trans. R. J. C. Broadhurst and Robert Irwin (IB Tauris, 2019), 314

[3] Ibn Jubayr, Travels 320

[4] Ibn Jubayr, Travels 321

[5] Ibn Jubayr, Travels 357

[6] Ibn Jubayr, Travels 360-361

[7] Ibn Jubayr, Travels 338

[8] Amira K. Bennison, “Muslim Universalism and Western Globalization,” in Globalization in World History, ed. Antony G. Hopkins (London: Pimlico, 2012), 56–69.

[9] Ibn Jubayr, Travels 342 and 376

[10] Ibn Jubayr, Travels 335

[11] Ibn Jubayr, Travels 337

[12] Cf. Dale F. Eickelman and James Piscatori, “Social Theory in the Study of Muslim Societies,” in Muslim Travelers: Pilgrimage, Migration, and the Religious Imagination, ed. Dale F. Eickelman and James Piscatori (Routledge, 1990), 3–25.

[13] Ibn Jubayr, Travels 75-76

[14] Ibn Jubayr, Travels 92-93

[15] Ibn Jubayr, Travels 137

[16] Ibn Jubayr, Travels 359

[17] Ibn Jubayr, Travels 57-69

[18] Bennison, “Muslim Universalism”

[19] al-Muqaddasī, The Best Divisions for Knowledge of the Regions: Aḥsan al-Taqāsīm Fī Maʿarifat al-Aqālim, trans. Basil Anthony Collins (Doha, Qatar: Centre for Muslim Contribution to Civilization, 2001), 2

[20] al-Muqaddasī The Best Divisions 45-46

[21] al-Muqaddasī, The Best Divisions 45

[22] Ross E. Dunn, “International Migrations of Literate Muslims in the Later Middle Period: The Case of Ibn Battuta,” in Golden Roads: Migration, Pilgrimage and Travel in Mediaeval and Modern Islam, ed. Ian Richard Netton (Curzon Press, 1993), 75–85. See also Ross E. Dunn, “Delhi,” in The Travels of Ibn Battuta: A Muslim Traveler of the Fourteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 183-210.

[23] al-Muqaddasī, The Best Divisions, 8

[24] Cf. Zayde Antrim, “Cities and Sacred History,” in Routes and Realms: The Power of Place in the Early Islamic World (Oxford University Press, 2012), 33–60.

[25] Cf. J.P. Ghobrial, “The Secret Life of Elias of Babylon and the Uses of Global Microhistory,” Past and Present 222 (2014): 51–93.

[26] Cf. Scott Ashley, “Global Worlds, Local Worlds: Connections and Transformations in the Viking Age,” in Byzantium And the Viking World, ed. Fedir Androshchuk, Jonathan Shepard, and Monica White (Uppsala University Library, 2016), 363–87.