Some travelers look forward to packing their cases and hitting the road, but for those forced out of their hometowns and away from their mother countries against their will, travel has an entirely different meaning—one of separation, loss, and an often desperate act of survival.
For Muhammad ibn Abdallah al-Salmani, born in the town of Loja near Granada in the year 1313, travel abroad meant more than mere exile. An accomplished poet and minister in the Nasrid court of Granada during its heyday, when the Alhambra palace was getting its most brilliant finishing touches, he and his sovereign, King Muhammad v, were obligated to flee for their lives to Morocco, to the safety of the court of the Merinid Sultan, when the king’s half-brother launched a palace coup in the year 1359.
And it was in Morocco, based in the seaside town of Salé but often camped outdoors in the wilds of the mountainous interior, that this most erudite and refined man—author of more than 60 works ranging from political theory, veterinary medicine and history to mysticism, administrative science and collections of his prodigious correspondence (which included a letter sent to none other than the Arab world’s most famous traveler of all time, Ibn Battuta, by then long retired from his own journeys around the world)—began also to write travelogues.
Three of them are most playfully entitled: Mi’yar al-ikhtiyar fi ahwal al-ma’ahid wa al-diyar (The Measurement of Choice in the Conditions of Places and Buildings); Khatrat al-tayf fi rihla al-shita wa al-sayf (The Appearance of a Ghost During a Trip of Winter and Summer); and Nufadat al jirab fi ‘ulalat al-ightirab (The Shaking of the Bag for Entertainment While Abroad).
His contemporary polymath and friend Ibn Khaldun said he “possessed an unequal linguistic habit and his pupils followed in his footsteps.” What Ibn Khaldun did not say was that his pupil and equally brilliant poet Ibn Zamrak was the source of his friend’s eventual undoing. Spanish Arabist Emilio García Gomez called him the last great man of letters in Al-Andalus because “after having thrown away the key, he turned out the lights and left it in the dark.”
Those who doubt the excellence of his poetic voice need only read his verses, some in gilded letters on a lapis background inscribed in stucco on the walls of
the Alhambra.
See with your own eyes the delight in me,
And admire my shape and adornments …
Let God who is without form or space give shape
To my creator’s most remote desire.
Known to history under the delightful name Lisan al-Din Ibn al-Khatib (Tongue of Religion, Son of the Sermon-Giver) or, more simply, Ibn al-Khatib, he also accrued three other more telling nicknames. During his lifetime he was known as Dhu al-wizaratayn (He of the Two Ministries), because after three years in exile, he was able to return to Granada, when Muhammad v reclaimed the throne, and resume office.
After his death in 1375, which occurred during his second Moroccan exile and in the shadow of yet further intrigue, his biographer, al-Maqqari, renamed him with the dual monikers Dhu al-‘Amrayn and Dhu al-Mayyitayn (He of the Two Lives and He of the Two Deaths). These were references to the fact that Ibn al-Khatib’s prolific writing was due in part to insomnia: Working by day and night, he accrued the equivalent of two lifetimes; his death, indeed, was by a kind of double execution— strangulation followed by immolation.
Of his travelogues, The Appearance of a Ghost is the more straightforward. It recounts a 21-day journey in the spring of 1347 from Granada to Almería in the company of his Nasrid sovereign Yusuf i, father of Muhammad v, to inspect the kingdom’s defensive perimeter.
Ibn al-Khatib seemingly does the impossible by turning a dry trip report into a literary tour de force of rhymed and rhythmic prose, touching on the descriptions of towns large and small, many of whose names come from the Arabic—Guadix (wadi, or “valley”), Gor (ghor, or “declivity”), Almazora (mahsour, or “restricted”), Almanzora (mansour, or “victorious”) and Purchena (burj, or “tower”)—before arriving at his destination, “a city that guards the independence of the realm, a flourishing city where caravans and fleets keep their rendezvous, a town that hoists its flag of pristine honor and shows itself to be first among its rivals.”
The Legado Andalusí Foundation in Granada has created a tourist map, called Ruta de Ibn al-Jatib (Spanish scholars transliterate “kh” as “j”), which tracks this exact itinerary, with stops along the way to see a mudéjar wooden inlaid ceiling in a former mosque in the town of Baza and the Moorish castle in Lorca. The narrative has been translated into Spanish by Jacinto Bosch Vilá and Wilhelm Hoernerbach.
The Measurement of Choice was written as a maqama, a short-barrel, scattershot literary form invented by the Arabs that aimed to impress readers with impossible-to-match rhetorical extravagances. In his, Ibn al-Khatib wrote of 34 cities in Al-Andalus, including Malaga, Granada and Ronda, which he compared to the Moroccan towns Tangier, Meknes, Ceuta and Fez that he had more recently visited as an exile. Despite being far away, he fondly recalled his childhood home of Loja and its women “who cure broken hearts and rabbits that seem awake while sleeping.”
On the other hand, The Shaking of the Bag—a miscellany of praise poems, history and geography, and personal narrative based on his trips from the High Atlas back finally to Al-Andalus—is far less straightforward. Its vocabulary has been studied for covert meanings, of the inside story within the outside story of a physical journey.
“I am nothing but a wanderer of the road,” he wrote, “who has fled this world as a lion, to isolate myself from it, just as I separate body from soul…. Abstinence from all that men desire brings me wisdom and money to give as alms to others.” Simple travelogue it is not, but rather a kind of secret diary of a man-in-exile’s attempt to save himself from the political storms back home and those he felt were sure to come again.
One might find it strange that Ibn al-Khatib chose his place of exile in Salé rather than the more sumptuous Merinid capital of Fez, calling it “a sandy ground, with water of poor quality … with mosquitoes … its people avaricious and of low intelligence.” But historians speculate that at this point in his life he was set on establishing his own identity, to avoid being too closely associated with a deposed king whose time and fortune he feared were now finished.
These thoughts play out most evidently when he goes up the High Atlas to meet the shaykh of the Hintata tribe, Amir Ibn Muhammad ibn Ali. In the person of the amir, Ibn al-Khatib was eager to find a patron unrelated to and in fact more powerful than the ruling Merinid dynast, because a royal protector he knew could be as easily deposed as was his own patron, Muhammad v.
Indeed, the greatest Merinid sultan of all, Abul Hassan Ali ibn Othman, had expanded his territory across the Algerian coast as far as Tunis, commanding at one point some 40,000 Zinata Berber cavalrymen and troops of Andalusi Arab footmen, and then, following a bad turn in his military campaign, had been dethroned, captured and executed by his son Abu Inan
in 1351.
Ibn al-Khatib calculated that he would need friends in high places whose power was enduring, not fleeting, and thus he looked beyond political dynasties toward the Atlas tribe that had once loyally sheltered Abul Hassan. For a man fluent in the recondite language of diplomacy, to approach and praise such rough-hewn mountain men meant that Ibn al-Khatib felt deeply pressed to seek far and wide a fail-safe insurance policy offering both haven and protector in the event he once again must flee for his life.
Outside Marrakesh in the direction of the Hintata territory, near North Africa’s highest summit, Jebel Toubkal, lies Aghmat, the first capital of the Souss region. It had fallen into such decline—“a place as ugly as it tried to be beautiful,” he wrote—that it had become a miserable place of exile for many former rulers of the petty kingdoms of Al-Andalus, the so-called Taifa states, broken away from the Caliphate in Córdoba.
Two of these were also men of high literary talent, the poet and last Abbadid king of Seville, Al-Mu’tamid ibn Abbad, and the last Zirid king of Granada, Abdallah ibn Buluggin, who wrote his memoirs there. In visiting Aghmat in the footsteps of his fellow Moors, Ibn al-Khatib must have been making a literary pilgrimage as much as he was reconnoitering a safe haven.
We propelled ourselves to climb the crowning mountain like a rapacious bird hanging over our ascent, flanked by the tribal lands of the Hintata, they who are supporters of the state, intimates of the Merinid dynasty, sworn to its obedience, noted for their loyalty, ready to risk their life before they would profane it, to keep a promise and a friendship, deserving above others all prestige. This was the chief incentive for my route, the most simple reason for my trip.
Ibn al-Khatib relates how he sought to make the Merinid amir’s acquaintance, concluding with a 12-line qasida addressed directly to him whose lines include “By God, how you maintain happiness! / By God, what lucky fortune keeps you safe!” The central part of the narrative is not the difficulty of the steep ascent but rather the luxury of its banquet at the summit: “Barely were we seated, relieved of our shoes, when a meal was served that drowned the very sea and flooded its very waves.”
The Shaking of the Bag recounts the return of Ibn al-Khatib to Granada following the reinstatement of Muhammad v to the Nasrid throne, before finally concluding with the account of a ceremony at the Alhambra, the Prophet’s moulid, or birthday celebration, on December 30, 1362. He describes the guest list, menu, palace décor and the king’s attire. “The sovereign’s visage dazzled the eyes,” he wrote, “and what pleased him most was that instead of a crown, he wore a special turban which as of that night became the royal-most symbol of Al-Andalus.
“Scribes, travelers and officials jaded by other such festivals all recognized that this convocation, as much for its location as for its cuisine, music and chronometer [a timekeeping device for measuring the night hours that had been demonstrated], was an event without precedent, that never would be outdone or even repeated.”
A poem by Ibn al-Khatib inscribed in the Court of Myrtles captures the night’s magical setting:
With my jewels and with my crown I surpass the most beautiful,
And before me the stars of the zodiac all bow down ...
It is as though I had received the gift of that bounty which
Flows from the hand of my lord Abu al-Hajjaj[Yusuf i, his former patron]
Thus out of his shaken bag poured many jewels and stars. In his travelogues, Ibn al-Khatib always wrote about more than simple arrivals and departures and the stopping places in between. He wrote in the highest form of Arabic literary prose, and signed his name upon the Alhambra itself. The millions of tourists from all over the world who visit the palace each year see his verses adorning its walls in praise, even if few can now read them.
“Travelers of Al-Andalus” is a six-part series selected and adapted from the original 41-part series “El Viajero Histórico,” an idea and production by Ana Carreño Leyva in El Legado Andalusí: Una Nueva Sociedad Mediterránea, the magazine of the Andalusian public foundation El Legado Andalusí, based in Granada, Spain, from 1990 through 2010. Adapted from the original by Hamid Triki, which appeared in issue number 11, titled “Ibn Al-Jatib: El hombre y sus dobles.”
Some travel more with their feet and others travel more in their hearts. The names of some are known in foreign lands because they themselves have gone there, while others become famous abroad because their works precede them. Some reputations are forceful, and some are gentle. But those people whose legacies journey farthest often are those who write not of conflict, but of love.
For Abu Muhammad Ali ibn Hazm, topics of the heart examined from all possible vantage points—from moral philosophy to social psychology, from the most ethereal matters of the spirit to the most practical ones of the body, and, in religious terms, from the sacred to the profane—engraved his stamp on both Arabic and Western literary traditions far from his own life and times in 11th-century Al-Andalus.
His most important book is Tawq al-Hamama (The Ring of the Dove). It is the one Arabic work most cited alongside the Western canon on like subject matter—the Greek philosopher Plato, the Roman poet Ovid, troubadours in medieval France who strummed their lyrics on the lute (descended from the Arab ‘ud) and also, one might argue, the Beatles in “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” Elvis Presley in “Don’t Be Cruel (To a Heart That’s True)” and singers of countless similar boy-wants-girl pop confections.
Historians recognize that Al-Andalus served as a bridge to Europe of the literary form known as the muwashshah, or the rhymed strophic poetry with a refrain. The word came from the Arabic root meaning cummerbund, as if each stanza is “belted” by the repeating verse. They were often set to the musical accompaniment of lute, tambourine and hand drum—the ideal instruments for a minstrel trailing his royal sovereign or the ladies of the court. But from where came love as the subject of a song?
For this, medieval Europe looked to the Arabic translators in Al-Andalus as well as the Arab East, and to the Christian court in Toledo, where Arabic was still widely spoken. All helped transmit back to Western languages what the Arabs had previously translated from Latin and Greek. While most of these texts were scientific and analytical, there was also a keen interest in what might be called the philosophy of life—and they returned to Europe those ideas that classical writers had expounded about the nature of the human heart.
As Plato has Phaedrus say in his eponymous dialogue, “My tale, Socrates, is one of your sort, for love was the theme that occupied us—but love after a fashion.” Their conversation continues on the subjects of soulful, mad and divine love. Or as Ovid put it in the opening lines of his Art of Love, written with the same pedagogical purpose: “If there be anyone among you who is ignorant of the art of loving, let him read this poem and, having read it and acquired the knowledge it contains, let him address himself to Cupid.”
As a similar guide to the heart from an Arab perspective, Ibn Hazm praised the supremacy of requited love and rejected the remote and unattainable love often depicted by pre-Islamic poets, that of a woman whose only traces are found, for instance, in the dead ashes of her abandoned campfire. When the sixth-century poet Imru al-Qays wrote, “Oh my friends / Let us stop and weep over the remembrance of my beloved / Here was her abode on the edge of the sandy desert,” Ibn Hazm responded, “Spare me those tales of the Bedouin … their ways are not our ways … it is not my habit to wear out anyone’s riding beast but my own.”
Indeed he explicitly rejected the imagery of the desert, and in The Ring of the Dove’s introductory poem, he directly addressed his beloved:
The passions most men boast them of
Are like a desert’s noontide haze:
I love thee with a constant love
Unwithering through all my days.
Ibn Hazm was born in Córdoba in the year 994 to the Bani Hazm, a large, Arabized family of Hispanic origin. His grandfather had long ago abandoned the family farm near Huelva in order to improve his fortune by serving in the Umayyad court, then at the apex of its magnificence in Córdoba. Ibn Hazm’s father, Ahmad, was a man of letters who was also skilled in navigating the political affairs of Caliph Hisham ii, and he attained the office of vizier.
The caliph awarded Ahmad with privileges of luxury and wealth, and he allowed the family to move closer to the court in the noble city of Madinat al-Zahra, on the outskirts of Córdoba. There, Ibn Hazm spent his childhood in the haram among the women, where he observed and learned from them in silence. This experience helped him develop a sensitive understanding of the feminine perspective on life that was to become so important in all his literary and philosophical works.
As a boy, Ibn Hazm was said to have been especially impressionable, clever but prone to melancholy, educated in the high tradition that included Greek sciences and readings of classical Arab authors. In those years he shared company with a group of intellectuals who belonged to the aristocracy, among whom he would later seek protection from political persecution, and with whom he would ceaselessly squabble over arcane matters literary and theological.
It was until the year 1008 that the imperial capital at Córdoba enjoyed a splendor built on the strength of the Umayyad caliphs. However, after dynastic upheavals and family conspiracies, the political situation turned turbulent. Revolts and internal struggles brought on a long series of betrayals, murders, dismissals and rebellions, sudden enthronements followed by usurpations and exiles. All marked a decline that resulted in the abolition of the caliphate in 1031. In all this, Ibn Hazm’s father was dismissed from his post, his privileges began to vanish, and he fell from favor. Chaos reached its peak in May 1013. Ibn Hazm was about 20 by then. Córdoba fell into the hands of an invading Berber army from North Africa. The city was plundered, its streets littered with corpses, its gardens and palaces reduced to ashes. The Bani Hazm home was demolished, its extended family members dispersed and chased from town, and the young Ibn Hazm, now sunk into more than a typical adolescent depression, went into self-imposed exile to Almería.
Almería, it turned out, was no safe haven, and there he was arrested and sent into involuntary exile, first in the hamlet of Aznalcázar near Seville, then in Játiva, Valencia—which happened to be the center of papermaking in Al-Andalus, which may have nudged him to first pick up the pen. Later he was to return to his family’s ancestral farm near Huelva, and there he died at age 70 in 1064.
Although the open wound in Ibn Hazm’s temperament never healed, it did give him the impulse in the year 1022 to write about—of all things!—love, a much more refined and multifaceted emotion than the rancor he must have felt. The Ring of the Dove, an exquisitely composed and maturely imagined treatise on the act of loving and being loved, was composed by a 28-year-old who by all accounts had not yet tasted any of that.
What he wrote in following years—if his son Abu Rafi can be believed—comprised more than 80,000 pages in some 400 works on topics such as theology, law and religious polemic (subjects far in spirit from where he first began), and it was all torched on the order of Abbad ii Al-Mu’tadid, the petty ruler of the kingdom of Seville that took shape following the breakup of the Caliphate. Ibn Hazm’s defiant answer to this was, “Even though you might burn paper, you will not burn what is written upon it, since that remains in my heart and in my mind.”
Literary scholars Ramón Menéndez-Pidal, María Rosa Menocal and others believe that Arabic literature has been until recently an underestimated source for much of medieval European belles-lettres. Attraction, temperance, forbearance: such subjects can be found in the philosophical tracts of Ibn Rushd (Averroës), who lived in Córdoba a century after Ibn Hazm. In following centuries, it is not known when or if the West ever became enlightened by the Tunisian Shihab al-Din al-Tifashi’s manual Delight of Hearts About What Will Never Be Found in Books, or from the Arab East by Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya’s Meadow of Lovers and Diversion of the Infatuated and Ibn al-Jawzi’s Condemnation of Desire.
Ibn Hazm’s work stands above because of its fine balance of rumination and reflection interspersed with his poems and personal history. Some of his most engaging anecdotes are based on his own experience, and they begin with such lines as, “Once when I was seated in Almería,” or “I knew a young man who,” or “Writing this has put me in mind of a certain day when,” or, as an example of his wide range of informants, “A woman in whom I have confidence once told me.”
According to The Ring’s English translator A.J. Arberry, it shows “a perfect blend of sacred learning and profane delectation.” He goes on to say, “Ibn Hazm is surprisingly free of pedantry; it is doubtful whether any other Arab writer so well qualified as he would have resisted the temptation to enumerate all that earlier scholars had said on the derivation of the Arabic word for passion.”
Ibn Hazm’s dedicatory preface, addressed to an unnamed friend but probably his fellow poet Ibn Shuhayd, lays it out: “You charged me—may God exalt you!—to compose for you an essay describing Love, wherein I should set forth its various meanings, its causes and accidents, and what happens in it and to it.” In this, his purpose was less to instruct and more to warn. Among its 29 chapter headings, one can read: “Of the Slanderer,” “Of Wasting Away,” “Of Betrayal,” “Of the Vileness of Sinning” and “Of the Reproacher”—all showing just how cautionary was his tale.
Yet there were also joyful accounts of the times when love goes not wrong but right. “I never saw any amorous couple,” he wrote in the chapter “Of Contentment,” “who did not exchange locks of hair, perfumed with ambergris and sprinkled with rosewater, done up at the roots with mastica or clarified white wax, and wrapped about in ribbons of embroidered cloth, silk or the like, to serve as a souvenir when they are separated.”
The Ring’s many poems, which were heavily excised in the one remaining manuscript that was copied three centuries after its original composition and now resides at the University of Leiden, are written as commentary on the life lessons taught in its more discursive prose sections. Arberry has put them into rhyming quatrains that seem to jump off the page as love lyrics wanting to be sung. This one comes from the chapter “Of Allusion by Words,” about how deeply speech can sting the heart:
Harsh words of bitter blame
And false complaining came
From one most cruel, who
Was judge, and plaintiff too!
She laid her nameless charge
Before the world at large,
But none knew her intent
Save him, whose hurt she meant.
It is almost as if the troubadour Marcabru, who lived in Gascogne in southwestern France in the following century and sang most famously about the alleged perfidies of women, had first read The Ring of the Dove.
By the fountain of the orchard,
where the grass is green, near the shore …
I found, alone, without companion,
she who doesn’t want my happiness.
Paul McCartney had not yet been disappointed in love (as Ibn Hazm predicted he inevitably would be) when he sang, “Oh please, say to me / You’ll let me be your man / And please, say to me / You’ll let me hold your hand.” But the Andalusian could have also warned that stony silence, even more than harsh words, can pierce the heart of a true but unrequited lover, as Elvis Presley learned to his own sorrow:
You know I can be found,
sitting home all alone,
If you can’t come around,
at least please telephone.
Don’t be cruel to a heart that’s true.
To return from the recording studio back to the 11th century, Ibn Hazm counseled firmly that neither boy nor girl “come around” to their beloved, and The Ring is suffused with advice for continence and separation. Even as he quoted a hadith (saying) of the Prophet Muhammad, “Let your souls relax from time to time, otherwise they are apt to rust in the same way that metal rusts,” he also stated a higher purpose: “I have planned the matter thus so that the conclusion of our exposition and the end of our discussion may be an exhortation to obedience to Almighty God, and a recommendation to do good and to eschew evil; which last commandment is indeed a duty imposed upon all believers.”
But whether good and evil can so easily be discerned between lovers, that is the eternal question Ibn Hazm left hanging. And it remains so, in varying and inverse proportions of the two, in almost every love song ever since written.
“Travelers of Al-Andalus” is a six-part series selected and adapted from the original 41-part series “El Viajero Histórico,” an idea and production by Ana Carreño Leyva in El Legado Andalusí: Una Nueva Sociedad Mediterránea, the magazine of the Andalusian public foundation El Legado Andalusí, based in Granada, Spain, from 1990 through 2010. The basis of this article appeared in issue number 19, titled “Ibn Hazm de Córdoba,” by Magdalena Lasala.
The story, according to Córdoba-born historian Ibn Hayyan, is that when the amir of Al-Andalus, ‘Abd al-Rahman ii, assigned his court poet and trusted ambassador to a mission to the Byzantine capital of Constantinople, the poet tried his best to refuse.
Independent, insubordinate, even impudent: Such moments were almost trademarks of Yahya ibn Hakam al-Ghazal, whose surname meant “the gazelle,” a name given for his extraordinary good looks and fleet wit. He was known for satirical verse and sharp epigrams that not infrequently landed him in trouble. Yet it was precisely this kind of trouble that precipitated his travels, which later included also the farthest and earliest Arab journey to the Norsemen, or Vikings, a journey that, if true, outshines even the more famous (and better documented) voyage a century later of Ahmad Ibn Fadlan up the Volga River.
Because Al-Ghazal himself is not known to have ever put his own pen to parchment—at least to any that survives today—we rely on Arab chroniclers of following centuries. Although some eminent Western historians of Al-Andalus, including the Frenchman Evariste Lévi-Provençal and the Spaniard Ambrosio Huici Miranda, are skeptical of their accuracy, modern historians of the Vikings take the truth of Al-Ghazal’s story as a given. Ibn Hayyan wrote his 10-volume history of Al-Andalus in the 11th century, fully 200 years after Al-Ghazal lived, and it is the most complete record we have of his biography and diwan, or suite, of poems, many written and, often, composed orally and recited on the spot, thanks to his lightning wit. Thus we know that although he tried to beg off the assignment to Constantinople, protesting that he was too old and the journey too dangerous, Al-Ghazal eventually acceded, begrudgingly:
Some say that Al-Ghazal is so clever
That after due consideration, he was the one selected.
Yet that was not the reason. Rather it is that I was
The easiest one to be rid of.
So yes I will go, but those who cause me harm
Stand before the whims of fortune;
I only wish it to be God’s plan that I return
Whether they like it or not.
Al-Ghazal was born in Jaén, on the Iberian Peninsula, around 770 ce. This was during the reign of ‘Abd al-Rahman i, who had fled for his life from the Umayyad court in Damascus. Not much is known about Al-Ghazal’s early years, but his family must have been socially prominent, because as a young man, he was free to move to Córdoba, and there, he began flirting with power.
To put it that way is apt because, besides his handsome looks that helped him engage in conversations with women, Ibn Hayyan also wrote that “together with his education, he had varied and abundant wisdom; he was able to play the knowing fool when speaking, and he was funny, intense and always at ease in his expression.”
It is perhaps to Al-Ghazal’s fortune that he was still too young to practice his satire during the reign of ‘Abd al-Rahman’s successor, Hisham i, who is known to have cut out the eyes and snipped off the ears of a poet who rubbed him the wrong way. Nevertheless, all that we know of Al-Ghazal tells us that once he opened his mouth, he sometimes could not close it in time.
In 832, by then well positioned in Córdoba and in his early 50s, al-Ghazal wrote a scathing verse about the popular Persian poet and musician Abul Hasan Ali ibn Nafi, known also as Ziryab, who had been invited to court by ‘Abd al-Rahman ii expressly to educate the amir’s own court poets in the arts of the Arab East, which were much admired. For this Al-Ghazal was sent briefly into exile—ironically to Iraq, seat of power of the rival Abbasids, which also happened to place him near the feet of none other than Abu Nuwas, the greatest Arab poet of all time.
Perhaps Al-Ghazal never fully recovered from this misstep, because even though he returned from Baghdad a better poet, he was unable to turn down the ambassadorship to Constantinople. But he tried his best, as Ibn Hayyan recorded his verses beseeching ‘Abd al-Rahman ii to reconsider:
What they give me for being absent, I will consider,
Although being too much, is miserable.
I see death stealing life from the most elusive deer
And, like birds, catching them despite their flight.
He left for Constantinople in 834 as a guest of the Byzantine emissary who had come to Córdoba to forge an alliance against the Abbasids. But en route, Al-Ghazal apparently did not care for the Greek’s hospitality, which he found meager, nor his provisions, which he found light, as he complained in an epigram: “I would like to know how much it would have cost you to do me the smallest of favors, in case you had chosen to do even one.”
Once in Constantinople, Al-Ghazal put loyalty first, but wit was not far behind. Ibn Hayyan wrote that when the time came for Al-Ghazal’s audience with Emperor Theophilus, the emperor laid a trick to disconcert his Arab visitor: a doorway so low that nobody could pass through without kneeling, an act which, however inadvertent or forced, would express submission to the emperor. But Al-Ghazal’s wit got the better of the moment when he turned backward and propelled himself through the tiny door rump first. Once inside, he turned and stood properly to greet Emperor Theophilus with due respect. It seemed that everyone, Theophilus included, was impressed, and the meeting went well.
Theophilus and his wife, Empress Theodora, seemed captivated by the manners of this experienced courtier. According to Ibn Hayyan, the first time the poet saw Theodora “wearing jewels and dressed like a rising sun,” he was so impressed that he could not lower his eyes. When Theophilus expressed his annoyance, Al-Ghazal replied, “I am so dazzled by the beauty of this queen and her extraordinary form that I am unaware of the reason you have called me here—and this is fair, for I have never seen a more beautiful image.”
Once back in Al-Andalus, he was denounced—unfairly—by the vizier. It concerned a trifling matter of jewelry he was given abroad and allegedly illegal grain sales he made at home. Unfair or not, he again faced the displeasure of his amir. Al-Ghazal took aim at the vizier and all court hypocrites with a barbed poem:
A judge asked for my opinion
About a man who seemed fair
And thus was to be appointed governor.
“What do you think he will do then?”
And I responded:
What do bumblebees do to bees?
They break into their hives, eat their honey
And leave the left-overs to the flies!
Still, it seemed to the amir that Al-Ghazal’s diplomacy overseas was as good as his sharp tongue at home was bad. This was why he asked the poet to lead yet another embassy: this time to the land of the Norsemen who had lately been raiding the coasts of Al-Andalus. We get this only from later, less reliable Arab sources, including a 12th-century biographical encyclopedia of the lives of Arab poets collected by the Valencia-born Ibn Dihya al-Kalbi.
The first Western scholar to vouch for the story was W.E.D. Allen, a diplomat-socialite and expert in the South Caucasus who briefly dabbled in British fascism. Allen’s evocatively titled The Poet and the Spae-Wife (spae-wife is an Old English cognate of an Old Norse word for “prophetess”) accepts Ibn Dihya’s account of Al-Ghazal’s journey mostly on circumstantial evidence. Other scholars, however, claim it tracks disturbingly close to Ibn Hayyan’s account of the trip to Constantinople, and thus Ibn Dihya may have either filled in a real journey’s story with plagiarized details or made it all up outright.
Undisputed is that Norsemen attacked throughout the Mediterranean in these years. Vikings had raided several cities of Al-Andalus, including Seville, just downstream from Córdoba. After one unsuccessful attack that resulted in the burning of their ships and the death of their captain, a Viking embassy in November 844 came to sue for peace. ‘Abd al-Rahman ii decided to send a return legation to the Viking camp. It was this mission that was headed by Al-Ghazal, since, according to Ibn Dihya, he had “a sharp mind, and a quick inventiveness; he was savvy at replying, he was brave, had perseverance, and knew how to cross all doors.”
The account begins just as Ibn Hayyan’s story of the Constantinople embassy begins: a storm delayed Al-Ghazal upon setting out in the company of a foreign ambassador. Then he arrived at the Viking camp “on an island or peninsula” that scholars of Norse history have identified as possibly Denmark’s Jutland Peninsula, but more likely it was Ireland. Although some Vikings had recently become Christians, Ibn Dihya described them as pagan devotees of fire cults, using for them the name Al-Majus, or Magians, the same given to fire-worshipping Zoroastrians and the word from which English gets magician.
In what may be the clearest of Ibn Dihya’s alleged plagiarisms, Al-Ghazal told his hosts he would not kneel before any sovereign but his own, and yet, as in Constantinople, the door to the Viking throne room was of low clearance, so that this time he scooted in feet first, sitting, so that the soles of his shoes approached closest to the king. If true, it was another quick-thinking but plausibly deniable gesture to gain the upper hand; if false, it was merely a cut-and-paste of the Constantinople account to a more exotic locale.
Having delivered ‘Abd al-Rahman’s letter and trunks of luxurious gifts, he is said to have again exercised arts of seduction on his host’s royal consort, in this case the Queen Nud. Ibn Dihya recounted the poet’s version of the encounter: “I swear that she had certain charm, but I won her favor by talking to her in a way so that I got more than I wanted.” He goes on to say that Al-Ghazal’s Arab companions had to intervene to silence the poet, lest the indiscretion go too far.
Despite the similarities, one reason to think Ibn Dihya’s version was at least based on a now-lost contemporaneous account is that some of Al-Ghazal’s poems here are not found in other chronicles, and they read as if they were written specifically for the moment at hand. At one point the Viking queen suggests that her guest darken his white hair with dye so as to look younger. His answer could not have been more sharply put:
Do not disregard the shine of white hair!
It is the flower of understanding and intelligence
I have now what you’ve longed for from your own youth,
Good manners and education.
He returned to Córdoba after an absence of 20 months, in the summer of 846, when he was more than 70 years old. While some authors say he reached 94, the most accurate source may be one of his own verses, written not long before he died:
I have lived thirty years and some more,
Plus thirty-two.
The first third part of them flirting
The second part living in sin,
And the third part deep in an abyss
Where my pity and faith are lacking.
But how finally might one settle the question whether Al-Ghazal headed one or two ambassadorships—the one to Constantinople, and the other, possibly, to Ireland? There may be a hint in a bite of Spain’s tastiest variety of fig. It’s called the doñegal, and it is said to have been introduced to Al-Andalus by Al-Ghazal—from Constantinople. But why use that name? “Donegal” is an Old Irish word meaning “fort of the foreigners.” What, we might wonder today, would the Gazelle say about that?
“Travelers of Al-Andalus” is a six-part series selected and adapted from the original 41-part series “El Viajero Histórico,” an idea and production by Ana Carreño Leyva in El Legado Andalusí: Una Nueva Sociedad Mediterránea, the magazine of the Andalusian public foundation El Legado Andalusí, based in Granada, Spain, from 1990 through 2010. The basis of this article appeared in issue number 20, titled “Al Gazal: De Bizancio al País de los Vikingos.”
“Travelers of Al-Andalus” is a six-part series selected and adapted from the original 41-part series “El Viajero Histórico,” an idea and production by Ana Carreño Leyva in El Legado Andalusí: Una Nueva Sociedad Mediterránea, the magazine of the Andalusian public foundation El Legado Andalusí, based in Granada, Spain, from 1990 through 2010. This article appeared in issue number 33, titled "Ibn al-Shaij de Málaga: deslumbrado ante el Faro de Alejandría."
As one might expect from the name, a “book of wonders” is not only what one sees and hears on one’s travels, but also what one could not have possibly seen because it did not then nor did it ever exist. At the same time, these “wonders”—of legendary places, mythical people and wholly imagined events—make for good reading. Fusing the world of the impossible with the world of the merely strange-but-true, the style might best be filed under the words of one of his prologues: “Marvels are found in the most remote part of the sky and the earth. Our Lord has ordered us to contemplate the wonders of the world.”
Travel began early in Al-Garnati’s life, and not by choice. When he was 10, his family probably fled Granada at the approach of the Almoravid king Yusuf ibn Tashfin. They took refuge near Cuenca, which at the time belonged to the Christian king of Castile Alfonso vi. Although it was not uncommon for such territorial switching in times of peril, it may have set the boy on his lifelong journey of expecting the unexpected—as in the year 1108 when, at the Battle of Uclés, the Almoravids conquered his land of refuge, and he had to flee a second time.
He was one to look for what lurked under the surface of the factual, the visible. For instance, Chapter 1 of his second book described the “world and its inhabitants—men and jinns”; Chapter 2, “its wonders and monuments”; Chapter 3, its “seas and fantastic animals”; and Chapter 4, “its caves, tombs, and ossuaries—with the purpose of inviting contemplation, to escape hell and enter heaven.”
When verbally mapping his home country, he began his tour at the Cave of the Seven Sleepers, a legend shared by both Christians and Muslims. He located it just outside Granada, not at its traditional location near Ephesus in Turkey; nearby he also found a magic olive tree that budded, flowered and matured its fruit in a single day.
Also beside Granada, he claimed to have found the walled “City of Copper,” whose ramparts were such that if a daring man managed to climb them, he would be overcome by fits of hysterical laughter and plunge inside never to be heard from again. Authors of the Arab East said that the city was located at the world’s outer limits, and they attributed its building to Alexander the Great, who was often conflated with King Solomon in other “books of wonders.”
According to Al-Garnati, it was Solomon’s followers who also built the Iberian cities of Toledo and Zaragoza. Al-Garnati described a magnificent bridge from the first city rising to the sky “like a rainbow,” and of the second, he wrote of its magical powers held by talismans placed in the city gates to prevent scorpions from entering. The city of Sintra, he said, was famous for its apples, and whoever ate of them would receive the power to discern the possible from the impossible.
Although it is likely that during the early stages of what became his lifelong trip to the East he remained for a time in Morocco, it is unknown if he reached the Saharan trade city of Sijilmasa at that country’s edge of the desert, where some of the world’s strangest things really are seen. (For a taste of this still today, visit the day-and-night funfair in Marra-kech’s Djema’a al-Fna.)
At the Strait of Gibraltar, in the city of Ceuta, he paused his journey to relate the legendary stories of the Roc, the huge bird of prey depicted in A Thousand and One Nights and in other magical accounts of the East, as well as the Sole, a flat fish that looks like it is sliced down the middle from tip to tail and often called the “sole of Moses” after the Biblical story that in the parting of the Red Sea, the fish too was parted and thus became two live halves.
Al-Garnati here also related the story of the “Idol of Cádiz,” also reputedly built by Alexander, which was a huge statue, not unlike the Colossus of Rhodes, whose right hand reached into the Atlantic in order to push back the waves and other dangers.
In the year 1115, when he was 34, Al-Garnati reached Alexandria via Sardinia and Sicily. Of this latter land, he wrote:
And in the Green Sea [the Mediterranean] there is a group of islands, where one of them is very big and is called Sicily. It has cities, fortresses and manors; it is one of the richest of God’s countries. By the sea, there is a huge mountain. It is the mountain of fire. From its summit, a blue smoke pours out during the day and by night a fire burns that illuminates as far as ten parasangs [about six kilometers].
This reference to Mt. Etna described it fairly accurately.
He later mentioned Alexandria’s famous and entirely real lighthouse, and he gave its measurements. After describing and sketching its architecture, he added the detail of its enormous mirror for reflecting the fire so that those arriving by sea could see it at a distance of even several days offshore. Next, he described “Solomon’s Audience Chamber,” a room famous for the beauty of its columns, particularly one magical one that tilted to follow the sun across the sky like a sunflower.
According to Al-Garnati, visitors put pebbles under this column’s base, which remained suspended in the air, and then were ground to dust as the column rotated its position. (Legends of magically moving columns were common: Marco Polo spoke of such a column in the church of Saint John the Baptist in Samarkand, and today Jordanian tour guides at the Temple of Artemis in Jerash point out a column that is said to have had a similar property.)
In Cairo Al-Garnati studied with the city’s leading scholars of hadith, and he mused over the same questions that have puzzled visitors since the time of Herodotus: Who built the pyramids? Why does the Nile flood? What kind of animal is the crocodile—fish or snake?
In the year 1124, Al-Garnati reached Baghdad via Damascus, quite probably seeing the ruins of Baalbek and Palmyra (then called Tadmur) en route. In Baghdad he was hosted by a scholar and vizier who later became minister under the Abbasid caliphs al-Muqtafi and al-Mustanjid.
Leaving Baghdad after some seven years of residence, Al-Garnati moved to the Persian city of Abhar, just south of the Caspian Sea, and later he reached Saysin, a village near the sea’s northern shore in the Volga River estuary and an important commercial crossroads upstream as far as Kazan, now in Russia. It was during the journey up the sea’s western coast that he visited the city of Derbent at the eastern end of the Caucasus range whose Persian etymology means “locked gate” and is known to the Arabs as Bab al-Abwab, or Gate of Gates.
In Tuhfat al-albab wa nukhbat al-‘aja’ib (Gift of Secrets and Selection of Wonders), the second of his two complete works, he described one of the wonders of the Caucasus:
Near Derbent, he wrote, was a mighty mountain, and at its foot two villages inhabited by a tribe of weapon-makers. When a kinsman died, he was told, they separated the body’s bones from its flesh. If the person was a man, they fed the flesh to crows, and if a woman, they fed it to vultures. In both cases, they put the remaining bones in “bags of gilded Byzantine brocade,” wrote the deceased’s name on it and left it hanging in their home. “This is a wonder indeed,” he ended.
Al-Garnati next followed the Volga upstream to the land of “Bulgar” (far north and east of modern Bulgaria) where he found it so cold that in winter the ground was too frozen to allow for burials. Ever a businessman, he told how Bulgar traders obtained beaver skins, and in exchange they obtained Azeri sword blades that in turn they traded for sable pelts—a shrewd upgrade of animal fur via beaten steel. But mostly he marveled over the beaver dam, a structure he called “miraculous.”
Fifteen years later, around 1150, now aged 70, he arrived in the land of Basgird, modern Hungary. His descriptions here were surprisingly brief, yet they remain important given the paucity of information known about this region at the time. Still, he found space to mention no fewer than 78 of its cities and towns.
Here, he seemed to take on a role of a religious missionary more than a collector of tall tales, and he worked hard to serve a large Muslim population descended from North Africans—maghrebis he called them—who had settled in the area years ago. But some modern scholars suspect that this is not so much wonder or fact but merely a manuscript copyist’s mistake—perhaps Al-Garnati’s own—because elsewhere he wrote about a certain Turkic people living nearby whom he called “Magharebi.”
Whoever they were, he taught them proper Arabic prayer, because he found them suffering from a “deep ignorance.” It seems that his work was successful, because at the end of his stay he was able to write, “Today amongst them, the Friday sermon is preached in more than ten thousand places, since their territory is very wide.”
In Hungary, it appears that Al-Garnati finally put down some family roots when his eldest son, Hamid, married a local woman and remained there in the service of the Christian king of Hungary, Geza ii. King Geza battled the Byzantine empire in alliance with Roger ii of Sicily, who, like Geza, brought into his court many prominent Muslim scholars such as Al-Garnati’s contemporary, the geographer Muhammad al-Idrisi, whose famous world atlas The Book of Roger and travelogue The Book of Pleasant Journeys to Faraway Lands inspired countless later generations of traveling confabulists.
In 1153 Al-Garnati returned to Saysin, where his own wife and other sons had remained. But no place, it seemed, could keep him forever: Soon again he crossed the Caspian to the land of Khwarezm, an oasis in the Amu Darya river delta south of the Aral Sea, where he had visited before and made friends.
He left Khwarezm on a pilgrimage to Makkah the following year, probably via Merv, Isfahan and Basra. In 1155, he returned again to Baghdad, where finally he sat down to put his mental notes in order after long years of traveling and collecting stories. He dedicated his first book to his Abbasid patron.
But still he had miles to go and pages to turn before he unlaced his shoes and put away his pen. In 1162 he arrived in Mosul to write his second book, which he finished in three years. The first word of the title, tuhfa, is most appropriate, as it stems from the same root as the Arabic word for museum, mathaf, a place to store wondrous things. Al-Garnati died in Damascus in 1169 at nearly 90 years old, but his scant historical record does not state whether he had settled down there or was, as usual, just passing through.
The value of Al-Garnati’s writing lies less in his “wonders” than in his witness of some far, cold, out-of-the-way Muslim lands rarely visited by others in his day. Despite an apparent simplicity of manner, his descriptions have a pleasant style displaying keen erudition. Observations are adorned with both objective fact and impossible legend. The reason behind his journeying was not, as far as is known, political duress or economic necessity, but rather the mere love of adventure.
That he embellished what he saw and related clearly false and impossible tales in the same breath as perfunctory lists of his itinerary’s stages should not count against him. He was writing about ‘aja’ib—wonders—after all. Because of this, he became one of Arabic literature’s greatest authors of medieval cosmography, a world view that maintains that truth is found not in the literalist eye of a human beholder, but in the fuller and ultimately unknowable creations of God.
“Travelers of Al-Andalus” is a six-part series selected and adapted from the original 41-part series “El Viajero Histórico,” an idea and production by Ana Carreño Leyva in El Legado Andalusí: Una Nueva Sociedad Mediterránea, the magazine of the Andalusian public foundation El Legado Andalusí, based in Granada, Spain, from 1990 through 2010. The original of this article, by Ingrid Bejarano Escanilla, appeared in issue number, 7, titled "Abu Hamid Al-Garnati y las Marvillas del Mundo.”
To name him in full, Abu al-Husayn Muhammad ibn Ahmad Ibn Jubayr al-Kinani served as secretary in the palace of Granada’s governor, Abu Said Osman, son of the first Almohad caliph, Abd al-Mu’min. As the story goes, at one point while dictating a letter, the prince coerced him to drink seven cups of wine, forbidden to Muslims. In exchange, the prince granted him seven cups of gold dinars. To seek expiation of his sin—and perhaps to make a hasty exit from the court—this otherwise most pious Muslim scholar set out to fulfill one of the five pillars of Islam by making the long pilgrimage to Makkah.
No matter Ibn Jubayr’s true motive, his two-year journey made a considerable impact on literary history. His account of his travels and tribulations in the East—which makes no mention of the wine incident—served as the foundational work of a new genre of writing, the rihla, or the creative travelogue: a mix of personal narrative, description, opinion and anecdote. In following centuries, countless people emulated and even plagiarized him.
What could have moved so many people from Al-Andalus and the North African Maghreb to undertake dangerous journeys to faraway lands, particularly those people as well heeled and comfortably accommodated as Ibn Jubayr, who had received the traditional education of the sedentary elite of Al-Andalus, trained in both religious science and belles lettres?
Faith, to answer the question most simply. “For Muslims, pilgrimage rituals are something of the sublime,” Ibn Jubayr wrote, thus setting a religious context for all the places and monuments he saw during his nine-month stay in Makkah and along his roundabout travels there and back. As an additional incentive, such a journey granted the esteemed title of hajj to whoever completed the pilgrimage. In the case of his being from the Arab West, he gained additional status by obtaining an ijaza, or religious teaching license, at the feet of scholars from the Arab East.
Ibn Jubayr, however, had an even more personal incentive: finding his family origins. Born in Valencia but descended from the great Arab lineage of Kinana, from the region of Makkah, in some ways he was going home. Still another reason may have been of a literary nature: He was fascinated by the desert world and by the romance of travel by caravan, thanks largely to the potent imagery in the Arabic poetry he learned as a boy.
Ibn Jubayr was 38 years old when he left Granada on February 15, 1183. He moved first to Ceuta in North Africa to embark for Alexandria aboard a Genoan boat. His first act upon reaching Cairo was to stand before tombs of the Prophet Muhammad’s followers. Next, he went up the Nile by boat to the town of Qus (near modern Qena), from where he mounted a camel to ride to the Red Sea port of ‘Aydhab, near the modern Egypt-Sudan border, and from there sailed across the Red Sea to Jiddah. In August he arrived at Makkah.
For his return journey, he joined a pilgrim caravan that stopped in Madinah. In circular, even backward fashion, he crossed the deserts of Hijaz and Najd in the direction of Baghdad, heading east and north. There, in the Abbasid capital, he praised “the natural goodness of its air and waters,” but he complained about the vanity of its people.
“Strangers they despise,” he wrote, “and they show scorn and disdain to their inferiors, while the stories of the news of other men they belittle ... it is as if they are persuaded that God has no lands nor people save theirs.”
He returned through the fertile lands of Mesopotamia, through Mosul and west toward Syria, via Aleppo. The city of Damascus, where he remained two months, dazzled him: “Paradise of the Orient,” he called it. He then took the road to the Mediterranean port of Saint John d’Acre (‘Akka), still occupied by a Crusader army, intending next to travel into western lands.
But this leg turned dangerous. Unfavorable winds left him shipwrecked in the Strait of Messina in Sicily, fallen into Christian hands a century earlier. There he remained for nearly four months, living under the hospitality of the Arabic-speaking King William ii (known as “William the Good”), whom Ibn Jubayr came to admire for bringing non-Christians into his court. “He has much confidence in Muslims,” he wrote, “relying on them for his affairs ... in them shines the splendor of his realm.”
When the winds again turned, he set out for home, and he disembarked back in Al-Andalus, at the port of Cartagena. He arrived at his house in Granada in April 1185. There, he set about to write down his story.
Once home, he surely enjoyed increased authority as a returned scholar and pilgrim, yet what he did next is not recorded. Four years later he returned to the Arab East, although his rihla of his first sojourn makes no reference to these later two years of travel. When he was 72 years old, he undertook his last trip, passing through Makkah, Jerusalem and Egypt, where he died in Alexandria on September 29, 1217. The rihla and two poems are all he left behind.
Ibn Jubayr’s epic story constitutes one of the most valuable testimonies about the eastern Mediterranean world in the late 12th century, which had recently been turned upside down by Crusaders in Syria and Palestine as well as by the Norman invasion of Sicily and the fall of the Fatimids in Egypt to the rising Salah al-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub, or Saladin.
With a writing style concise if at times pompous, with alternating citations of Qur’anic verses, brief, fervent prayers and lines of poetry, Ibn Jubayr offered suggestive images of the lands he traversed, drawing the landscapes, cities, villages and markets with an astonishing attention to detail.
His exhaustive descriptions of mosques, tombs and other monuments are still of great help to archeologists and art historians today.
His journey also makes modern readers wonder about the climate of fear along the maritime and land routes of his day. He wrote, for instance, of a traveler’s defenselessness in the face of pirates and covetous customs officers, corrupt traders and confidence men from all corners of the world, as well as Kurdish, Arab and Beja tribesmen always at the ready to assault and rob pilgrim caravans.
Ibn Jubayr’s rihla helps modern readers understand the complexity of the direct encounter between the two worlds of East and West—Islam and Christianity—that until then had been seeing each other more slantwise from across the sea, glimpsed from the corner of the eye.
He explained how these two civilizations first quarreled, then learned to accept one another and finally lived warily together, all within a single lifetime. The second Crusade, after all, was launched in 1145, the year of Ibn Jubayr’s birth. Although he offered pro forma insults of other monotheisms, as was expected for his time, as well as denunciations of the various schisms within his own religion, he made his story accessible to all, for instance by providing both Islamic and Christian dates for the various legs of his trip.
Ibn Jubayr would be pleased to know that his manuscript was first edited and published by a westerner, and that the earliest known copy is in a library in the West, at Leiden University in the Netherlands, and it has since been translated into Russian, Persian, Urdu, Italian, French, English, Spanish and Catalan—the latter two languages of his Iberian homeland.
Christians and Muslims, he observed, were meeting both on the fields of battle and in processions for marriages. “One of the astonishing things that is talked of is that though the fires of discord burn between the two parties, Muslim and Christian, two armies of them may meet and dispose themselves in battle array, and yet Muslim and Christian travelers will come and go between them without interference.... The soldiers engage themselves in their war, while the people are at peace.” Likewise, at a Christian wedding in Tyre, he noted how “the Muslims and other Christian onlookers formed two ranks along the route, and gazed on bride and groom without reproof.”
He was appreciative similarly of the European ships that carried Muslim pilgrims to their own holy places without interference, fearing bad weather more than militant unbelievers. Throughout, he praised the thriving Christian communities in Islamic lands and the similar Muslim communities in Christian lands.
Observing the favorable situation of some Muslim peasants working for Christian farmers, he lamented that “the Muslim community bewails the injustice of a landlord of its own faith, and applauds the conduct of its opponent and enemy, the Frankish landlord, and is accustomed to justice from him. He who despairs of this state must turn to God.”
In Tyre, he recounted how a Muslim army from North Africa had attacked a Christian stronghold that had previously honored a truce with its Levantine Arab neighbors, and had thus unnecessarily upset their peaceful relations. Since then, Muslims from western lands—but not their eastern coreligionists—were obliged to pay a tax as redress for such heedless trouble-making. Even though Ibn Jubayr himself had to pay the tax, his cultural circumspection allowed him to see both sides of the matter. “In the payment of this tax,” he wrote, “the Maghrebis are pleasingly reminded of their vexing of the enemy, and thus the payment of it is lightened and its harshness made tolerable.”
He explained the religious quandary he felt about this encounter between competing monotheisms, relating the religious fervor of his time in a personal voice when writing of his own pilgrimage to the land of many religions’ prophets, saints, preachers and ascetics.
Remember that Ibn Jubayr was educated under the Almohad dynasty, whose mission was to reform and revive Islam. Educated in the Maliki school of law, one of the four orthodox juridical systems, he nonetheless did not ignore or outrightly condemn even the most heterodox manifestations of his faith.
Zaydis, Qarmatians and other rafidi—rejectors, as he called them—all attracted his curious gaze. In fact, given his Almohadite demands for correct religious behavior, he seemed to indulge even the most casual Muslims as long as they were hospitable toward pilgrims such as himself. Of the Saru Bedouin of Yemen, he wrote, “the religious laws do not direct them in their affairs, and you will find among them no devotional practices beyond that of good intention.” For him, that was sufficient—and the pleasant fact that they were eloquent in their Arabic.
One might wonder which readers Ibn Jubayr had in mind when writing his rihla. He was certainly self-effacing—never once writing in the first person—and he left much room for self-doubt and contradiction, and more often than not he addressed his own idle curiosities over matters of state.
Compare this with the opening lines of the Travels by Marco Polo, the foundational travelogue of western literature written barely 100 years later: “Emperors, kings, dukes, marquises, counts, knights, and all persons wishing to know ... the kingdoms, provinces, and all the regions of the East, read this book.” What Marco Polo wanted to teach others of high estate, Ibn Jubayr was ready to set to the margin.
At other times, Ibn Jubayr seems almost chagrined by his own people’s state of affairs. The Abbasid caliph Al-Nasir, ruling during Ibn Jubayr’s Baghdad visit, died 35 years before the area was laid waste by the Mongol invasion in 1258. Ibn Jubayr had little positive to say about the city or its sovereign other than it still had a faint glow from its golden age under Harun al-Rashid four centuries earlier: “Most of its traces have gone, leaving only a famous name.”
His focus instead was on a new and rising multicultural capital, Sicily’s Palermo, full of “wealth,” “splendor” and “elegance”—words he had rarely if ever used in the Arab East—and of “well-set piazzas” and “towering palaces” like “pearls encircling a woman’s full throat.”
It is telling that Ibn Jubayr, despite acute homesickness when abroad, was unable to remain in Al-Andalus after his return. Perhaps it was because the Arab West at this time was facing the loss of much of its Iberian territory to Christian armies, beginning with the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa, known to the Arabs as the Battle of Uqab, in 1212, just five years before his death.
And perhaps just as likely, he saw in Saladin’s strong hand the promise that once again Jerusalem, Damascus and Cairo could be something like Palermo, “having all that you could wish of beauty, real or apparent, and all the means of subsistence, mature and fresh,” where peace, not war, prevailed.
“Travelers of Al-Andalus” is a six-part series selected and adapted from the original 41-part series “El Viajero Histórico,” an idea and production by Ana Carreño Leyva in El Legado Andalusí: Una Nueva Sociedad Mediterránea, the magazine of the Andalusian public foundation El Legado Andalusí, based in Granada, Spain, from 1990 through 2010. The original of this article, by Daniel Grammatico, appeared in issue number 2, titled “Las peregrianciones de Ibn Yubair.”