Ibn Battuta

Cl Cross

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Ibn Battuta

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• Arts

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• Publié par: ifydesut
• Nombre de lectures: 87
• Langue: Français

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Cameron Cross

26 November 2001

attuta: An Overview

One of the most difficult tasks of the historian's profession is vividly recreating the past, not as a series of

events, but as a living reality filled with living people. For this reason, eyewitness accounts like those of Ibn

Battuta's are invaluable for gaining insights into this dynamic entity. They offer a comprehensive view of the world

of the fourteenth century, from the activities of Venetian traders to the crumbling of Byzantium to the recovery of

Iran as the cultural leader of the Middle East.

Ross Dunn's chronicle of Ibn Battuta's life, The Adventures of Ibn Battuta, is a combined narrative of

itical, religious, and commercial events of the Islamic World and of Ibn Battuta's journeys as these events were

unfolding. It is one of the best works I have read that truly ties the world together. Here is where one sees the fierce

rivalries between Italian city-states, the Spanishreconquistain action, the daily functioning of the Mamluks in

Egypt and Syria, the Turkification of Anatolia, the legacy of the Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century, the

internal conflicts and civil wars in India, Central Asia, and North Africa ("one damn dynasty after another") all at

work, interacting with and influencing each other.

Ibn Battuta was born in Morocco, in the city of Tunis, in 1304. Macroscopically, this was a time of a

dramatic shift in political power, ultimately from the Muslims, who had controlled the Iberian Peninsula since the

700s, to the European Christians, who were about to embark on five hundred years of political influence and

domination all over the world. This shift began in the Spanishreconquistaof the 1200s, when the Muslims were

slowly but surely driven from the peninsula, city by city. It would be another two hundred years for the assault to be

completed by Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492, but in the meantime it was a period of political fragmentation and

riodic fighting between both Muslim and Christian states: "Algeciras, for example, was ceded by Granada to the Marinids in 1275, returned to Granada in 1294, taken again by Morocco in 1333, and finally seized by Castille in 1344" (16). Far from being a war-torn land, however, North Africa was in a period of intellectual flowering. This came rtially from the "Iberian brain drain" (25) of scholars and'ulamafleeing the Spanish peninsula into the cities of