The traveller and his Scribe: In the footsteps of Ibn Battuta and their rendering by Ibn Juzayy

Abstract

This essay attempts to explore the meaning of movement and space in the medieval context, by taking as a frame of reference the travels of Ibn Battuta (1325–54). By examining his travel journal (rihla), it tries to reach an understanding of the notion of nomadism, in general, through the prism of the theories of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, as well as the art of travel specific to Ibn Battuta. The analysis of his travelogue, which provides a glimpse of the creative way in which he wandered through the now-vanquished world of Dar-al-Islam, raises questions about travel writing.

Notes

1. ‘And so away he goes, hurrying, searching. But searching for what? Be sure that this man, such as I have depicted him—this solitary, gifted with an active imagination, ceaselessly journeying across the great human desert—has an aim loftier than that of a mere flâneur, an aim more general, something other than the fugitive pleasure of circumstance. He is looking for that quality which you must allow me to call “modernity”; for I know of no better word to express the idea I have in mind. He makes it his business to extract from fashion whatever element it may contain of poetry within history, to distil the eternal from the transitory’ (Baudelaire, 1964, p. 12).

2. The conference entitled ‘Deleuze and Guattari—On the Edge’ took place at the Maison Française of Columbia University, in New York, on 15–16 April, 1999.

3. ‘a new way of thinking’ means an affirmative thought, a thought which affirms life and the will to live' (Deleuze, 1983, p. 35).

4. ‘dance, laughter and play are affirmative powers of reflection and development’ (Deleuze, 1983, p. 194).

5. In the Muslim world of Ibn Battuta's time, merchants, soldiers, artisans, and scholars were constantly on the move (Hourani, 1991, p. 43). For most of them, travel was a necessity.

6. Dar-al-Islam was the name given to lands ruled by Muslim kings and princes whose subjects were predominantly Muslim and where shar'ia (Islamic law) was the foundation of the social order (Dunn, 1986, pp. 6–7).

7. Marco Polo's travel book shares some of the problems of the Rihla. Like the Moroccan shaykh, he did not write his own narrative. He dictated what he recalled of his travels to a writer named Rusticello in a Genoese prison (Janssens, 1948, p. 105; Dunn, 1986, p. 5). According to Dunn, Marco Polo's travel book contributes more meticulous and useful information on medieval China and other Asian countries during the thirteenth century than does Ibn Battuta's but the latter's narrative is more ‘personal and humanely engaging’ (Dunn, 1986, p. 5).

8. ‘What you look for in travel is neither discovery nor exchange, but a gentle deterritorialization, being taken in charge by the journey itself, and therefore by absence’ (Baudrillard, 1990, p. 119).

9. Quoted by Irena Grudzinska-Gross (1991, p. 166).

10. ‘the acquisition of a new code without abandoning the old one’.

11. I wish to thank Terese Lyons who suggested the term ‘rooted cosmopolitanism’ to me.

12. This fact still pertains to contemporary Muslim countries. However, there are modern-day commentators and intellectuals, among them Tahar ben Jelloun, who question the absence of the notion of individualism and the difficulties that ensue.

13. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze & Guattari (1987) oppose the smooth space of the nomad ‘marked only by “traits”that are effaced and displaced with the trajectory’ to a sedentary space which is ‘striated by walls, enclosures, and roads between enclosures’ (p. 381).

14. ‘But the nomad goes from point to point only as a consequence and as a factual necessity’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 380).

15. ‘If the nomad can be called the Deterritorialized par excellence, this is precisely because there is no reterritorialization afterward as with the migrant, or upon something else, as with the sedentary’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 381).

16. In spite of all its flaws, the Rihla succeeds, nonetheless, in reviving an entire vanished world.

17. Irena Grudzinska-Gross (1991, p. 9) describes travel narratives in the following terms: ‘Most travel accounts aspire only to be practical guides to a country or a city the reader may intend to visit. But some address contemporary problems and discuss the dilemmas of their own societies while comparing them to the visited ones’. One finds no discussion of Moroccan dilemmas in the Rihla, no doubt because Ibn Battuta did not want to displease his patron. Indeed, near the close of the Rihla, he praises the Maghrib in the following terms: ‘the lands of the Maghrib are the cheapest in cost of living, the most abundant in good things, and blest with the greatest share of material comforts and advantages’ (Gibb, 1986, p. 309).

18. ‘The thinker thus expresses the noble affinity of thought and life: life making thought active, thought making life affirmative’ (Deleuze, 1983, p. 101).

19. ‘To affirm is to create, not to bear, put up with or accept’ (Deleuze, 1983, p. 185 186).

20. ‘Everything conspires that we reinvent the past: memory offers a canvas on which one can embroider, harmonise bits of melodies and restore ruins’ (translation by the author).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Marlène Barsoum

Marlène Barsoum is Associate Professor of French at Hunter College of the City University of New York. Her fields of interest are nineteenth-century French literature and Francophone literature. She is author of Théophile Gautier's Mademoiselle de Maupin: Toward a Definition of the ‘Androgynous Discourse’ and of several articles on the writer Andrée Chedid.