ibn battutah: the muslim travel blog

Islam in Russia

2005-11-28T20:52:00.000Z

Thank you to Avari/Nameh for introducing the following to the Blogosphere:

New York Times features a very cool multimedia presentation to go alongside an article about the growth of Islam in Russia. The multimedia presentation is a combination of pictures, Qur'anic recitation and voice-over, focusing largely on the rebirth of Islam in Kazan, capital of Tatarstan, and in small Caucasus republics like Karachevo-Cherkessk.

Let's Trance - William Dalrymple in Fes

2005-11-12T21:20:00.000Z

William Dalrymple recounts an ecstatic evening in Fes in today's Guardian Travel Supplement.

Youssou N'Dour and Ravi Shankar have played the Fes Festival of World Sacred Music. But William Dalrymple found real soul at an all-nighter in the backstreets.

Click here for the rest of the story.

Fibre of Silk Road city is ripped apart Muslims of remote region angry as China takeover threatens livelihoods

2005-07-20T15:16:00.000+01:00

Richard Spencer
The Daily Telegraph
16 July 2005

IN THE ancient Silk Road city of Kashgar, the mud-brick bazaars around the Id Kah mosque are gone, replaced by nondescript shopping centres with green-tinted windows. The garden beside the mosque has been dug up and paved. Only in postcards do the devout, in their beards and skull caps, still enter through a tangled mass of pink and red roses. Meanwhile, as the old quarter's houses are gradually demolished, the mosque is increasingly dwarfed by the expanding city next door, all boulevards, concrete and brash advertising. In its 2,000-year history, Kashgar, a once fabled oasis between the Taklamaken Desert and the Pamir Mountains, has been ruled by Turks, Mongol khans and Chinese, and seen wrenching changes of fortune. But it has never seen such a transformation as the five-year cultural revolution, now drawing to a close, inflicted by its Chinese overlords. Kashgar is, to western travellers, the best-known city of Xinjiang, a rebellious Muslim province of China's far west.

Click here for the full story.

Lahore Lahore hai

2005-07-20T15:14:00.000+01:00

By VICTORIA BURNETT (Financial Times)
16 July 2005

If you ask a Lahori what it is that makes their city special, the chances are they'll turn to you with a sigh that's half wistful and half smug and say: "Lahore Lahore hai" - "Lahore is Lahore".

On the surface of it, this is not enormously helpful. But Lahore's motto does hint at the indefinable charm of this sultry city of mopeds and Mogul mosques. It captures the self-assurance of a town that for centuries has been a hub of poets, artists, musicians and universities and the capital of passing empires.

Bang in the middle of the Punjab - a region now split between Pakistan and India - Lahore was on the frontlines of the bloodletting that accompanied the creation of Pakistan in 1947. The city was gutted by communal rioting and by the flight to India of Hindus and Sikhs who, before partition, lived side by side with its Muslim population.

Now, the winds of peace with India are fanning the embers of a renaissance that began in the 1990s under Nawaz Sharif, the Lahori former prime minister. The city is sprucing itself up for a growing flow of visitors from Delhi - many of whom have memories or relatives there - with a fancy new airport, refurbished colonial buildings and ambitious hotel projects.

With temperatures hovering around 46Degrees C, Lahore is best left well alone during the summer months. But at any time of year the city's at its best in the evening, when the fat sun slips behind the rooftops of the old city and tints the great marble domes of the 17th century Badshahi Mosque a fiery pink.

As a hazy dusk settles along the Mall - a wide avenue of government buildings and four-star hotels in the city centre - spotlights flatter the sandstone facades of elaborate Mogul-Gothic palaces: the stately High Court; the Lahore Museum, once run by Rudyard Kipling's father, Lockwood. The shabby but interesting collection includes a suitably ugly bronze statue of Queen Victoria and a startling, hollow-eyed starving Buddha. Opposite the museum, sits the Zamzama - the canon the young hero straddles in the opening of Kipling's Kim.

It is no coincidence that one of the fonts of the city's renaissance is a pedestrian street in the district of Gawalmandi, lined with crumbling, colonial buildings and filled with outdoor restaurants. Food is not a delicate or sophisticated affair in Lahore, but Lahoris are famous food-lovers - none more so than the tubby Mr Sharif, who reputedly broke off a cabinet meeting to fly down to Lahore for some home-cooked grub.

By night, Food Street, as it is known, blazes with strings of lights and - a recent, dubious touch - glowing fake palm trees. The air is heavy with oil from sizzling pakoras and pooris and smoke from flaming grills of skewered lamb and roasted sajji chicken. Throngs of diners fill the rows of tables or wander the avenue in search of their favoured eatery.

Waiters rush to lure potential clients to stalls selling tikka, hareesa - a Kashmiri stew of spiced grains and meat - and murgh karahi - chicken sauted with ginger and tomatoes. Vendors sell Kashmiri tea, pink and milky and served with chopped pistachios, clam-shaped pots of sweet rice pudding and cardamom-scented icecream, or kulfi.

For a meal with a spectacular view, I head to Cooco's Den, a restaurant housed in a haveli on the edge of the Heera Mandi, Lahore's red light district, which overlooks the Badshahi mosque and the massive walls of the 16th century Lahore Fort. Iqbal Hussein, the owner and a local artist, grew up in the haveli, then a brothel run by his mother. At night, diners flock to fill the terrace and harried waiters use a pulley system to reel pots of delicious murgh handi - chicken cooked in a clay pot with ginger and chilli - from the street-level kitchen.

The old city that stretches behind Mr Hussain's restaurant - a maze of narrow streets filled with ragged children, goats, rickshaws, chickens and men whose bellies bulge over their dhotis - is home to basant, the kite festival that heralds the start of spring.

For two days in February, Lahore is a frenzy of kite-fighting, music and hashish - a refreshing burst of hedonism in a country unlikely to go down in history for its riotous spirit. The sky is speckled with thousands of bobbing kites as rivals battle to cut one another's strings. Residents crowd the rooftops and the air throbs with the blare of horns and the squeal of Bollywood singers.

While ordinary revellers fill the streets and rooftops, Lahore's elite parties in the elegant courtyard of Yusuf Salahuddin, grandson of the poet Allama Iqbal and owner of a beautifully restored haveli tucked away in the old city. To the dismay of many locals, the corporate sector has jumped on the basant band wagon, sponsoring all-night parties crammed with glitzy socialites. The festival's popularity hasn't escaped the hotel owners either - with rooms going for an unheard of Dollars 300 a night.

For those with a strong constitution, an early walk in the old city will yield a street-side breakfast of halwa poori, deep-fried puffy bread with sweet semolina pudding, or kulcha, a sesame seed bread served with thick cream.

The cool of the morning is the time to pace the vast flagged courtyard of the Badshahi mosque (dodging the ancient but insistent guide who rattles off improbable statistics about its size and construction). With its towering, octagonal minarets and inlaid floral mouldings, it is grander and more beautiful than its counterpart - the Friday mosque - in Delhi.

Opposite the mosque, through a doorway flanked by great stone elephants' feet, sits the once splendid Lahore Fort. If you have the patience to indulge local tourists in their favourite pastime - having their photo taken with a foreigner - it is worth a wander to read the Raj-era graffiti carved on marble pillars by bored British soldiers.

Among the neglected palaces is the Shish Mahal, a love pavilion whose ceiling is studded with tiny mirrors to create the effect of a starry night, that was built by Shah Jahan - the romantic Mogul emperor who went on to build the rather more famous Taj Mahal. With a Dollars 1m grant from Unesco, the dilapidated Shish Mahal is getting an urgent facelift. If the winds of peace continue to blow, the city may yet live up to its other maxim: "He who has not seen Lahore, has not yet been born."

Victoria Burnett is an FT correspondent based in Islamabad

*Cooco's Den, 2168 Fort Road, opposite the Lahore Fort and Badshahi Mosque, Old City, Lahore.

*Pearl Continental Hotel, The Mall, nr Governor's House, Lahore, tel: +92 42-636 0210. Rates for double room: Rs14,000 to Rs19,000 plus 24 per cent tax

*Avari Hotel: 87 The Mall, Lahore, tel: +92 42-636 6366. Rates for double room: Rs6,500 to Rs18,000 plus 24 per cent tax

Religion of Love

2005-05-27T20:12:00.000+01:00

A religious lesson at the Mosque of Ibn Al-Arabi in Salhieh, Damascus.

Muhyiddin Ibn Arabi (1165-1240) is one of the most famous Muslim philosophers. He was born in southern Spain and lived during the golden era of openness and tolerance in Arab-ruled Andalusia. He spent years traveling around the Islamic world before finally settling in Damascus, where he completed his greatest book Al-Futuhat Al-Makkiyyah (Meccan Revelations), which is an encyclopedia of Sufism (Islamic mysticism) and Sufi teachings. He was buried in Damascus; and the Mosque, pictured above, was built in his honor by Ottoman Sultan Selim I in 1516.

Throughout his life, Ibn Arabi preached tolerance among all faiths. In one of his most famous poems, he considers his heart "a center of love":

O Marvel! a garden amidst the flames.
My heart has become capable of every form:
It is a pasture for gazelles and a convent for monks,
and a temple for idols and the pilgrim's Kaa'ba,
and the tables of the Torah and the book of the Quran.
I follow the religion of Love:
Whatever way Love's camels take,
that's my religion and my faith.

The Hall of a Thousand Columns

2005-04-18T19:16:00.000+01:00

The much awaited second installment of Tim Mackintosh-Smith's wonderful series following in the footnotes (and literal footsteps) of Ibn Batuttah the great medieval Tangerine traveler is reviewed in The Guardian.

2005-04-08T01:05:00.000+01:00

Outside the mosque and burial place of of Abu Al-Darda' in the Citadel of Damascus. Abu Al-Darda' was a companion of Prophet Mohammad (PBUH) and one of the narrators of Hadith (sayings of the Prophet). After the Muslims conquered Syria, he resided in Damascus and became the city's judge during the reign of Caliph Uthman Ibn 'Affan. He died in 653.

Prayer Area in Heathrow Terminal 4

2005-03-14T15:27:00.000Z

I just received the following email:

There is now a Prayer Area in Heathrow Terminal 4.

This has just been opened recently (about 3 weeks ago).

Location: After completing security, turn left in the departure lounge towards Gates 1-6. The prayer area is on the left after Dixons.

It would also be a good idea to email BA and thank them for this facility. I understand there has been a lot of effort in getting this space.

Istanbul

2005-03-12T20:45:00.000Z

Istanbul is a great city. No, there's no point in arguing. It's great. Whilst reading an extract from Orhan Pamuk's 'Istanbul', an autobiographical rather than geographical piece, I was transported back to the Shores of the Golden Horn, Eminonu in particular and had an epiphany of my own:

The sun is setting behind me. I glance back at the mainland. The imperious Ottoman minarets trace a mesmerising skyline. The mosques jostle with each other to catch the eye and beguile the mind. My attention returns to the shore as the restauranteur, for that is perhaps the most apt description for him, hands me a freshly made sardine sandwich. We exchange a glance and some devalued currency. As I garnish this freshest of fast-food with rock salt, the earth finally coaxes the sun from its celestial path and the muezzin calls the faithful to prayer.

Eminonu ©Tauseef Mehrali 2005

Life in the Pamir Mountains

2005-03-07T09:36:00.000Z

A photographic slideshow.

The empty quarter - Holidays in the Muslim world

2005-02-26T09:06:00.000Z

A dated but fascinating look at the travel potential of the arab world by The Guardian.

Privileged view
What's the truth about holidaying in Muslim countries right now? Jonathan Glancey opens our special report in Jordan

To boldly go
If you've always wanted to see the temples and tombs of Luxor or have a taste of the Spice Market in Istanbul, don't be put off. Roger Bray reports

Friends in ancient places Mary Russell enjoys the traditional hospitality of the old Arab city of Damascus

Medina dates
Tourists may be scarce, but north Africa is still the wild, kaleidoscopic, beautiful maelstrom it always was. Andrew Gilchrist gets happily lost

The view from the other twin towers
Andy Pietrasik finds Malaysia and Indonesia to be tolerant and safe

Mullah lite

2005-01-09T13:40:00.000Z

Kevin Rushby, seemingly a devout anti-revolutionary, visits Iran on behalf of The Guardian and bumps into the most fascinating set of taxi drivers you could hope for.

...I changed from bus to taxi there and found myself with the moustached holy man I dubbed Mystic Magdi, probably one of the few drivers who can explain the theory of metempsychosis while negotiating a hairpin bend.

...Next driver southwards was Amin the Animal, a one-man mongol horde who whipped his Hillman Hunter to a gallop and never let it stop as we plunged through yet more spectacular mountain scenery...Those Arabs were barbarians too," Animal told me. "Lizard-eaters and drinkers of camels' milk from the desert, all coming here to Persia and thinking they can be kings."

...My next taxi driver, a former tae-kwando champion, was not impressed. "These mullahs have deep pockets, too," he muttered, then added, rather cryptically, "No one knows where they buy their clothes." [In case you're interested, Niloofar Haeri had more luck in scouting the mullahs' favourite clothiers for the same paper - Clerical Chic]

...I hired the most colourful character yet: Mr Mathematics. The 200 miles to Pasargadae went by unnoticed as he explained why the number seven does not exist - neither does my memory of how he proved this.

Travel Challenge

2004-12-18T13:59:00.000Z

Here's an invitation to set fellow bloggers a specific task to complete when away from their desktops on location.

To get the ball rolling:

Delhi - discover Sultana Raziya's tomb in Old Delhi

Damascus - where's the sign that reads 'severe your connection with the created and establish a connection with the Creator'?

Istanbul - find the obelisk in Sultan Ahmet

Andalusia- spot the 'baby chick tears' dining out in Granada

Keep those suggestions flowing.

A night on the tiles

2004-12-08T15:18:00.000Z

A slightly disjointed, but still interesting article on the ancient step-back-in-time city of Fez from The Independent this Saturday.

By day, Fez is one of the most vibrant medina cities in Morocco. After dark you see a different side of it. Jackie Hunter is taken on a moonlit mystery tour.

"After dark, the medina becomes a tranquil warren of shadows and echoes, safely encircled by the ancient city walls of Fez- el-Bali. The awesome babble and flow of its daytime existence has ebbed away; the sounds, smells and colours subdued until morning. Gone are all the shoemakers who were hand-stitching yellow leather slippers, like nimble-fingered elves in some old-fashioned book of fairy tales; the women who made pancakes by tossing a ladleful of batter over a hot stone shaped like a giant hat block; the irresistible stacks of oven-warm bread and delicate patisserie; the live turkeys, dead goats, pottery, jewellery, finely woven wool rugs and djellabas, dates and olives, bunched herbs, lizard skins and love potions."

A view of Fez from the surrounding hills.

Source: mustafa hadi

I lost my heart in... South Africa - Rageh Omar

2004-12-06T18:36:00.000Z

Isabel Choat interviews BBC journalist Rageh Omar in the Guardian's travel section.

Where do you want to go next: I am fascinated by Iran. I've worked close to the border but never actually been there and it's somewhere I'd like to get to know, especially Qom, where you find the main seminaries.

The True American Middle East Travel Guide

2004-11-21T11:35:00.000Z

Sorry, I couldn't resist. Click the picture to read the manual.

Spot the difference

2004-11-20T14:28:00.000Z

Photos from a Market in Samarkand 1963 versus Photos from a Market in Samarkand 2001.

Oh, and if you haven't already, read Wild West China by Christian Tyler and take a Great Leap Forward of your own.

'The mind of an innocent and a hero's heart'

2004-11-20T13:07:00.000Z

'One might have thought he would be seduced by the magnificent simplicities of Islam, but he appears to have shown no sign of it: nor did he withdraw into one of his deserts, like the Christian sages of old, to commune with an Almighty'

A somewhat condescending take on Wilfred Thesiger: A life in pictures by Jan Morris in the Guardian review today, just about gives credit to the actual substance of the book, the photography.

'...no Himalayan photograph I know tugs at the heart more powerfully than Thesiger's terrific view of Annapurna....'

But mainly she cuts away at Thesigers inconsistencies.

'Cynical as I am about his Luddite preferences, this book has brought home to me what an artistic unity he made of his life. It may have been distorted by his obdurate dislike of everything new, but within its limits it had true majesty. Thesiger never faltered in his prejudices (except in his willingness to use modern medicine), but he believed in them so absolutely, lived and died so faithful to them, that to this album of his life there is a true beauty - even perhaps a sort of holiness.'

Ouch.

Ibn Battutah on China

2004-11-19T21:37:00.000Z

For many the lure of Ibn Battutah lies in his candidness. The anodyne observations of our politically correct age were as alien to him as his forthright views seem to us. The British government dismissed its ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, for expressing his opinions. God knows how IB would be dealt with had he held his position in the world of international diplomacy in the current era.

I accompanied green dot and TC on a memorable recent trip to China. A (very) brief photo diary of our expedition, interspersed by some rather blunt yet endearing extracts from ‘The Travels of Ibn Battutah’ edited by Tim Mackintosh-Smith follows.

‘The Chinese are infidels’

‘The Chinese infidels eat the meat of pigs and dogs and sell it in the bazaars’.

‘In every city of China is a quarter where the Muslims live separately and have mosques for their Friday prayers and other assemblies. They are highly regarded and treated with respect’.

‘China, for all its magnificence, did not please me. I was deeply depressed by the prevalence of infidelity, and whenever I left my lodgings I saw many offensive things which distressed me so much that I tended to stay at home as much as possible. When I saw Muslims it was as though I had met my family and my relatives.’

‘China is the safest and best country for the traveller’.

Qur'an 29:20

2004-11-17T10:10:00.000Z

Say: Travel through the earth and see how Allah did originate creation; so will Allah produce a later creation: for Allah has power over all things.
(YusufAli)

Even to the borders of China

2004-11-17T09:54:00.000Z

James Buchan is enthralled by Tim Mackintosh-Smith's edition of The Travels of Ibn Battutah, a Moroccan view of the 14th-century world

Saturday December 21, 2002
The Guardian

The Travels of Ibn Battutah edited by Tim Mackintosh-Smith325pp, Picador, £20

Ibn Battutah, the Moroccan who journeyed for a quarter-century across Asia and Africa on the eve of the black death, gives a picture of medieval civilisation without equal in detail and brilliance in The Travels. Translated from the Arabic in the 20th century by the orientalist scholar HAR Gibb and completed by the late Charles Beckingham, The Travels were available in English only as single volumes in the antique book trade or as inky pirate editions from India and the Arab world.
This abridgement of the Gibb-Beckingham volumes by the British travel writer Tim Mackintosh-Smith is as good an introduction to the great masterpiece of Muslim geography as anyone could want.

Shaikh Abu Abdullah Muhammad ibn Battutah was born in Tangiers in 1304, the son of a judge of the Maliki school of Islamic law, and himself bred up as a jurist. He set off eastwards at the age of 21. He seems to have intended little more than to perform the pilgrimage to Mecca, which is a religious duty for able-bodied Muslims, and to practise the law.
As he travelled east, his horizons began to open. In Alexandria, he dreamed of flying on the wings of a huge bird to Yemen, and then east and south, "alighting in some dark and greenish country". After performing the pilgrimage no fewer than five times, exploring Iraq, Iran and the Persian Gulf, descending as far as what is now Kenya and residing in the Christian capital of Constantinople, he passed by way of the Crimea, Central Asia and Afghanistan to the rich Muslim sultanate of Delhi, arriving in the early-to-mid-1330s.

Dispatched in 1341 by Sultan Mohammed bin Tughluq with presents on a mission to the Emperor of China, ibn Battutah was wrecked on the Malabar coast and lost the presents. Rather than risk returning to Delhi, he set up as a judge in the recently Islamised Maldive Islands.
Quarrelling with the civil authority after little more than a year, he made his own way to China by way of Ceylon, the Coromandel coast of India, Bengal and Sumatra. No doubt he wished to fulfil a famous saying attributed to the Prophet: "Seek knowledge even to the borders of China."
Returning to the Maghrib and Spain across countries ravaged by the black death, ibn Battutah made a hair-raising journey across the Sahara to the kingdom of Mali, which he completed in 1353. He covers as much ground as Marco Polo a generation before, but seems to have relied less on second-hand reports. (Both men's accounts of, for example, Chinese paper money are unsatisfactory and it may be that they used the same source or group of sources.) A summary of the Travels was completed on behalf of the sultan of Morocco by ibn Juzayy in 1356. Little is known of his later career.

Ibn Battutah and Marco Polo were fortunate in their lifetimes. These were the years of the so-called "Mongol peace" in which the successors of Genghis Khan, having destroyed eastern Islam, including the city of Baghdad, had settled into generally peaceable principalities linked by open trade routes. Ibn Battutah's expertise in Islamic law was as saleable in territories newly brought within the Islamic fold as the Italian wares the Polos carried to the east.
As a traveller, ibn Battutah is wholly convinced of the superiority of his own culture (Sunni Islam of the Maliki rite) but curious about other rites and even non-Islamic civilisations. China, with its vast cities, astonishing technology and unbelief, unsettles him; Mali he finds plain uncivilised. Pharisaical and even fanatical at the outset, ibn Battutah is softened by his adventures. He retains both his faith and his humanity.

His personality is a war between contradictory impulses of mysticism and worldliness. Mackintosh-Smith prints the key passage, which occurs at a meeting in 1326 with a Sufi saint on the Shatt al-Arab near the town of Abadan (now the centre of the Iranian oil industry): "For a moment," ibn Battutah writes regretfully, "I entertained the idea of spending the rest of my life in the service of this shaikh, but I was dissuaded from it by the pertinacity of my spirit." This in Arabic is al-nafs al-lajuj: the relentless, importunate, animal spirit that the Sufi adept must overcome to advance in knowledge.

In ibn Battutah's case, this animal spirit was a love of women. Even while performing the circuit of the Kaaba in the shrine at Mecca, he is tormented by the scent still lingering on the hot pavement. "The Meccan women... make a practice of performing the circuit of the House on the eve of each Friday, and come in their finest apparel, and the Sanctuary is saturated with the smell of their perfume." Whenever ibn Bat tutah has any money - and he is an inveterate sponge on royal courts - he buys one or several slave-girls.

In the Maldives, where he has fled the terrifying complications of the Delhi court to serve as a judge, he gives up on his attempt to oblige the local women to cover their breasts. On the mainland, he witnesses the practice of suttee, where a Hindu widow throws herself on to her husband's funeral pyre, and faints.

Mackintosh-Smith, who lives in Yemen, published a book last year of his own journeys along ibn Battutah's tracks in the eastern Islamic world, called Travels with a Tangerine. This is the better book. He has weeded out much of the first three volumes of Gibb's text, including the lists of which learned men were resident in Mecca between 1326 and 1332, and topographical descriptions of Jerusalem and Damascus. In their place, he prints almost all of ibn Battutah's paradisal sojourn in the Maldives and the account of his capture by thieves near Aligarh in 1342.
As he is dying of thirst, ibn Battutah's broad world collapses into a well without a bucket: "I took a piece of cloth which I had on my head and tied it to the rope and sucked the water that soaked into it, but that did not slake my thirst. I tied on my shoe next and drew up water in it it, but that did not satisfy me either, so I drew with it a second time, but the rope broke and the shoe fell back into the well. I then tied on the other shoe and drank until my thirst was assuaged."
There is nothing like that in all medieval literature.

Mackintosh-Smith has kept many of Gibb's astonishingly learned footnotes, though on one occasion, in trying to pin down the Turkish-speaking tribes of southern Iran, he repeats a mistake of Gibb's and adds one of his own. The book's fault, which is not a serious one, is that Gibb began his stupendous translation in the 1920s and chose for it the orientalised English prose of 50 years before and the English verse (merles, ouzels) of 150. It is quite hard to be more prudish than an Arab traveller of the Middle Ages, but Gibb managed it.

What Mackintosh-Smith conveys in his abridgement is the sheer scope, both geographical and mental, of Islamic civilisation in its climactic phase between the Mongol devastations of the 13th century and the revival of Christendom in the 15th. At Sijilmasah, a place now in ruins to the south of the Atlas mountains in the Maghrib, ibn Battutah stayed with a jurist whose brother he had met at Qanjanfu (Fuzhou) on the Chinese mainland. "How far apart they are," he comments.

· James Buchan's most recent novel is A Good Place to Die (Harvill Press)