Good morning everyone, good morning. I am lecturing today on Ibn Battuta, so hopefully you have tuned in. And we're progressing with our discussion of historical question number seven, which is this question about who ran things in Afro-Eurasia. And just a bit of a reminder that...
When I say who ran, of course, as I explained in the lecture last time, what I mean is who seems to have had power, authority, and influence beyond their personal, immediate, private life, if you want, in terms of social, political, economic, religious. communities. And so we've explored rulers.
Of course, it's always assumed, as I mentioned in the last class, that rulers seem to have the upper hand in terms of authority. All right, so we've then explored merchants. In the last lecture concerning Smith, Chapter 11 really focused on merchants and investors.
And we're going to explore that further today because the author of the primary source that you were supposed to read for today, Ibn Battuta, was very much also a merchant, an investor in some way. ways. And then in the next lecture, we're going to turn our attention to jurists, lawyers, and their impact and influence, power if you want, imperium over society in this medieval period.
And you have a couple of readings from Dante and from a famous lawyer slash philosopher, very influential in medieval Christendom in Europe, Aquinas. All right, so without further ado, let's get to... Ibn Battuta.
Ibn Battuta is very much along the lines of Alan bin Hassun, who was mentioned in chapter 11, right at the beginning, the Jewish merchant that was used by Smith to illustrate the kind of social mobility that this incredible Afro-Eurasian explosion of trade and commerce in the period of the 10th to the 13th, 14th centuries created. And so that The focus today, the kind of larger context, is that sustained economic expansion spreading across Afro-Eurasia. This is page 378 of Smith.
Okay, so social mobility. Social mobility means movement up, movement down, these kinds of hypothetical vertical ladders of intra-social differentiation, the rich, the poor, aristocrats, commoners. And also, of course, we saw in previous lectures clerics and laity, which is a distinction we can use for many societies from the Atlantic to the Pacific in this period.
So let's, without further ado, turn our attention to some of that social mobility. But as we're exploring social mobility today, we also want to keep track of immobility, if you want. notions of social hierarchization, right?
Boundaries placed within societies by powerful individuals within those societies to keep people, if you want, or persons in their proper place. And it's been a characterization, as we've lectured to before, of practically every society we've looked at since the beginning of the course. And A large part of the context, the broader context, in fact almost all of the broader context for today's analysis of Ibn Battuta's writings, his memoirs, is to bring back this idea that whenever we're talking about religious solidarities, if we imagine religious groups as large communities, we need to keep in mind what Smith said at the beginning of chapter 8 on page 268, which is that There are multiple Christianities and of course that's true also of Islam.
There were multiple Islams. There were multiple Christianities and there were multiple Islams and we've also seen there were multiple Buddhisms. And that gets us to a more precise definition of exactly what the kinds of communities are that are interacting, what their boundaries are, what I call emic boundaries, the boundaries that made sense to them, that were important to them. And we're going to come in today's lecture towards the end to how in Ibn Matuta we see very clear intra-Islam, that is within Islam, intra-Islam boundaries, thresholds of emic difference.
They had to do with proper conduct. Islamic conduct versus improper Islamic conduct, which I think is very evident for anyone reading Ibn Battuta, particularly the section I selected for you concerning the Maldive Islands. And we're going to come back to this in class in the next lecture when we talk about lawyers and jurists and intellectuals.
And just a heads up, think about the quotation from this Arab shipmaster on page 508 in chapter 14. which you'll be reading in a couple of weeks. The Arab shipmaster Ibn Majid, active in the Indian Ocean, writing in 1462, quoted on page 508, bemoaning the, quote, corruption of Islamic marriage and dietary laws among the Muslims of Malacca, Southeast Asia, Malaysia, Indonesia. Quote, they have no culture at all. The infidel marries Muslim women while the Muslim takes pagans to wife. The Muslim eats dogs for meat.
For there are no food laws. They drink wine in the markets and do not treat divorce as a religious act."But Smith continues her analysis by saying enforcement of Islamic law often was suspended where it conflicted with local custom. And that's a very much a dynamic that we're exploring today because it reveals intra-societal thresholds of difference, right, that are sort of vertical because Ibn Battuta was not just any Muslim. He was trained in Islamic law. So one of the great, I guess great is the wrong word, but one of the important aspects of today's work that we're doing is to think about law versus reality. And just a very short excursus into what I mean by this. If you drive the highway from here to Waipahu, you'll see a highway that's got speed limits at 50 and 60. Well, a good historian 2,000 years from now... who is analyzing that archaeological evidence of the signs with the speed limits, will not make the mistake of assuming that, ah, well, then everybody was driving below 50 or 60 miles per hour. A good historian will realize, actually, the probability is most people were driving over the speed limit, but within what they thought was acceptable to the law enforcement agencies. So that's the key, right? Legal reality, legal ideals. versus real reality, lived reality. And with Ibn Battuta's analysis or description of what he experienced in the Maldive Islands, we get an opportunity to analyze that. I'll give you another example, a more shocking example for my students when I've taught a course on the history of sexuality in previous years. And it's an example I used to begin the course that analyzed the difference between social practices and legal theory. In the United States of America, my students would read in this analysis of legal practice in the USA in the 1980s and 90s, a majority of states had in their statutes a law that said that any sexual contact outside of marriage was a sexually a crime. At the same time, what the students read in this analysis, from the 1940s onwards there had been almost no prosecutions in any of those states that have that law, based on that law. And of course, that's shocking in some ways to our norms of behavior that we think of as normal in the USA today, in the year 20-whatever it is. But it highlights for us the difference between statutes and law books and legislation and prosecution and that's going to come back um in terms of islamic law and islamic local practices in our analysis of ibn batuta all right so um who was this ibn batuta and what do we know about him uh generally speaking i'm gonna share a bit of a slideshow with you all right um okay so What you're looking at is a map you've seen before on pages 400-401. This is international commerce in Afro-Eurasia 1150. So, you know, we're not talking about the 12th century 1150. Most of the polities that you see outlined here in colors purple, yellow, green had fallen to a different dynasty or a different ethno-political group that become dominant. But it is the best map from our materials to demonstrate the places that this incredible traveler ibn batuta visited in the 1300s and if you've read the little introduction to um to the selection I made for you. You have an explanation of the context here. What really matters to us is to grasp the general storyline that he tells about his life. He begins his life in the West, in the Maghreb, in a town, Tangiers, that's right on the maritime edge of what today is Morocco and Spain. And in the course of his lifetime, from his 20s to his 50s, he essentially travels from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean, the China Seas, from sub-Saharan Africa below the Saharan desert, all the way to Central Asia, in fact, beyond what you can see in this map here. And I've noted on this map, which will be available to you in Laulima, the major points which he mentions in the selection that you read, and each has an importance for him, right? And the importance for him had to do with... uh economics it had to do with social contacts and had to do with of course his origin um and where we are concentrating attention on his visit to the maldive maldive islands here in the indian ocean uh the dots that you see there actually do not correspond to the size of those islands uh they're tiny little coral apples and i'll show you hopefully a bit of a a video that will give you a sense of oh it's uh what the relative size of these are But one of the important aspects, contextually, to understand Votuta is the Silk Road that we've discussed before. And I've mentioned the land route Silk Road that, at least from the period of the Han and Roman empires, had linked the Far Eastern and the Far Western Afro-Eurasian landmass together through trade, through commerce. But there was also a maritime link, and that's the one that we're discussing today, that went right beside the Maldive Islands. And the Maldivian archipelago was somewhat important because the monsoonal winds that change every year could bring ships inadvertently into the islands. So the islands were not necessarily a major powerhouse, economic or demographic, religious or political powerhouse, but they had importance for the maritime trade routes or Silk Road if you want that linked to the eastern Mediterranean. with the south china seas so to understand um how ibn batuta uh experienced the maldives i'm going to go back to this image that you've seen before and this was used in smith this is the image of an artist's illustration for a book of stories called just a plural the title of this work I would like you to remember the name of the artist, Al-Wasati, because importantly he came from one of these port cities in southern Iraq, as I mentioned before. And what he did here was represent essentially a Tao as they looked in the early 13th century. And there would have been relatively little change from then until 100 years later when Ibn Matuta was traveling to the Maldive Islands on ships like this, as well as Chinese or Southeast Asian junks, as they were called. Of course, this is an artist's representation. It's not very specific, not very precise, but it gives you a sense of what's happening in the narrative of Ibn Battuta. Because, of course, we can imagine Ibn Battuta as one of those travelers in the hull with his goods, his materials. And he's important, of course, for understanding what he wrote, but the captains of these ships are also important. And I want you to notice the problem we have in establishing clearly which captains he's referring to. And if you read the footnotes carefully of your selection, you'll see that Captain Ibrahim, and sometimes it's called Omar, sometimes it's called Ibrahim, there's a bit of a confusion. Ibn Battuta was remembering his travels based on his diary that he kept during his voyage, really at the end of these travels in the middle of the 1300s, 1350s. And so there were errors that creeped into his memory, obviously, and his interpretation. And perhaps he even lied on occasion. And we'll explore that a little bit later. But it's clear that Captain Ibrahim and Captain Omar of Hinaur, which today is in India, in the Malabar Coast, were part of his social trust networks. And that's really a very important theme for us to keep in mind in our analysis. Social trust networks. Because... I've made reference to them before. It's with those social trust networks that kept the merchants in line in terms of their own conceptions. We rarely have merchants having recourse, as I mentioned in the last class, to state or government legal institutions. to resolve their disputes. They would prefer not to do so. So keep track of Ibn Battuta's trust network, which extended from the Hadhramaut and Zafar al-Khimmur, which is a port city in what today is Oman, western Oman, and Yemen to India. He spent time in Delhi, as is explained in the introduction, seven years really working for the Sultan there, important connection. and of course he had friends in the maghreb but he also had friends from damascus from egypt other places he'd studied or worked in before he got to the maldive islands and um those come up in um in in his text and also um on page 836 he mentions um the there was a party every a get-together hosted by the maldive sultan or sultana i should say in which uh there were quranic readers chanting in beautiful voices, and they were followed by, quote, the poor brethren, his friends, Ibn Battuta's Persian and Arab friends who had arrived on the islands on a merchant ship, who began the ritual chants and dances. And this is an international, transnational, transliminal brotherhood of Sufis, of mystics, that we'll come back to in a few minutes in our analysis. So what we're really looking to today is... to sort out the emic thresholds and the transliminal comparisons. And now, transliminal comparisons can be comparisons that we make across boundaries, political, economic, social, geographical, linguistic boundaries, right? But they can also be the comparisons that those persons in the past whose ideas were reading made themselves. So we want to explore Ibn Battuta's comparisons between, for example, the Maghrib which simply meant the western area of Islam, to this area of the Maldive Islands that you see on the map here. His own transliminal comparisons, as well as our own etic transliminal comparisons that we impose on the past, differences that they might not have been aware of in the past that we're discussing. Okay, so I'm gonna stop sharing the slide there. So that gives us a sense of the background of the lecture today. But we are also going to look at, in detail, the text of Ibn Battuta to see the kind of sociological distinctions that Ibn Battuta employs or deploys in his narrative to make sense of his world. And by world, we mean all his different worlds that he inhabited. And he inhabited a world in which he saw himself as a Muslim, but he also saw himself as a lawyer, a judge. He saw himself. as a man, in a sexual sense, and he saw himself also as a traveler and a kind of opportunist with a great entrepreneurial skill at getting jobs, if you want, a worker, someone who works for salaries, quite dramatic ones at times. So before we show you the little clip, it's about a seven-minute clip. give you a sense of what's involved in Ibn Battuta. I want to just mention the ending, because one of the most important social networks of Ibn Battuta, beyond his business associates, his fellow religious members of the ulema class, the intellectual Muslim juridical class, he also married into the royal family in the island. And what you see there is my attempt to map out very simply his marriages. He was married four times on the islands. And there's a lot of information about this in his stories. But he ends up, because of these intermarriages with the royal family, the sultana particularly, and let's make note in our minds that the ruler, the effective ruler when he was there was a woman. His intermarriages lead him to, as the British say, a sticky end. He gets into trouble with the Wazir Abdallah, and he gets into trouble with the Wazir Jamal al-Din, who was married to the sultana as well, and occasionally calls himself a sultan in the text. So although social networks like business partnerships and family connections can be good, could be good to somebody like Ibn Battuta, can be good for all humans, They also are, in fact, the source of disputes and conflict. And it's the reason why Ibn Battuta eventually had to leave the Maldives. Okay, so let me see if I can show you this little clip here. A few minutes. of the clip and then we'll come back to our analysis of the grist of this substance of this and this is a film a documentary Made by a British trained educated a scholar who is now a public historian Focusing on the life of the Matuta is going to give us a good comparison to the contemporary Maldive context Ibn Battuta's next destination was an archipelago of tiny islands in the Indian Ocean. Strangely enough, the easiest way for me to get there was to fly first all the way back to the transport hub of the Eastern Hemisphere, the Calicut of the 21st century, Dubai. Dubai is the fastest growing city on earth. A fifth of the world's cranes are at work in these few square miles. The frantic expansion is the fruit of oil-rich investors ploughing money into luxury real estate. And it's enabled by dirt-cheap labour from the very place I'd just come from, Western India. I'd heard that something intriguing had sprung up on the edges of this tropical crane forest. The Ibn Battuta shopping mall. It's like Pasolini's Thousand and One Nights when you walk through a door and you're suddenly in Persia. Totally bizarre. I don't know where I am. At least it couldn't get any weirder. Salaam alaikum, Mr. Smith. Wa alaikum salam. Welcome to the Abbotutum. Man, enter. Who are you? I am Abbotutum. Welcome to my mall. Hang on. You are he. Yes, I am he. You are the man. You have found me. Ibn Battuta offered to take me on a tour of his mall. And who are these lovely ladies? These two lovely ladies are going to be assisting us on our journey. Are they wives, concubines? I'll leave that up to you. Please, come sit. Thank you. This is getting more and more bizarre. What is the Ibn Battuta Mall? Basically it's a shopping destination where we celebrate Ibn Battuta, the traveler, through six different countries. Where we take people on a journey through the six different countries in the themed environments of the 14th century. There's this exhibit about him, the tutor, his life, his travels, the people he saw, the adventures he had. I love their expressions. Take a look in here. Oh, wow. We have a wonderful virtual library where people can learn all about the Golden Age. of Islam. Islamic geography and cartography. And then our virtual librarian will go and fetch the book for us. This is brilliant. Technology. Interaction. As the Muslim empire spread from across the Middle East into vast stretches of Asia, Africa and Europe, its soldiers, sailors, merchants and adventurers journeyed further than ever before. Close. I love it. This place is about... Giving people a taste of Islam. I would say a pinch of Islam on a rather large meal of shopping. But that's what Dubai is all about. Ibn Battuta had a deeply bourgeois side to him. He loved money. He loved having it. He loved shopping. He loved robes and furs and gold dinars and that sort of thing. And that side of him would have absolutely adored this place. Now this is getting the name of Ibn Battuta into small minds at a very early age. You know, people say, who's Ibn Battuta? Oh, he's the Arab Marco Polo. One day they will say, who is Marco Polo? And they'll say he's the Venetian Ibn Battuta. Okay, so who is Ibn Battuta the Marco Polo? the Arab Marco Polo or who is, as he says, Tim McIntosh Smith here says, who is Marco Polo, the Arab Ibn Tutte. Now the difference between one and the other has to do with us, but the importance of Marco Polo or Ibn Tutte in the 14th century is a different matter. So as I've mentioned before, there are transliminal comparisons that we make among societies today, but there's also transliminal comparisons that we can make between ourselves. and those societies in the past or between others today and other societies in the past. So it gets quite complicated, right? These transliminality. The mole may be a symbol of our civilization that we live in today. And it's very clear that it's related to something that's globalizing. The capitalist, if you want, societies in which we live in around the world. And that's very much Part of the context of imputut. And there's a lot of material in Ibn Battuta that you could mine to explore the importance of the Qadini merchants that come up in chapter 11. Those Mamluk, Fatimid, Egypt, Syria-based Muslim merchant cartel networks that kept the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean worlds in commerce, mostly the spice trade. And you see a lot of evidence in Ibn Battuta himself, his narrative for trade routes and commerce back and forth in these maritime and land networks that had to do with coir that was used for the ships. And there's good descriptions of that. So there's evidence of cowrie shells, which he tells us he saw in sub-Saharan Africa, in Mali and Gao, all the way to Bengal being used as currency, but not. in the Delhi Sultanate where he had spent seven years of his life and not in most of the Mediterranean world of Islam either. So there's lots of great evidence there for the practicalities, the objects that made this world of Afro-Eurasia a connected mercantile network or world if you want. But there's an element in the little documentary excerpt we saw where Macintosh Smith asks the fictional Ibn Battuta about the two women on the cart, if they're concubines or wives. And of course we see that in Ibn Battuta's narrative, we have what's essentially a highly sexualized travelogue. And that's very much part of the way in which Ibn Battuta gendered his narrative. And you need to pay close attention to how he... did this because of course it's part of how he saw the reality of islamic law not really being applied according to what his legally trained mind uh told him but pay close attention also i'll come back to this in a few minutes to the way he exploited the peculiar meldivian views of sexual relationships and i've already noted that uh that the ruler was a woman and even batuta comments on it He could have taken the hard line and said, well, you know, there's lots of Islamic law that would recommend you do not have a female ruler. But he didn't do so as far as he admitted in his narrative. And that should matter to us. There's all the talk in your selection by Ibn Battuta of dowries, the monies that get transferred from families through women, wives, to men for use. And there's a nice comparison on pages 288. 289 in Smith, of the rules between Jewish, Christian, and Islamic jurisdictions, the theory, the legal theories. And it tells you that Islamic law, in contrast to Jewish and Christian law in this period, explicitly granted women certain property rights and control over their own earnings. So explore how that is a reality in Ibn Battuta's narrative. And it really does. contribute to his downfall because, of course, as a married member of the royal family, he gets himself into trouble. And ultimately, when he's kicked out of the Maldivian, it's not just because the local sultan or the local court elite think that he's plotting to overthrow the government, which in fact Ibn Battut admits that he was going to do. It's also about gifts that were given to him, the salary that was given to him when he was appointed qadi or judge in Mahal or Mali. capital of the kingdom. Property, gender, money, marriage, wealth, social trust networks that turn out to be networks of great distrust and enmity are all embedded there. But look also for the way that you have in Ibn Battuta perhaps evidence, and this may be most evident on page 832, evidence that there was a matriarchy at the heart of Maldivian custom and tradition. that had survived the Islamization of the 12th century. And so we have an accommodationism, what we refer to in our discussion of Beowulf as syncretism, perhaps in the political, religious, legal, gendered world of the Maldivian sultanate, in which a previous matriarchal and, we know, Buddhist society of polity was slowly accommodating to the norms of Islamic law. that were highly patriarchal despite giving women independent control of wealth to a much greater degree than Jewish or Christian law at this period did. So explore that. And if you want to look back to definitions of matriarchy and patriarchy, two good places to do so are in Smith, page 33, and Smith, page 57, where you have a discussion of matrilineal lines. I'll just say one thing only is that it can be seen as patriarchy is male-dominated, matriarchy female-dominated. but that would be a little bit imprecise because matriarchy and patriarchy refer to the mater and the pater, father, the mother and the father. And so it's not just gender, it's age and importance within the family network that we need to keep in mind when we think about patriarchy and matriarchy. Okay, so what kind of other networks mattered? that we can see in the details of Ibn Battuta's narrative? Well, we know from Smith's discussion of the history of Islam in chapter 8 on page 295 that a peculiar institution characterized what was called in the documentary the golden age of Islam. I don't know. Let's be more historical and objective and say that it was a high point. in the importance of Islamic history to the rest of Afro-Eurasia, clearly. And it comes on page 295. And I've mentioned this before very briefly, but here we need to spend a little bit more time thinking about how it comes up in the context of Ibn Battuta. He needs to also, in addition to family, royal families, business partners, the captains of the ships he travels on, with whom he engages in kind of personal private business, and... and even a kind of political conspiracy against the Sultanate of Maldives. He also needs to interact with the Mamluks. And the Mamluk was an Arabic term used for slave soldiers. Soldiers who were recruited from slaves to become the main military forces of most of the Sultanates of the Islamic world in the period of the 11th through the 14th, 15th centuries, and in fact thereafter as well. Now we need to forget about our preconceived notions of slaves as powerless because these soldiers who worked for the various emirs and sultans of this Islamic world were very important politically and economically They were the right-hand men of the Islamic rulers and the theory Operating back then was that if you wanted to be a good ruler You didn't want to recruit your soldiers from your same population that you ruled over Because there was always a potential that the soldiers would be loyal to their families or their business and personal networks and not to you personally So much better to have soldiers who were slaves of you who you controlled in terms of property But those soldiers could rise to become governors tax collectors Ministers and they definitely did so so we should not assume that they were powerless So from page 295 of Smith to Ibn Battuta because those soldiers come up in Ibn Battuta on page 813 The sultana's army, he says, her army comprises about a thousand men recruited from abroad, though some are natives. So a mix there, an interesting, peculiar example of this. Okay, so think about the importance of these mamluks, because of course, any form of taxing that is happening will require the help of the coercive forces, the police or the soldiery. And in this case, both together in the Maldives. So you can see that some of the governors that are mentioned in Ibn Battuta, some of the wazirs, may have in fact began their careers as a Mamluk soldier. slave of the sultans and sultanas. All right, who else is involved in this world of Osama? I mean, Osama, no, we're not yet in Osama, in Munketh's world, Ibn Battuta. The Sufis, I've mentioned the Sufis, the poor brethren, as he calls them in his narrative, who danced and entertained. And the Sufis are living at this period kind of on the cusp between acceptance by the religious authorities of the Islamic world and rejection. Some Muslim authorities in the 14th century thought of the Sufis as essentially wacko mystics who were practicing a form of Islam that was very, very detrimental. Others, on the other hand, praised them. And it's important to remember that Ibn Battuta tells us he spent the better part of a decade working for the Muslim Turkish originally Turkish dynasty that ruled northern India in this period To which we're going to come back in chapter 12 on page 437 You have a very good description of the kind of the potted history of this Turkish Muslim dynasty in Delhi the Sultanate known as the Delhi Sultanate because peculiarly This Delhi Sultanate according to Smith the Delhi Sultan's I'm quoting from page 437 cultivated those close relationships with Sufi masters and in fact believe that The Saints the Sufi Saints those highly respected leaders of the mystical Sufi movements Conferred sovereignty and here she's quoting from from a text contemporary text They conferred sovereignty on rulers. Through their spiritual influence, Muslims gain victories over unbelievers. So when Ibn Battuta arrives in the Maldive Islands, he's coming from a context where he's learned the importance not just of the Mamluk slave soldiers that made up the main army of the Turkish sultans of Delhi. but also the close relationship between Sufis and political power that open up the gates to the wealth that governments all over the world collected through taxation, and in the case of the Maldives, through the taxation of commerce along the maritime silk routes. So the importance of Sufism. There's another section if you wanted to think back to these Sufis, these poor brethren, on pages 295. of chapter eight of Smith. Okay. So now we come to, and what I think the most important aspect of the life of Ibn Battuta in the Maldive Islands, and that is his world as an educated expert in the law. And I've got about 10 minutes to explain this. So the first thing is to kind of step back to the first part of the reading that I selected for you. Which is all about the education as the introduction and the explanation to your reading tells you it's about the qualifications that he acquired In Damascus mostly but elsewhere in Mecca Medina in Baghdad in Egypt in Persia Which he had visited before he got to the Maldive Islands because everywhere he went And he actually did the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca three times in his life, but everywhere he went he studied law Sharia he studied the law of Islam and The narrative of who he studied with in Damascus gives you essentially, as I explained, his university transcript. You're not required to remember, obviously, the names here, but embedded within that is some interesting information that links back to some of the networks and ideas embedded in Ibn Battuta's narrative that we've discussed already. Because of the 14 professors he had in Damascus who gave him credentials to apply for jobs as a Muslim judge anywhere in the Islamic world from the Atlantic to the China Seas. Two of them were women. Umm Muhammad Aisha, daughter of Muhammad Ibn Muslim Ibn Salama al-Harrani and Zainab, daughter of Kamal ad-Din Ahmad Ibn Abd al-Rahim Ibn Abd al-Wahid, etc. etc. on Mach DC. Both of these women professors were highly respected in the context of what was essentially a very patriarchal society, Muslim society, and the intellectual world of Damascus, which was really seen by Muslims from one end of the world to the other as the kind of intellectual legal heart, or at least one of the hearts of an educated Muslim. lawyer. So an interesting gender dimension to his education, which is worth remembering in terms of how we begin to describe the highly gendered and sexualized comments of Ibn Battuta's narrative of his life in the Maldives, so that we don't engage in falsely transliminal comparisons between Muslim and non-Muslim worlds today. and in the past and between different Muslim contexts in the past. Allows us to explore some realities that may not be embedded within the treatises on gender and sexuality that are referred to in Smith on those pages that I referred to before where we were thinking, for example, on pages 288, 289 about dowries and marriage, etc. Okay, but. He arrives in the Maldives, he gets the job of main qadi, and then he starts to make some mistakes. And, you know, you want to go through what mistakes he makes. He obviously ticks off, he angers some of the members of the family, the royal family. He also angers a previous qadi whose job he took away by essentially pointing out where he wasn't applying Muslim law very well and having taken bribes. And it's important for you in your lab discussions to focus on what Ibn Battuta tells us in terms of his transliminal comparisons between the ideal of Islamic behavior and Maldivian reality, and also the Muslim behavior that he's seen elsewhere in the Islamic world during his lifetime in the 14th century, and Maldivian Islamic practice. And it's difficult to sort out what is orthodox and what is unorthodox. and I need to pause for a second and just share with you a kind of a reminder of what those two terms mean so I'm gonna use Smith and go back to chapter 8 on pages 270 and 271 so if you're interested in in revisiting this idea of the meaning of Orthodoxy and heterodoxy you'll find it embedded there and I'm showing you in purple highlighted in purple the sections that are most important so Orthodoxy from the Greek for correct and norms or practice or beliefs and then hetero doxy hetero just means different than so different than the norms different norms norms that are different than the the accepted dominant norms of a particular society so employ those two terms Orthodox and hetero dox orthodoxy and hetero doxy as you analyze Ibn Battuta's comments on the If I can be permitted this horrible neologism the Muslim iti of behaviors amongst the Maldivians that is his judgments on pages for example to 824 and 825 or 828 and 829 or 840 and 841 Concerning the Maldivians way of of clothing themselves of their marriage practices What else? Their perhaps eating practices, their prayer practices. And plot out where you think he made the greatest number of enemies, if you want, by saying, hey, that's not how it's supposed to be done in Islam. But oftentimes he doesn't give us evidence that he did that, right? He kind of glosses over telling people to dress up. properly or not. Although that was the one point where clearly it was one of the customs that he he wanted to change the most. And not just the way people dressed, but the way women dressed. So there's a gendered intellectual engagement with proper orthodox ordering of society that matters very much to how we interpret the mindset, the worldview of Ibn Battuta as he reveals it to us. He does, however, admit to us that even in terms of the clothing of women, which he found quite inappropriate, he only managed to change custom and behavior to a certain degree. And that's worth pausing our analysis and thinking about, as you will do in your lab discussions. Okay, so the orthodoxies that Ibn Battuta allows us to think about are Probably what I would suggest you focus your attentions. on the most because of course the task at hand in this week or these weeks was to think about the power wielded by individuals over their Neighbors their their societies wherever they lived and Ibn Battuta was as a very highly respected legally trained Claudia or judge Someone who could travel from the Atlantic to the South China Sea and get jobs Because jobs were there for anyone who? who had that kind of training within any polity that officially declared Islam as its religion. But that would create these kind of transliminal tensions between different visions of Islam, different Islams. And we can explore that kind of world of orthodoxy meets heterodoxy in the local environment and in a very specific way in our reading of Ibn Battuta. So I've got just a few more minutes. And I wanted to point out that all of this is happening in Ibn Battuta's mind within a larger context that we need to stop and consider, which is that even in the 14th century, and I'm going back to Smith's analysis of how the Islamic world was politically fragmented by the 14th century, even though it maintained this idea that it was just one world of Islam, a world ruled by Islam. The Dar al-Islam as it's called on page 290 of Smith. This is an imagined community, right? And it's an imagined community based on this idea that no matter where one goes in this Muslim world, Muslim law is uppermost. But the reality you see in Bib al-Batuta, of course, is that that was not the case. But there's another element to this Dar al-Islam or world of Islam viewpoint of the medieval period that that you should pause to consider and that goes back to something discussed in smith on page 291 and that's the vimy the people of the of the book jews and christians also zoroastrians who were perceived by muslims in the period that we're discussing as being monotheists but of erroneous belief and practice that is heterodox monotheists now the meldivian buddhism that uh that seems to have been the the substrate of the society that Ibn Battuta visited or lived in for about 18 months. You know that probably presented problems of heterodoxy because But it's not clear in his text because of the peculiar nature of the philosophy of Buddhism. On the other hand perhaps Ibn Battuta could accommodate it within his view as purely as a philosophy. On the other hand, you do have evidence of the story of the Islamization of the islands embedded within Ibn Matuta. In fact, one of the principal sources, primary sources for historians reconstructing how these thousand islands in the Indian Ocean were Islamized in the period of the 12th to the 14th century. And the answer is slowly, with a lot of syncretizing of previous Buddhist and non-Buddhist religious beliefs and practices into this newly constructed, syncretic Islamic society, along the lines of how we saw in Beowulf a syncretization of Anglo-Saxon, Pruton, Germanic, barbarian polytheism within a story crafted by a Christian monk. So there's an element of that, and think very carefully about the story that Ibn Battuta tells of how and when and why. The rulers of the Maldive Islands converted to Islam. It has to do with these weird memories of pre-Islamic society that Maldivians kept alive into the 14th century. You need to remember 200 years have elapsed by then. And so lots of opportunity there to think about the Maldivian Nemo history of Islamization. And it all ties back to this really odd character. sorry now I can't find my my notes and the character is basically called areas on page 829 he's called Abu Barakat al-Barbari stop and consider that this pseudo mythical agent of his minimization In Arabic was called the father of luck and success, the maverick, the legend, the barbarian, the Berber. And that's what his name really meant. The Berber. Okay, the father of good luck, the Berber. This leaves us with a question we don't have time to explore, but it's a fascinating one, which is to what degree was Ibn Battuta reporting a story he heard on the Mild Island, or to what degree was he fabricating one? Because the Berbers were from the population that lived in the area of the Maghreb. alongside Arabs and some others was Arabs. So literally the Berber could have been used to refer to Ibn Battuta himself. He was from the land of the Berbers in the Maghrib. And this is a moment where we have to kind of pause and say let's leave this for another course for the future for you to investigate. and i'll see you in the next class when we continue our discussion of rulers jurists investors and merchants and add into the mix intellectuals and poets thank you bye