Free Stories from Islamic History by Nayab Naseer

board unable to disembark and join us. I
had nothing left but a carpet to spread out." The storm, rather
than abate, increased.
    Dhows are cumbersome in shallow, narrow
harbors, and the dhow captain tried to make for deeper water where
he might safely ride it out.
    This dhow didn't make it.
    Ibn Battuta had the ghastly experience of
watching the dhow smash onto the rocks, killing everybody on board
with it. When the crew of the kakam saw what had happened,
they made haste in spreading their sails and be off, leaving Ibn
Battuta alone on the beach.
    Wrecked with the dhow was Ibn Battuta's Delhi
career. He knew the first question Tughlaq would put to him was why
he had failed to go down with his ship. This time, no show of
mendicancy would be adequate atonement.
    Despite the trauma of the incident, Ibn
Battuta inserts in his account one of those factual and informative
observations that makes his Rihala such a treasure today: “The
[ruler of Calicut's] police officers were beating the people to
prevent them from plundering what the sea cast up. In all the lands
of Malabar, except in this one land alone, it is the custom that
whenever a ship is wrecked, all that is taken from it belongs to
the treasury. At Calicut, however, it is retained by its owners,
and for that reason Calicut has become a flourishing and much
frequented city.”
    Ibn Battuta withdrew to the port of Honavar,
where he spent some six weeks in solitude, prayer and
fasting—perhaps to keep a low profile, perhaps to grieve for the
loss of his child who was in the ill-fated dhow, and reconciling
the end of a potentially exalted ambassadorial career. His retreat
ended when he volunteered, exactly why he does not say, to lead the
Honavar sultan's military expedition against the rival port of
Sandapur.
    Though briefly victorious, the attack was
swiftly countered. He says "The sultan's troops abandoned us. We
were reduced to great straits. When the situation became serious, I
left the town during the siege and returned to Calicut."
    Ibn Battuta now had no means left, no
prospects of appointment anywhere, and one friend fewer in Honavar.
He had literally run out of options.
    With nothing better to do, he hopped on to a
ship bound for the Maldives islands.
    The ruler of the Maldives, Queen Rehendi
Kilege, locally called Khadija, was a puppet of her husband, the
vizier. Despite Ibn Battuta's attempts to keep a low profile, the
royal couple soon heard that there was a well-traveled qadi in the island, As they had no one in the islands filling the office
of qadi at the time, they invited Ibn Battuta to take up the
post, and made it clear that they would not take "no" for an
answer. “ So reasoning with myself that I was in their power and
that if I did not stay of my own free will I would be kept by
force, and that it was better to stay of my own choice, I said to
his messenger, ‘Very well, I shall stay’” .
    The next few months Ibn Battuta enjoyed
perquisites of power while acting in the familiar function of qadi ; punishing thieves and adulterers, adjudicating
disputes, and trying quite unsuccessfully to require women to cover
themselves more fully than the island custom dictated.
    Ibn Battuta married into the royal family and
soon found himself the husband of four wives, the full complement
allowed under Islamic law. All of these matrimonial unions were at
least in part political and it was not long before Ibn Battuta,
whose Delhi credentials made him a big fish in this very small pond
began to acquire a power base of his own among the local
nobles.
    The end result of these developments was Ibn
Battuta’s hasty departure, under suspicion by the queen and his
vizier, apparently well founded, of plotting a coup d'état. In a
mere seven months Ibn Battuta had gone from a much courted qadi to qadi non grata
    Ibn Battuta fled to Ceylon, and from there to
the Coromandel Coast in East India. As he neared the coast, a
fierce squall broke up the ship. Ibn Battuta got his