Free Stories from Islamic History by Nayab Naseer Page B

afraid to do so." He sailed
on to Oman, and finding himself having fought his way to a dead end
once again, made his fourth hajj .
    It was late spring in 748 AH (1348 CE), in
Damascus that Ibn Battuta learned that a son he had fathered there
died twelve years earlier and that his own father had died fifteen
years earlier. But a fellow Berber reported his mother still alive.
Ibn Battuta resolved to see her.
    On his way back to Tangier Ibn Battuta found
that the good days were over in Cairo. Ibn Battuta describes the
city as a “honeycomb without honey.” The great builder, Mamluke
sultan al-Nasir Muhammad Qala'un had fallen nine years earlier to a
cabal of rivals, under whom the city's administration all but
collapsed.
    In Taza, near Fez, Ibn Battuta learned death
had knocked on his mother's door before he had been able to return.
The purpose for which he had returned no longer present, having no
family in Tangier, and having nothing worthwhile to occupy himself,
he set his sights on taking part in jihad to defend the
frontier of dar-us-Islam against Christian Spain.
    The one strong leader in the region, Abu
al-Hasan had consolidated central maghrib and sent an
expedition to retake Gibraltar, now under the suzerainty of the
king of Spain. Emboldened by the success of this move, he was
preparing another expedition to drive Christian knights out of
Castile.
    Ibn Battuta’s descriptions of al-Andalus (Spain) are no less copious and rich than the
rest of the Rihala. The scenery has changed today only in that the
tracks he walked are now paved roads and in towns television
antennae clutter what were then unbroken roofscapes of red
tile.
    The jihad eventually took place at Rio
Salado, but the sultan lost much of his army. Ibn Battuta
nevertheless came home unscratched.
    ***
     
    Ibn Battuta had traversed the entirety of dar-us-Islam except that part almost the closest to his
home, but which, because of the difficulty of getting there was in
practical terms farther away than the rest.
    On 1st Muharram 752 AH (28 February 1351 CE),
Ibn Battuta accompanied a caravan, to cross the Sahara and reach
Mali and bilad al-sudan , "the country of the blacks." Today
Tuareg guides in their indigo blue still make that camel trek, from
Goulemine in Morocco, near his departure point of Sijilmasa - then
prosperous but now deserted. The crossing takes sixty three
days.
    It was not out of casual curiosity that Ibn
Battuta went in this direction. Central West Africa was in the
midst of an unusual boom. Mali produced more than half of the
world’s supply of gold. Had the demand for gold from dar-us-Islam been all there was, Mali would have maintained
a prosperous but stagnant economy. But there was far greater demand
for gold. The Christian lands of Europe were converting to stable
but foreign gold from local but volatile silver. The effect on Mali
was an economic boom.
    The caravans of camels that carried gold to
Morocco also carried the region's other exports, such as hides,
nuts, ostrich, ivory and salt. In the opposite direction went
cotton textiles, spices, finished jewelry, grain, dried fruit,
horses and the metals West Africa lacked: silver, copper, and
iron.
    The Mali-Morocco trade was dominated by
Berber merchants, who had settled in the savannas south of the gold
fields. Muslim traders arrived, settled among the locals, built
masjids and called people to prayer. Muslim concepts of fair trade
and philanthropy not only attracted people to Islam but also
brought order to what was hitherto a free-for-all chaos. Mansa
Musa, the king of Mali became a legend by distributing so much gold
in Cairo en route to hajj in 724 AH (1324 CE) that he
depressed the market.
     
    An example of the extraordinary range of
Islamic economics of the times is found in the fact that cowry
shells from Maldives were used as money in Sudan and Mali, and gold
from Mali turned up as currency in the Maldives, 9000 kilometers
and an ocean away.
    The new wealth supported