Further Reading

While reading The Travels of Ibn Battutah I kept on thinking about another travel narrative I had read titled In an Antique Land. This work is composed partly of personal travel tales from the Indian born author, Amitav Ghosh, and in part a historical reconstruction of India and the Middle East in the 1100’s. The autobiographical narrative of In an Antique Land is interwoven with the story of an Arab Jew and his Indian slave from twelfth century. Much of the historical information needed to recreate their story was found in ancient documents that were preserved for centuries in the Cairo geniza, which held a wealth of Jewish texts from tenth century onwards. The papers Gosh was most interested in were mostly personal letters between Abraham Ben Yijû, the Arab Jew of Gosh’s narrative, and his friends and family. After extensively studying the documents of the geniza, Gosh is able to give a fairly detailed outline of Ben Yijû’s life, and he fills in the wholes with the larger historical occurrences of the times. The Jew was born and raised in North Africa, just like Ibn Battutah, and traveled across the Arab speaking world to the Arabian Peninsula, where he worked as a merchant in Yemen. Latter, Ben Yijû would work would take him to the coastal city of Mangalore for several years before moving to Cairo to raise his children and attempt to reunite with his brotIn an Antique Landhers. The most interesting element of Ghosh’s narrative is his ability to tie the modern experience and politics of the Middle East into its greater historical backdrop. He explores the social and inclusive nature of people in the region as well as the exclusive and hostile actions of the past and present. Ghosh is quite elegant in the way he compares the two time periods to each other and exposes the everyday presence of history beyond just the monumental or course changing events. The Travels of Ibn Battutah can work as a good complimentary reading to In an Antique Land. Not only do these two pieces cover some of the same geographical locations, but they both attempt to give you a flavor of the places and people that inhabit the region. Of course Ibn Battutah traveled about two hundred years after Ben Yijû, but the relationships between travelers that we see in Battutah’s work mirror the social networks that Ghosh examines in Ben Yijû’s time. Such as the brotherhood created from religious ties, which happens to be Judaism in Ben Yijû’s case, and the attention paid to multi-culturalism in a world that seemed much larger than ours today.

Location