I bought a Greek slave girl here for forty dinars

Ibn Battuta shopping mall: a theme mall in DubaiOf the non-fiction (or maybe partially non-fiction) works we’ve read so far, this seems to be the first that relays the personal experiences of the writer. There are a good number of moments in Ibn Battuta’s text in which he lets the reader know about his personal experiences, feelings, and the challenges he faces in his travels. Or at any rate, more than we saw in Herodotus or Marco Polo. At the very beginning of his writing, Ibn Battuta informs the reader:

“I set out alone, finding no companion to cheer the way with friendly intercourse, and no party of travellers with whom to associate myself. Swayed by an overmastering impulse within me, and a long-cherished desire to visit those glorious sanctuaries, I resolved to quit all my friends and tear myself away from my home.”

Then later, he describes another experience that affected him personally as he traveled. Ibn Battuta relates a story about a man he had met in Alexandria, who told him he should travel on to India and China. Ibn Battuta writes that although “the idea of going to these countries having been cast into my mind, my journeys never ceased until I had met these three that he named and conveyed his greeting to them.” Here, Ibn Battuta is making his travel writing more of a personal narrative than previous non-fiction works we have read.

In addition to letting the reader know his own feelings and the way people he met affected him on his journey, Ibn Battuta lets the reader know many of the intimate details of his travels. He lets us know how he gets from place to place, and the challenges he faces as he does so. In the pages 50-55 excerpt, Ibn Battuta describes hiring camels and fighting off Hyenas who steal bags of dates from him as he leaves Cairo. Later, he tells the reader of how, traveling from Baghdad back to Mecca, he “fell ill of a diarrhea and had to be dismounted from the camel many times a day.”

Ibn Battuta doesn’t spare the reader the gritty details of his travels, and that makes it seem as though he had a different purpose in mind as he wrote his work. Apparently, Ibn Battuta saw some value in letting the reader know information like this. For this reason, Ibn Battuta’s writing appears to be closer to the travel writing we see today. Ibn Battuta appears to feel, as some modern writers do, that the journey through the traveler’s eyes is at least as interesting, if not as important, as relating the dry, specific details of the places visited. Ibn Battuta finds it relevant to his writing to note that in Konia, he bought a slave girl for 40 dinars, and I feel that because of details like these, his writing is not only meant to be an informative guide to the cultures and geography of the world, but also a travel story. Ibn Battuta did not just write a guide, he wrote down the personal story of an upper-class Muslim from Algiers traveling to all of these different places – why he traveled, how he felt, and the way he got from place to place. Ibn Battuta didn’t just write a guide to the cultures and places in the world, he wrote the story of Ibn Battuta. It’s not more informative, but I find this type of travel narrative more compelling and interesting, and perhaps, since every writer has motives and biases, more honest.