Pick a Paragraph:
Teaching Ibn Battutah at Clark University

March 1, 2006

For the past two weeks in the "Islam and Africa" course that I have been teaching at Clark Atlanta University, we have been working through the passages in Ibn Battuta's Rihlah in which he describes sub-Saharan Africa. There are two relatively brief passages on this topic in the course of his voluminous travel narrative, one a sea trip down the coast of eastern Africa, the second a land trip from Morocco to Mali. (Both of these are reproduced in Ibn Battuta in Black Africa, edited by Said Hamdun and Noel King.)

My approach in teaching travel narratives is to milk them for cultural knowledge. They are doubly fascinating for their first hand representations of cultures which are on the periphery of the world stage and then for the assumptions that are betrayed by the traveler himself. I think by paying close attention to what someone like Ibn Battuta notices in the world around him, one can learn a lot about his own cultural point of view, and Islam in general.

My assignments for these past few days has been for my students to come prepared to talk about a favorite paragraph, walking the rest of us through it and talking about what we can learn about Islam at this time from it. I never worry about what paragraph anyone will choose since one could close one's eyes and choose a paragraph, and there will be several important points to be mined from it.

Take the following fairly typical selection:

When I arrived at the river just mentioned, I crossed in a ferry and nobody prevented me. I arrived at the city of Malli, the capital of the king of the blacks. I alighted by the graveyard and went to the quarter of the whites. I sought out Muhammad ibn al-Faqih and found he had rented a house for me opposite his own. I went to it and his son-in-law, the faqih and the Qur'an reciter 'Abd al-Wahid, came with candles and food. Then on the following day there came to me Ibn al-Faqih, Shams al-Din ibn al-Naqwish... [43-4]

So what do we learn in this fairly dry passage?

1. Islam had penetrated far into the interior of Africa by the 14th century.
2. There appears to be a sepaarte colony of Arabs, and one can sense the comraderie.
3. A Muslim traveler could find an immediate welcome and accomodation.
4. The existence of an African kingdom which was stable—e.g. rented houses and a ferry.

It sometimes seems to me that all a person has to do is capture what surrounds him or her, and those words or images will someday be of surpassing interest. Of course most word and images fail to represent the world.. they fall into expected categories. Like the millions of tourists who visit Yosemite looking to take their own version of an Ansel Adams photograph. Those images are governed by a pre-existing image. Better to just walk and take pictures at random, and with a little bit of cutting and framing one is almost guaranteed to have something worth preserving.

This website is an attempt to capture the world that surrounds me. One constant effort will be to get pictures of the places where I spend time. In that spirit I took a stream of pictures yesterday at Clark Atlanta University. What will always stay with me about CAU is the main walkway, which between classes is always crowded with students standing and talking, or sitting, or hurrying to class on the crowded sidewalk. Meanwhile, just on the other side of a row of buildings is the beautiful quad, which always seems deserted.