The Travels of Ibn Fudayl

Introduction

IntroductionOn 19th of April 711, the seventeen-year-old Tariq bin Ziyad led his seven thousand Arab and Berber troops across the straits of Gibraltar that still bears his name.1 Tariq, ordered by the Umayyad caliph, invited by the Byzantine exarch of Septer and supported by a flotilla of Count Julian, a Visigoth noble, made the landing. Once onshore, he burnt his boats rallying his seven thousand by his dream that the Prophet Muhammad had come to him and promised him the land: the only way was either victory or martyrdom. His army completely routed the thirty thousand Visigothic troops and confined them to a small strip of land in the north of the Iberian Peninsula.

The victory inaugurated seven hundred years of Muslim rule in Iberia. At one point controlling Barcelona and penetrating deep into France; only to be stopped by Charles Martel at the battle of Poitiers in 732. It is a great irony then, that on 19th of April 2006, the only extant manuscript of this book should have been discovered, quite by chance, by a filing clerk at the Asad library, Damascus. The Travels of Ibn Fudayl, as it has become known, expresses vividly the magnificence of a world now gone. This translation gives a remarkable picture of Andalusia that will interest both the curious reader as well as the specialist.2

Abu Ayyub bin Fudayl (d. 1196) follows in the same traditions as other Muslim travellers and geographers. The manuscript suggests that, before settling in Syria, Ibn Fudayl had visited India, Persia, and the levant. As for his life, he has been mentioned by other scholars of the time in passing. Some labelled him as a zindiq,3 a freethinker, others considered him as part of a Sufi order mixing the Neo-platonic thought of Plotinus with the esoteric mysticism of the Shi’ites. There are also lines of poetry that have been attributed to him but they cannot be verified with enough certainty. For example:

I am the existent and yet the non-existent,

I am the ocean that fits in a drinker’s cup.

Questions that you hold to be self-evident,

With my being I knock and open up.4

What we can surmise from his works is that he was undoubtedly a polymath: a student, a scholar of considerable ability, an able poet and an eloquent speaker with a remarkable inquisitiveness that infected all that read him. We know that he was a native of Fatimid Cairo, or Fustat as it was then known. This incomplete work, Min As-Sabil ad-Dalla ila Sabeel al-Haq or ‘From the Misguided Path to the Path of Truth’, reveals all these aspects of the man.

It becomes apparent that Ibn Fudayl was someone imbued with the tradition for exploration. Although Ibn Fudayl does not appear to be particularly religious, as is the case with Ibn Jubayr, in some ways he was the very manifestation of the Quranic injunction on the Faithful: to travel the Earth and see what has passed. Despite not being overtly Islamic like Abu Hanifa, Ahmad bin Hanbal, al-Ghazzali or Ibn Arabi, yet just like Ibn Sina, Ibn Bajjah, Uthman bin Fathun, Ahmad bin Majriti (d.1008) and Ibn Rushd, he was an expression and product of Islamic civilisation. In his own little way, Ibn Fudayl articulated the confidence and curiosity of the Islamic civilisation; a civilisation that was willing to explore new frontiers unafraid to open up new doors for material, intellectual and spiritual benefit. Thus, it is not surprising that the period between the 7th to 15th centuries saw remarkable inroads into these fields.

The literature of the age reveals numerous accounts of similar men. Ibn Fadlan and Ibn Rustuh al-Isfahani gave an account of the Rus, Ibn Jubayr of the Arabian Peninsula, Ibn Battuta of China and India, al-Maqdisi and Usama bin Munqidh the Franks and the maps of al-Idrisi that Columbus used for his journeys, all display a healthy curiosity of the world that surrounded them. These fruitful periods were peppered with names of people that contributed to science, medicine, philosophy and geography that has shaped the modern world as we know it. In particular Andalusia, although this far-flung region remained at the periphery of the Islamic world and was no comparison to the great centres of Islamicate as was the case with Damascus and Baghdad; the role it played in relation to the West, as a medium for knowledge, is unmeasurable. Andalusia played a great function in transmitting scholarship, science, art and culture to Europe. It was the genesis or, to say the least, contributed greatly to the European Renaissance. The reader must not forget, however, that this intellectual exchange is quite natural in human history. Just like presently the Occident serves as the transmitter of learning to the Orient. likewise, when the Occident was experiencing its darkest age, the Orient was experiencing its golden. The result was osmosis.

What makes Ibn Fudayl so useful is that he gives a very detailed account of the life and mores of Andalusian society. He recalls the trends and currents that influenced this society in flux, in a way that no other contemporary had done in the period of the Party Kings, ‘asr al-Muluk at-Tawai’f. That is not to say we do not have information about Andalusia in general. In fact, there is a plethora of information, through the likes of Abdullah bin Bullugin, the road books or masalik of al-Ya‘qubi, Ibn al-Fakih and Ibn Rata, Ahmad Razi (d.955), al-Istakhri (d.935), his contemporary al-Hawkal, Ibn Hazm, as well as secondary materials from al-Maqdisi and al-Idrisi. But none can give such an impersonal and philosophical explanation of the events witnessed. Not at least until the arrival of Ibn Khaldun in the 15th century. Ibn Fudayl’s unique contribution makes his work so valuable to the historian. It is so rich in detail that the reader feels he is almost living with the author.

When Ibn Fudayl arrived in Andalusia, the reader is not aware that Andalusia was not what it was. The history of Andalusia up to the arrival of Ibn Fudayl can be divided into four stages.

Stage one, from 711 to 929. The region was ruled by a number of emirs who vied with one another for power. Andalusia was experiencing the birth pangs of a foundling state whereby the various parties competed with each other for control. The m******e of the Umayyad dynasty by the Abbasids in 756 meant that the last surviving descendant of the Umayyad dynasty, Abd ar-Rahman ad-Dakhili, arrived in Andalusia and successfully subdued the divergent groups and established himself as the emir of Cordoba. The period was characterised with expansion and consolidation of power. His descendant, Abd ar-Rahman III, ascended the emirate in 912 and extended its power in North Africa and Andalusia.

Stage two, from 925 to 1009. In 925 Abd ar-Rahman III proclaimed himself caliph and turned the province into a caliphate. His need for legitimacy ushered in a profound cultural flowering for all the inhabitants of al-Andalus. Despite there being three caliphates - the Fatimid, the Abbasid and his own - the Umayyad caliphate survived the geopolitical strains that the rival caliphates threw at it. This was due to Umayyad Spain producing capable enough caliphs not only to manage and unite the Muslim population against the Christian kingdoms, confined to the north of the Iberian Peninsula, but also to check the ambitions of the rival caliphates. By the 10th century, Andalusia had become one of the greatest centres for philological, literary, and juridical culture. However, by 1086 this ‘ornament of the world’, as the Saxon Poetess Hroswitha called Andalusia, had fallen into deep division and ushered in the third stage: a period of weakness.

Stage three from 1009 to 1086. The weak period was due to the sagacious and able commander al-Mansur bin Abi Amir, the majordomo of the Umayyad caliph, who took over the administrative control of Umayyad Spain in 965. Although he maintained the protocols of the caliphate he had inadvertently, through his political machinations, weakened the caliphate. His military policies introduced to al-Andalus a large number of mercenaries of Berber origin who, after his death, served as a powerful bloc of agitation against the natives. After his death in 997, this bloc rose to greater prominence and demanded a greater role in the affairs of the peninsula. Consequently, Andalusia fell into a series of political struggles that split its unity and coherence that was the key to its strength. The civil war that ensued between 1009-1013 destroyed any semblance of Muslim unity; the caliphate floundered in 1031. Andalusia fell into a period of further weakness.

The differences of the various factions split the caliphate into various fragmented statelets, all vying with each other for supremacy. The irrevocable damage to the caliphate meant two things for Andalusia. One, it saw one of the greatest flowerings of culture as these ‘petty kings’ competed with each other for legitimacy and became patrons of the Arts. Two, they enlisted the aid of the Christian kingdoms who seized the opportunity to re-conquer their lost territories. The Christian kingdoms in effect, became arbiters of the disputes that occurred between Berbers who fought Slavs who, in their turn, fought Arabs and so on. These ‘petty kings’, as they were labelled, provided the impetus for the formation of the Christian ideology of Reconquista, which ultimately culminated in the fall of Nasrid Granada in 1492. However, at the peaceful but symbolic takeover of Toledo in 1085 by King Alfonso VI of leon and Castile, the idea of Reconquista was still in its infancy. The ideology would not reach its full realization until perhaps after the fall of the Kingdom of Jerusalem in 1187. The fall of Toledo made the danger to Muslim Andalusia extremely apparent. The petty kingdoms saw no option but to seek help from North Africa. This led to the fourth stage.

Fourth stage, from 1086 to 1195, the period of foreign intervention in Andalusia. In 1086, to the nervous apprehension of many princes in al-Andalus, the Almoravid ruler of North Africa was invited to defend it from the ambitions of the Christian kingdoms. That same year the austere leader of the Almoravids, Yusuf bin Tashfin, crossed the straits and landed in Algeciras. He inflicted a severe defeat on the Christians at az-Zallaqa. By 1094 he had united the country, removed the somewhat decadent princes and annexed their states, installed his own governors, regained Valencia from the Christians and halted their advance. Al-Andalus had effectively become a vassal state to the Almoravids. However, the petty rivalries never quite went away between the governors or sultans who were invested with power to rule the land on behalf of the Almoravids. This was in fact the case with Sultan Abdullah bin Mardanish, the emir of the province of Valencia, who always sought to expand his power and influence through his patronage. Thus, despite the austere nature of Almoravid rule, with their patronage these emirs still attracted the finest minds in the Islamic world. It was precisely due to men such as Sultan Mardanish that Ibn Fudayl could find himself writing his amazing tract.

Finally, without dwelling too much on the problems of translation, a note on the text. Arabic is an extremely rich and subtle language. The act of translating into English sometimes results in the subtlety of meaning often becoming lost in translation; any deficiency therefore in the translation is borne wholly on my shoulders.

It is this very problem in translating that has meant that up to now The Travels of Ibn Fudayl has not been available to Western scholarship. It is hoped that with this major new translation, new inroads can be made for scholarship and research.

This translation has been carefully prepared by myself after having consulted and checked with major Orientalists in the field today, namely, the aforementioned professors at the School of African and Oriental studies and The School of Oriental Studies in Naples.

However, an annotated glossary has been added to equip the reader with keywords, for a full appreciation of the medieval manuscript. I was loath to add more footnotes to the translation, since it is already copiously annotated.

Let the reader be cautious in approaching these words, for in some ways they may appear as insults when, in actual fact, the dry tone suggests otherwise. Perhaps Ibn Fudayl did not view these words as insults at all and his scintillating mind may have thought of them with a certain degree of favour. Or his scientific mind recalled these words within the cold framework of reason, leaving all emotions aside.