Ibn Battuta in the Maldives: a 14th-century account

Ibn Battuta was born in Tangier, in today’s Morocco, in 1304. He was trained in Islamic law, and in 1325 he set out on the pilgrimage to Mecca. He did not come home for almost 30 years.

He crossed North Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia, India and, by his own account, China, and later West Africa. Everywhere, his legal training opened doors with Muslim rulers.

Back in Morocco, he dictated his memories to a court scholar, Ibn Juzayy, in the mid-1350s. The result is known simply as the *Rihla*, meaning “the journey”. It is our only real source for his travels, and it is where the Maldives chapter comes from.

Before the Maldives, Ibn Battuta spent several years in Delhi as a judge for Sultan Muhammad bin Tughluq. The sultan then sent him on a diplomatic mission to China. The mission fell apart on the coast of south-west India, after storms and shipwreck. He lost the gifts, his companions and most of his property.

With his career in India uncertain, he sailed from the Malabar coast to the Maldives, meaning to stay only briefly. Things turned out differently.

When he arrived in Malé, the court soon learned that he had served as a judge in Delhi. A scholar with Arabic and legal training was rare in the islands, and the government wanted him to stay. According to the *Rihla*, he was offered gifts and made to feel that leaving by ship would be difficult.

He accepted the post of qadi, the chief judge. He asked for, and was given, certain marks of rank, such as being carried rather than walking, as senior figures were.

Trying to change local custom

As judge, Ibn Battuta tried to apply Islamic law more strictly than the islanders were used to. In his own telling:

• he punished men who missed Friday prayers
• he applied severe penalties for theft
• he ordered women to cover up more in public, though he admits he had little success

He presents himself as a reformer. Local people and officials may well have seen him differently, as a demanding foreigner with powerful in-laws. Tension with a leading minister grew, and in the end he gave up the post. He suggests he was close to being dismissed anyway.

One detail that struck Ibn Battuta was that the Maldives was ruled by a woman. He names her as Khadija. Her father and then her brother had ruled before her. She was the head of state, and the Friday sermon was given in her name, which was a mark of sovereignty in the Islamic world. Day-to-day power, he says, was largely in the hands of her husband, who served as chief minister.

Khadija is remembered in Maldivian history as one of a small number of sultanas, or female rulers. Later Maldivian records give her reign over several periods in the 14th century. You can read more about the wider story in our history of the Maldives.

Ibn Battuta married several times during his stay, into families with influence at court. He wrote that marriage in the islands was easy to arrange, because dowries were small.

He also described a custom of short marriages with visiting sailors and merchants. A man could marry on arrival and divorce his wife when his ship left, and the women, he notes, did not leave their own country. When he left the islands, he divorced the wives who travelled with him, and one of them was pregnant.

These passages are often quoted, sometimes sensationally. Remember that he was a foreign judge with strong views, describing a society from the outside.

Some of the most valuable parts of the Maldives chapter are about trade. Ibn Battuta described the islands as part of a busy Indian Ocean network.

Cowrie shells

He wrote that the islanders gathered small sea shells, cowries, from the lagoons. They left the animals to rot, then kept the clean white shells. These cowries were used as money. He says they were traded to Bengal for rice and that Yemeni ships took them on board. He later saw cowries used as currency in West Africa too.

His account is one of the best-known early sources on the Maldives as a supplier of money cowries. For the full story, see our guide to cowrie shells and the Maldives.

Coir rope

He also noted that the islands exported coir, the strong fibre from coconut husks. Twisted into rope, it was used in shipbuilding and rigging across the region. The coconut palm runs through his chapter, from rope to food and drink. Our guide to the coconut palm in Maldivian life shows how much of that is still true today, and the dhoni tells the story of the boats themselves.

Fish and food

Fish was the staple. Ibn Battuta described the tuna-like fish eaten across the islands, along with coconut in many forms, rice and other foods. Fish and coconut are still the heart of Maldivian cooking. Try a breakfast of mas huni and you are eating something with a very long history.

Ibn Battuta recorded the story of how the islands converted to Islam, as it was told to him. In this version, a sea spirit troubled the islands until a visiting Muslim scholar from North Africa recited the Qur’an and drove it away. The king then embraced Islam.

Maldivian tradition dates the conversion to 1153 and names the scholar Abu al-Barakat. Ibn Battuta’s version shows the story was already accepted by the 1340s. Read more in our guide to religion in the Maldives.

After resigning, Ibn Battuta left the islands for Sri Lanka, where he climbed Adam’s Peak. He then went to south India. Later he came back to the Maldives for a few days. He says he met his young son there, and left the boy with his mother on the islands. He then sailed on towards Bengal and, eventually, China.

Based on the usual reconstruction of his journey, his main stay was in 1343–44, with the brief return in 1344.

Ibn Battuta is an extraordinary witness, but he is not a neutral one. Keep these points in mind:

• He dictated it years later. The *Rihla* was put together in Morocco around a decade after his time in the Maldives, partly from memory.
• He had an editor. Ibn Juzayy polished the text and borrowed some passages from earlier writers elsewhere in the book.
• He was an outsider with authority. He came as a foreign judge trying to change local customs. His views on women’s dress and island morals reflect his own background as much as Maldivian reality.
• He is a character in his own story. His conflicts at court are told from his side only.

Even so, much of what he says fits with other evidence, especially about the cowrie trade, coir and the sultanas. Historians still treat the Maldives chapter as an important early source.

You will not find a monument to Ibn Battuta in the Maldives, but you can see the world he described. In Malé, the old coral stone Friday Mosque and nearby heritage sites recall the islands’ long Islamic history. Our guides to Malé, the coral stone mosques and historical sites of the Maldives are good places to start.

On local islands such as Dhiffushi, everyday life still follows patterns he would recognise: fishing, coconut palms, the call to prayer and close-knit families. Our page on Dhiffushi’s history and island life gives a picture of one island community today.