Bruce Sterling - My Rihla

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Bruce Sterling

bruces@well.sf.ca.us

CATSCAN 7 "My Rihla"

Abu 'Abdallah ibn Battuta, gentleman and

scholar, late of Tangier, Morocco, has been dead for

six hundred and thirty years. To be remembered under

such circumstances is a feat to compel respect.

Ibn Battuta is known today because he happened

to write a book--or rather, he dictated one, in his

retirement, to a Granadian scribe--called _A Gift to

the Observers, Concerning the Curiosities of Cities

and the Marvels Encountered in Travels_. It's more

often known as "The Rihla of Ibn Battuta," rihla being

an Arabic literary term denoting a pious work

concerned with holy pilgrimage and foreign travel.

Sometimes known as "the Marco Polo of Islam,"

Ibn Battuta claimed to have traveled some seventy

thousand miles during the years 1325-1354, visiting

China, Arabia, India, Ghana, Constantinople, the

Maldive Islands, Indonesia, Anatolia, Persia, Iraq,

Sicily, Zanzibar . . . on foot, mind you, or in camel

caravans, or in flimsy medieval Arab dhows, sailing

the monsoon trade winds.

Ibn Battuta travelled for the sake of knowledge

and spiritual advancement, to meet holy men, and to

listen to the wisdom of kings, emirs, and atabegs. On

occasion, he worked as a judge or a courtier, but

mostly he dealt in information--the gossip of the

road, tales of his travels, second-hand homilies

garnered from famous Sufi mystics. He covered a great

deal of territory, but mere exploration was not the

source of his pride.

Mere distance mattered little to Ibn Battuta -- in

any case, he had a rather foggy notion of geography.

But his Moslem universe was cosmopolitan to an extent

unrivalled 'till the modern era. Every pious Moslem,

from China to Chad, was expected to make the holy

pilgrimage to Mecca--and they did so, in vast hordes.

It was a world on the move. In his twenty-year

peregrinations. Ibn Battuta met the same people again

and again. An Arab merchant, for instance, selling

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file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruiswijk/Mijn%20documenten/spaar/Bruce%20Sterling%20-%20My%20Rihla.txt

silk in Qanjanfu, China, whose brother sold tangeri

nes

in Fez (or fezzes in Tangier, presumably, when he got

the chance). "How far apart they are," Ibn Battuta

commented mildly. It was not remarkable.

Travel was hazardous, and, of course, very slow.

But the trade routes were open, the caravanserais--

giant government-supported hotels, sometimes capable

of housing thousands--were doing a brisk trade from

Cairo to Delhi to Samarkand. The locals were generally

friendly, and respectful of learned men--sometimes, so

delighted to see foreigners that they fell upon them

with sobs of delight and fought for the prestige of

entertaining them.

Professor Ross Dunn's narrative of _The

Adventures of Ibn Battuta_ made excellent, and perhaps

weirdly apt, reading last April, as I was traveling

some thirty thousand feet above the North Atlantic in

the boozy tin-can comfort of a KLM 747.

"God made the world, but the Dutch made

Holland." This gross impiety would have shocked the

sufi turban off the valorous Ibn Battuta, but we live

today, to paraphrase Greg Bear, in a world of things

so monstrous that they have gone past sin and become

necessity. Large and prosperous sections of the

Netherlands exist well below sea level. God forbid the

rest of us should have to learn to copy this trick,

but when I read the greenhouse-warming statistics I

get a shuddery precognitive notion of myself as an

elderly civil-defense draftee, heaving sandbags at the

angry rising foam . . .

That's not a problem for the Dutch at the

moment. They do, however, currently find themselves

confronting another rising tide. "The manure surplus."

The Dutch are setting up a large government agro-

bureaucracy to monitor, transport, and recycle, er,

well, cowshit. They're very big on cheese, the Dutch,

but every time you slice yourself a tasty yellow wedge

of Gouda, there is somewhere, by definition, a

steaming heap of manure. A completely natural

substance, manure; nitrogen, carbon and phosphorous,

the very stuff of life--unless *there's too much of it

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Bruce Sterling - My Rihla

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