The Maldives (Dhibat al-Mahal)

The islands of Dhibat al-Mahal are what is known today as the Maldives, and Ibn Battuta gives them a long chapter in the second part of his Rihla. He says he decided to go there because of what he had heard of them, and reached them ten days after taking ship at Calicut; he spells the name out: Dhiba like the feminine of "wolf", and al-Mahal with a on the m and the h ³. He counts them among the wonders of the world: about two thousand islands, a hundred or fewer of them gathered in a ring like a wall with an entrance like a gate, which a ship enters only with a local guide ³.

Ibn Battuta names the districts of the islands one by one and spells them letter by letter, among them al-Mahal, which gives its name to the islands, Kannalus, Haladutni, Kandakal, Muluk and al-Suwayd ⁴. He says nothing is sown there except in al-Suwayd, whose grain is brought to al-Mahal, and that the people's staple is a fish they call qulb al-mas, red-fleshed and without a fishy smell, which they cut up, cook lightly and hang in baskets of palm-leaf to be smoked until dry ⁵. Among the trees he lists citron, lemon and taro, and describes a dish they make from taro-root flour cooked in coconut milk, which he says he much enjoyed ⁶.

Ibn Battuta describes the small boats they call kanadir that go out to every ship that arrives: the islanders give betel or green coconuts to whomever of the crew they choose, who then becomes their guest, and they carry his goods to their homes as if he were a relative ⁷. He mentions the storehouse they call the bandar, which may buy a share of every cargo at a fixed price called "the law of the bandar", and which has a wooden house on every island called the bajansar ⁷. Cowries serve them as a fixed currency: seven hundred are called a fal, twelve thousand a kutti, and a hundred thousand a bustu, and a bustu sells for one gold dinar, sometimes less; they sell cowries to the people of Bengal for rice, where they are also the currency, and to the Yemenis, who use them as ballast in place of sand, and he says he saw them as the currency of the Sudan, sold in Mali and Gao ⁸. He notes that the women hired for domestic service mostly spin qanbar, coconut fibre ⁹.

Ibn Battuta calls the islanders people of piety and religion, weak of body and unused to fighting, whose weapon is prayer, and tells that once when he ordered a thief's hand to be cut off, several people in the court fainted ⁶. Among their customs he describes how a man meeting the qadi or the khatib lowers his garment from his shoulders and walks with him to his house, how cotton cloths are spread for a bridegroom from the door of the house to the room with cowries laid to right and left, and how greeting the ruler always requires a cloth to be thrown ¹⁰. Their houses are of wood, raised on cut stones against the damp of the ground ¹⁰.

Ibn Battuta reports that the women of the islands do not cover their heads, not even the sultana, and that most wear only a waist-cloth from the navel down; he says that when he became qadi he tried hard to end this custom and order them to dress, but could not ⁸. He says marriage there is easy because dowers are small, and that men who come on the ships marry and divorce when they leave, since the women never leave their country; he calls it a kind of mut'a marriage, which is his description, not the museum's ruling ^{7 9}. Among the women's customs he notes that a wife does not eat with her husband, and that he could not persuade some of his own wives to eat with him ⁹.

Ibn Battuta relays from trustworthy islanders, among them the jurist Isa al-Yamani and the qadi Abdallah, that before Islam the people believed a demon of the jinn appeared to them every month from the sea like a ship full of lamps, and that they drew lots for a virgin girl to be left overnight in the idol-house on the shore ⁹. Then a man from the Maghrib named Abu al-Barakat al-Barbari, who knew the Qur'an by heart, spent the night in place of an old woman's daughter on whom the lot had fallen, reciting, and nothing came near him; they told their king, Shanuraza, who became Muslim with his household and court, and then all the islands became Muslim and followed the school of Imam Malik ¹¹. Ibn Battuta says he read, carved in wood on the maqsura of the congregational mosque, that Sultan Ahmad Shanuraza became Muslim at the hands of Abu al-Barakat al-Barbari the Maghribi, and that the sultan endowed a third of the islands' revenues as alms for travellers ¹¹. He also tells that one night he himself saw people loudly proclaiming God's oneness and greatness, children with copies of the Qur'an on their heads, when something like a great ship full of lamps appeared at sea, and they told him it was the demon, which leaves when they do this ¹². The whole story is the islanders' account as Ibn Battuta relates it.

Ibn Battuta finds it one of the wonders of the islands that their ruler is a woman, Khadija daughter of Sultan Jalal al-Din Umar: orders go out in her name and the khatib names her at the Friday sermon, while her husband, the khatib Jamal al-Din, became vizier and held real power ¹². He lists the offices: the chief vizier who deputises for the sultana is called kalaki, the qadi fandayarqalu, who he says is the greatest of all men among them, his command like the ruler's or stronger, holding three islands whose revenue is his own; the khatib is called handijari ¹³. He says the sultana's troops number about a thousand, most of them foreigners, paid monthly in rice from the bandar ¹³.

Ibn Battuta first landed on the island of Kannalus, which has many mosques, then sailed to the island of al-Mahal, seat of the sultana and her husband; he had asked the ship's master to say he did not know him, fearing they would detain him, but they had learned that he had been a qadi in Delhi ¹⁴. He married a stepdaughter of the late sultan there, and the vizier then pressed him into the judgeship; he says the occasion was his objection to the qadi's taking a tenth of estates he divided ². He then tells of the estrangement between him and the vizier Abdallah ibn Muhammad al-Hadrami, a case his wife's maternal uncles brought before him, and how in the end he resigned the judgeship and resolved to leave ¹⁵. He says he afterwards stayed seventy days on the island of Muluk before sailing for Ma'bar, and that one of its wonders is that a cut branch planted in the ground puts out leaves ¹⁶. Elsewhere he says he stayed in the islands a year and a half ⁶.

The chapter is in part two of the Dar Ihya al-Ulum edition (Beirut 1407 AH/1987), from page 583 to about page 605 ¹⁷.