Ibn Jubayr's Visit to Al-Medina

Abstract

IT WAS in the century before Marco Polo that the famous Arabian traveller, Ibn Jubayr, kept a journal of his interesting journeys in the east. He had finished his studies in Granada and occupied himself there as secretary to the Governor. When he was thirtyeight years old, however, he began travelling. First he went to Alexandria (1183 A. D.), then to Jerusalem, from there to Medina, and thence to Mecca. From he journeyed to Damascus, then he accompanied a caravan that wended its way across the desert to Mosul and Baghdad. From Baghdad he went to Sicily (1185 A. D.) and returned from there to his home in Granada. Only two manuscripts of this Journal (Rihla), are known to be extant at the present time. One of these is in the University Library at Leyden. It is a copy that was made in in the year 1470 A. D. This manuscript was first edited by William Wright and was published in Leyden (1852), but it was further revised by M. J. de Goeje and a second edition was published in the Gibb Memorial Series in 1907. In his Italian translation of this work Professor Schiaparelli has mentioned that there is a second manuscript of the Rihla in the library of the leading mosque at Fez. The Journal of Ibn Jubayr has not as yet been translated into English, but the articles in the Encyclopaedia Britannica (eleventh edition) on Mecca and Medina , and also the more recent articles in the Encyclopaedia of Islam, show how largely the western orientalists have relied on Ibn Jubayr's descriptions of these sacred cities, for they were written at the time when the Muhammadan Empire was at its best. This is especially true of Medina, and it is of interest to note details of construction which such articles are forced to omit. For in 1256 A. D. the beautiful Mosque of the Prophet was burned down, so that what Ibn Jubayr wrote about it in 1184 is the last first-hand information available, and in grandeur and beauty of decoration the mosque that was burned is considered to have surpassed any mosque that has since been built to take its place. 26