Rigmaroles

Henry Day

• The Hall of a Thousand Columns: Hindustan to Malabar with Ibn Battutah by Tim Mackintosh-Smith
  Murray, 333 pp, £20.00, March 2005, ISBN 0 7195 6225 2

In 1346, after a four-month voyage from Sumatra, Ibn Battutah reached China. A devout Muslim, he was now far beyond the boundaries of the Dar al-Islam and the sway of the sharia, and was feeling nervous: ‘China, for all its magnificence, did not please me. I was deeply depressed by the prevalence of infidelity, and whenever I left my lodging I saw many offensive things which distressed me so much that I tended to stay at home as much as possible.’ But hagiomania soon got the better of him and he set off for Canton, in pursuit of ‘a venerable sheikh over two hundred years old who neither ate nor drank nor excreted nor had intercourse with women, though his powers were intact’. Having sniffed Ibn Battutah’s hand, the hermit, who was ‘thin, very ruddy, showed the traces of his devotional practices, and had no beard’, astonishingly said that he had met Ibn Battutah five years previously, on the island of Anjidiv, near Goa.