Tawfiq Alhamedi
Sources and Perspectives
Ibn Battuta's Travels
The main source of data for the annotations on the interactive map I have created has been derived from an English translation of Ibn Battuta’s The Rihla, wherein Ibn Battuta provides primary source descriptions of prominent Indian Ocean port cities (Gibb, 1956). During his religious journey Ibn Battuta travelled beyond the scope of the Indian Ocean, such as through the Black Sea and to West Africa; because of this I have only made use of his descriptions pertaining to cities relevant to the Hadhrami diaspora and Indian Ocean trade. I have utilized his descriptions as a lens through which Indian Ocean connectivity can be illustrated and interpreted in relation to the rise of Muslim trade networks, the spread of Sufism, and the prevalence of the Shafi’i legal framework. As Ibn Battuta himself was a Sufi and his travels took place during the 14th century, his primary source descriptions are ideal for the purposes of this study. Moreover, to complement this primary source, I have made use of Ross Dunn’s (1989) interpretations of Ibn Battuta’s travels to better understand the context of his journey. I have also consulted UC Berkeley’s virtual tour of Ibn Battuta’s travels for further elucidation (Bartel, 2012). For the base layer of the interactive map, I have mostly extracted data from foundational works discussing Indian Ocean history, commerce, and culture, such as K.N. Chaudhuri’s (1985) Trade and Civilization in the Indian Ocean and Janet Abu-Lughod’s (1989) Before European Hegemony. From these and other sources, I have compiled spreadsheets and made note of contextual information regarding important port cities, trade routes, and sultanates.
Bennett, 1878.
Alternate Cartographies
The interactive map intends not only to provide a visual narrative of Ibn Battuta’s travels but also to represent the Indian Ocean from the perspective of Hadhrami migrants as they looked out from the Arabian peninsula to coastal regions of the Indian Ocean. As Sheriff (2014) has argued, in the Indian Ocean world “Islam came to be its spiritual face...especially the Shafi’i school radiating out of Hadhramaut which played a major role in moulding that cultural continuum” (p. 257). Thus, for this map I have oriented the world with the Global South on top, centering the Arabian peninsula. Interestingly, this orientation is consistent with the perspective of medieval Islamic cartographers such as the renowned Muhammad al-Idrisi who also used a similar framing in his 12th century world map.
A roadblock in this process has been that mapping softwares like GoogleMaps pose limitations in that they do not allow for any reorientation of the world map other than the default Mercator projection. As it is part of my argument that this perspective and orientation is more useful to study the Hadhrami diaspora in the Indian Ocean, I have created a base layer map image in ArcGIS which allowed for the reorientation used in my interactive map. From here I imported the map image into Neatline, which is a plugin of Omeka that enabled me to annotate the base layer map with points, polygons, and other features. I have added a log on the right side of the map using NeatlineWaypoints which intends to serve as a guideline for the map. Overall, these tools and representations allowed me to create and alternate cartography from the conventional map perspective used widespread today that minimizes the Indian Ocean.
