Monday, December 16, 2002

-reproduced from my current read-
Ibn Battuta, a fourteenth century Muslim traveler who wanted to viist all the Muslim territories in the world, spent about seven years in Muslim India from about 1335. As a traveler he depended on the bounty of the various despots whose lands he visited. He knew the form; he knew how to give gifts to het bigger ones in return. He gave the local governor of Sindh a white slave, a horse, some raisins and almonds.
-break-
In India he constantly talks about slaves and slave girls; he says at one place that he can't travel without them. Slaves are part of the view. In Aden, he had seen slaves used as draught animals, he records it as a novelty, not as an impropriety. For a few months, and as a courtesy to him as a visitor, he was granted the revenues of a village in this Bahawalpur area by a local official. He made five thousand dinars. The dinars didn't fall out of the sky; they would have come from the fields and the serfs who worked them. They are the people never mentioned by Ibn Battuta, but always present.
-end-
the passage does not talk about Ibn Battuta, it talks about how such exploitation of serfs still goes on in rural Pakistan.

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