Compare And Contrast Ibn Waahab And Ibn Battuta

During the expansion of the Islamic faith an expansion of trade also boomed. With the development of trade in new states, the natural expansion of Islam also came about. These travelers would bring the Islamic faith from Africa to China. Two such travelers are Ibn Wahab and Ibn Battuta, Wahab was a merchant who was expanding his business to China and Battuta was a traveler that when all over the Islamic world documenting the different cultures. One place that both men visited was China, and they both had similar experiences and took away different aspects of the Chinese culture. Overall they both found China distasteful but Wahab getting the imperial upper-class view while Battuta got the peasant or common man view. They both respected

Ibn Wahab was a merchant in China for business not to observe their culture, unlike Ibn Battuta who was traveling from one Islamic state to the next writing down the observations that he made of them. Ibn Battuta evaluated each culture that he visited and thus had more experience in seeing the nuances of a culture. He also maintained a sense of superiority over the foreign states when they got a custom wrong or had a different one. As is the case in Mali when promised a gift and instead of money or clothing receives bread and beef instead. When Ibn Battuta visited Mali he largely focused on the interactions that he had with the royalty and how they conducted business with a few asides to the interactions he had with the larger public. Ibn Wahab also focused on the elites in his interaction with the Chinese emperor, detailing how the emperor explored answers to how the Islamic faith worked and the Chinese traditions that influenced Islam there. This shows the priority given to the elites of society by Islamic thinkers and the emphasis this had on the spread of Islam into these states while also maintaining a sense of superiority over the “lesser”