Chapter 13 - Africa & Asia (1200 - 1500)

     The Muslim scholar Ibn Battuta recorded events from all over the Middle East, Africa, and parts of Asia. He wrote that in Africa, people hunted, gathered, herded (the Tuareg people, for example, herded camels), fished and farmed (a majority of the farming he observed was in river deltas). The Delhi Sultanate mastered irrigation, allowing it to spread farming practices further away from the major rivers in the area.
     Mali was built on Islam and trans-Saharan trade.When the Berbers caused Nubia's collapse in 1076 and the Takrur empire (in Western Sudan - it was the first sub-Saharan adopter of Islam) was defeated by Sundiata, the stage was set for the rise to power of Mansa Musa. He ruled Mali from 1312 to 1337 and estqblished a reputation of wealth for the empire.
     After two centuries of success, Mali fell to the Malinke and Tuareg (the camel herders mentioned above). While they were taking over Mali, Muslims were taking over India. When the Sultan Iltutmish ruled, he acknowledged Delhi as a Muslim empire. When he died, his daughter Raziya took over, something which was unheard of at the time. The Sultanate eventually fell due to rebellions in Northern India.
     At this time, India invented its version of the Chinese junk: the dhow. The dhow was a cargo and passenger ship designed to sail in the Arab Sea and facilitate trade, since major trading centers were rising at the time. The Swahili coast, which provided gold, Great Zimbabwe, an empire in what is now (you guessed it!) Zimbabwe (which soon became the capitol of a trading state), and Aden, a port in Yemen, became important trading centers. From Gujarat came cotton and indigo, and Cambay, Calicut, and the Strait of Malacca turned into ports.
     All of this trading brought in many new ideas. Urdu, a literary style of Hindi using Arabic characters, was introduced by travelers and traders all over India. The expansion of Islam brought with it the concept of slavery. Between 1200 and 1500, there were estimated to have been 2.5 million slaves taken out of Africa. Although slavery was on the rise, the social status of women improved, especially in India. The expansion of Islam did not necessarily mean the adoption of Arab gender customs.