The Port of Mogadishu

Mogadishu, on the coast of the Horn of Africa in what is now Somalia, was in the medieval centuries one of the foremost Muslim cities and trading ports of the western Indian Ocean. A large, wealthy and populous city of stone houses and mosques, ruled by its own sultan (whom Ibn Battuta calls the shaykh), it stood at the meeting of the African interior with the sea-trade of the monsoon world, and grew rich on commerce. It was especially famous for its textiles: a fine cloth woven in the city, known by its name, was exported to Egypt and other lands and prized far afield. When the traveller Ibn Battuta came to Mogadishu about 1331, on his voyage down the East African coast, he described it as a town of enormous size and abundance, and recorded with wonder the great quantities of food, of meat, rice, ghee and fruit, that were set before the people; he noted too the hospitable custom of the city, by which every merchant or stranger who arrived was taken in charge by a host who lodged him and saw to his affairs. He found there, as all along this coast, a settled and devout Muslim society of the Shafi'i school, with its sultan, its qadi, its jurists and its scholars, fully part of the wider world of Indian Ocean Islam, linked by faith and trade to Arabia, Persia and India. This scene depicts the trading port of Mogadishu in its medieval prosperity. In keeping with the project's ethics any figure is anonymous and at a distance.