Ibn Battuta (1304 - 1368) was a Moroccan scholar, jurist and traveller who journeyed across North and West Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia, India, the Maldives, Southeast Asia and China over roughly three decades. [1] The narrative he dictated after returning home, known as the Rihla, is the single richest eyewitness description of the fourteenth-century Islamic world and of the societies at its edges. [2]
Early life
Abu Abdullah Muhammad ibn Battuta was born in Tangier on 24 February 1304 into a family of Berber legal scholars. [1] He was trained in Maliki jurisprudence, the qualification that would later support him throughout his travels: a competent qadi, or judge, could find employment and patronage anywhere in the Muslim world.
In June 1325, at the age of twenty-one, he left Tangier alone to make the pilgrimage to Mecca. He would not see Morocco again for twenty-four years. [2]
Travels across the Islamic world
Ibn Battuta crossed North Africa to Egypt, travelled up the Nile, then moved through Palestine and Syria to Mecca, where he completed the hajj and remained for a time to study. Rather than returning home he continued east, visiting Iraq and Persia, then sailing down the Red Sea and along the East African coast to Mogadishu, Mombasa and Kilwa. [1]
Subsequent stages took him through Anatolia, across the Black Sea to the lands of the Golden Horde, and on to Constantinople in the company of a Byzantine princess returning to her father's court. He then travelled through Central Asia and Afghanistan into India. [2]
India, the Maldives and China
At Delhi, Sultan Muhammad bin Tughluq appointed him a judge, a post he held for several years amid the sultan's volatile favour. He was eventually sent as an envoy to the Yuan court in China, an embassy that collapsed after shipwreck and the loss of its gifts. [1]
He spent time instead in the Maldives, where he again served as a judge and involved himself closely in island politics, and travelled on to Sri Lanka, Bengal and Sumatra before reaching the Chinese port of Quanzhou. His descriptions of Chinese cities are among the earliest by an Arabic-speaking traveller. [2]
Return and the journey to Mali
Ibn Battuta reached Morocco in 1349, arriving in the aftermath of the Black Death, which had killed members of his family. He then made two further journeys: to the Muslim kingdom of Granada in al-Andalus, and, in 1352, across the Sahara to the Mali Empire, where he visited the court of the mansa and the cities of Timbuktu and Gao. [3]
His account of Mali is a principal source for the social and political life of the West African empire at its height, describing its administration, its scholarship and the security of its trade routes. [3]
The Rihla and legacy
On his return the Marinid sultan Abu Inan Faris directed the scholar Ibn Juzayy to take down the traveller's recollections. The resulting book, formally titled A Gift to Those Who Contemplate the Wonders of Cities and the Marvels of Travelling and universally known as the Rihla, mixes precise observation with borrowed passages and occasional embellishment. [1]
Ibn Battuta spent his final years as a judge in Morocco and died there around 1368. Long known mainly within the Arabic tradition, the Rihla reached European scholarship through nineteenth-century translations and is now a standard source for the economic, religious and social history of the fourteenth century. [2]
