Ibn Battuta

Ibn Battuta was born in 1304 in Tangier, a city in present-day Morocco. He came from a family of qadis, or Muslim judges, and received a traditional education in Islamic law. In 1325, at about 21, he left Tangier to perform the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca. The journey began as a religious undertaking and an opportunity to study with scholars; it became the start of an extended period of travel.

After reaching Mecca, Battuta continued to travel through networks shaped by pilgrimage, Islamic scholarship and the patronage of rulers. His account describes journeys in the Middle East and East Africa, across Anatolia and the Black Sea region, through Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent, and onward to the Maldives, Southeast Asia and China. Later journeys took him to al-Andalus and the Mali Empire in West Africa. In places including Delhi and the Maldives, he also held judicial responsibilities. The itinerary spans parts of three continents, but its chronology and some individual episodes are not equally certain.

After returning to Morocco in the early 1350s, Battuta was asked by the Marinid sultan Abu Inan to dictate an account of his travels. The writer Ibn Juzayy recorded and shaped the narrative, adding an ornate literary style and poetry. The work is commonly known as the Rihla, Arabic for a journey, and its full title is Tuhfat al-nuzzar fi ghara'ib al-amsar wa 'aja'ib al-asfar. A surviving Arabic printed edition is catalogued by the Library of Congress. Because the account was dictated after the journeys, it is both a record of travel and a literary work shaped by memory and editing.

The Rihla preserves observations about political courts, religious learning, customs and social and cultural life in many 14th-century societies. It is an important source for the history of several regions, but it should not be treated as a precise modern itinerary: dates in the narrative do not always fit securely together, and historians question some reported journeys. Read alongside other evidence, the work remains an important source for medieval history and travel writing.