Ibn Battuta
Ibn Battuta travelled some 120,000 kilometres over thirty years and dictated the account when he got home. He was born in Tangier in 1304 into a family of legal scholars and set out at twenty-one to make the pilgrimage to Mecca, alone, on a donkey, expecting to be away about sixteen months. He was away for twenty-four years. The framework that made it possible is the point. A Maliki jurist could find employment, hospitality and a legal position anywhere in the Islamic world, and the world in question ran from Morocco to Sumatra — so he travelled through Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Persia, Yemen, East Africa as far as Kilwa, Anatolia, the steppe khanates, Central Asia and India, where the Delhi sultan Muhammad bin Tughlaq made him a judge for several years and then sent him as an ambassador to China. He was shipwrecked, robbed by bandits, nearly executed, and served as a judge in the Maldives, where he attempted to enforce a dress code and failed. He reached Quanzhou in China, went home through the Black Death, crossed the Sahara to Mali in 1352, and returned to Morocco in 1354. The sultan set a scribe to take it down, and the resulting Rihla is a court production with borrowings and probable inventions in it — the visit to Bulgar is doubted, and parts of the China section — and it remains the fullest description anyone left of the fourteenth-century world. He also travelled further than Marco Polo and was almost unknown in Europe until the nineteenth century, when the manuscripts were found in Algeria and translated. The airport in Tangier, a shopping centre in Dubai and a crater on the Moon are named after him.
- Lived: 1304 CE – 1368 CE
- Nationality: Moroccan
- Roles: explorer, writer
