Ibn Battuta

Abu Abdallah Muhammad ibn Battuta (born 24 February 1304 in Tangier) was a Moroccan jurist and traveler whose account of his journeys, the Rihla ("Journey"), is one of the most celebrated travel narratives of the pre-modern world. He came from an Arabised Berber family of the Lawata tribe that produced qadis (Islamic judges), and he was trained in the Maliki madhhab — the school of Sunni law dominant in North Africa. In 1325, aged twenty-one, he left Tangier to perform the hajj (pilgrimage to Mecca), and what began as a pilgrimage became roughly three decades of travel. By his own telling he crossed Egypt, Syria, Arabia, Iraq and Persia, sailed the East African coast, passed through Anatolia and the lands of the Golden Horde, and reached India, where he reports serving for some years as a qadi in Delhi under Sultan Muhammad ibn Tughluq. He describes further travel to the Maldives — where he says he was made chief judge — and onward toward Southeast Asia and China. Returning to Morocco around 1349, he then reportedly journeyed to Muslim Granada and, in 1352–1354, across the Sahara to the Mali Empire. At the Marinid court he dictated his recollections to the Andalusian scholar Ibn Juzayy, who shaped them into the Rihla (c. 1352–1356). He is said to have served afterward as a qadi in Morocco and to have died there, traditionally in 1368/69. Scholars treat the book as a partly reconstructed memoir: some episodes are vivid and reliable, others compressed, borrowed or embellished.