At a glance
Era 6- Dates
- 1304-c. 1368 CE
- Who
- Moroccan scholar who travelled for nearly thirty years across the Muslim world and beyond
- Era
- The Mongols & the Mamluks
ProfileIbn Battuta
Muhammad ibn Abdullah ibn Battuta was born in Tangier in 1304 into a family of judges. In 1325, at twenty-one, he set out alone to make the Hajj. He did not come home for almost twenty-five years.
He crossed North Africa to Egypt and Syria, made the Hajj several times, and went on to Iraq, Iran, East Africa, Anatolia and the lands of the Golden Horde. In Delhi he served as a judge for the sultan Muhammad ibn Tughluq for several years, and in the Maldives he was chief judge. He sailed by way of Sumatra to China. After coming home he crossed the Sahara and visited the Mali Empire in 1352 and 1353.
In Fes he dictated his travels to the scholar Ibn Juzayy, and the book became known as the Rihla. It is one of the richest pictures of the fourteenth-century world.
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