Ibn Battuta

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   Tangier, MoroccoJune 1325 CE725 AH

   Stop 1: Tangier, the setting out

   Ibn Battuta was born in Tangier in 1304 into a family of Berber descent known for its judges and scholars. He studied Maliki law, as was usual in North Africa. In June 1325 he set out alone to make the Hajj. He later wrote that he left his home as a bird leaves its nest, and that parting from his parents, who were still alive, grieved both him and them.

   He travelled east along the North African coast, joining caravans for safety. On the way he fell ill with fever and tied himself to his saddle so that he would not fall. In Tunis he was so lonely among strangers that he wept, until a pilgrim greeted him kindly. During the journey he married for the first time.

   Read more: The Mongols & the Mamluks (Era 6 · Overview)

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   Alexandria and Cairo, Egypt1326 CE

   Stop 2: Alexandria and Cairo

   In the spring of 1326 he reached Alexandria, where the great lighthouse, partly ruined, still stood. A holy man there told him that he would travel to India, Sind and China and meet certain friends of his there. At the time it seemed impossible. Years later, he met them.

   Cairo, the capital of the Mamluk sultans, astonished him. He called it the mother of cities, crowded with people, mosques, madrasas and markets, with the Nile flowing past it. He visited its hospital, founded by Sultan Qalawun, and its many Sufi lodges, where travellers could stay and eat.

   From Cairo he tried to cross to the Red Sea, but war closed the road, so he turned north to join the pilgrim caravan from Damascus.

   Read more: Cairo, the capital of learning (1260-1517) (Era 6 · Chapter 06)

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   Damascus, SyriaAugust 1326 CE

   Stop 3: Damascus

   Ibn Battuta reached Damascus in the month of Ramadan in 1326 and stayed for some weeks. He thought it surpassed all other cities in beauty. He prayed in the Umayyad Mosque and studied with the scholars of the city, receiving licences to teach from several of them.

   He was struck by the endowments of Damascus. Waqfs paid for people who could not afford the Hajj, for wedding clothes for poor brides, for the release of prisoners, and even for the repair of the streets. He tells of a servant boy who dropped and broke a porcelain dish in the street, and of an endowment that paid for a new one so that the boy would not be punished.

   From Damascus he set out with the pilgrim caravan south through the desert to the Hijaz.

   Read more: Cairo, the capital of learning (1260-1517) (Era 6 · Chapter 06)

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   Madinah and Makkah, the Hijaz1326 CE and later years

   Stop 4: Makkah and Madinah

   The caravan reached Madinah first, and Ibn Battuta visited the mosque of the Prophet ﷺ. Then he went on to Makkah and performed his first Hajj in November 1326.

   He did not go home. The pilgrimage had filled him with a wish to see more of the Muslim world. Over the next years he returned to Makkah several times, staying for long periods to study and worship, and he made the Hajj more than once. Makkah was the centre to which all his roads came back, a city where he met pilgrims and scholars from every land and heard of the places he would visit next.

   From the Quran

   قُلْ سِيرُوا۟ فِى ٱلْأَرْضِ فَٱنظُرُوا۟ كَيْفَ بَدَأَ ٱلْخَلْقَ ۚ ثُمَّ ٱللَّهُ يُنشِئُ ٱلنَّشْأَةَ ٱلْـَٔاخِرَةَ ۚ إِنَّ ٱللَّهَ عَلَىٰ كُلِّ شَىْءٍ قَدِيرٌ ۝٢٠

   Say, ˹O Prophet,˺ “Travel throughout the land and see how He originated the creation, then Allah will bring it into being one more time. Surely Allah is Most Capable of everything.

   Read more: The Mongols & the Mamluks (Era 6 · Overview)

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   Mogadishu and Kilwa, East Africac. 1331 CE

   Stop 5: Mogadishu and Kilwa, the Swahili coast

   After travels in Iraq and Persia, Ibn Battuta sailed from Aden down the coast of East Africa. At Mogadishu he found a large and prosperous trading town. When a ship arrived, young men came out in small boats, each offering a covered dish of food to a merchant and naming him as his guest. Scholars and holy men were taken first to meet the sultan. He praised the cloth woven in the town, which was sold as far as Egypt.

   Further south he reached Kilwa, on an island off the coast of what is now Tanzania. He called it one of the most beautiful and best-built towns in the world. Its sultan was famous for his generosity and his raids against non-Muslim peoples of the mainland, and he gave freely to scholars and the poor.

   The Swahili coast, he found, was a Muslim world of its own, joined to Arabia and India by the monsoon winds.

   Read more: Monsoon winds and merchants (from the 7th century) (Era 10 · Chapter 01)

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   Anatolia, Crimea and the steppe1331-1333 CE

   Stop 6: Anatolia and the Golden Horde

   In the early 1330s Ibn Battuta travelled through Anatolia, where many small Turkish states had grown up after the Mongol conquest. He met Orhan, the second ruler of the young Ottoman state at Bursa, and called him the greatest of the Turkish kings in wealth, lands and soldiers. Everywhere he was welcomed by brotherhoods of young men, the akhis, who kept lodges to host travellers.

   He crossed the Black Sea to the Crimea and the steppe of the Golden Horde, ruled by Özbeg Khan, a Muslim Mongol. He travelled by wagon to the khan's camp, a moving city of tents, mosques and markets. Özbeg received him at a Friday audience, seated on a throne with his wives beside him. Ibn Battuta counted him among the seven greatest kings of the world. From the steppe he travelled with one of the khan's wives, a Byzantine princess, to Constantinople.

   Read more: Osman and a frontier principality (c. 1299-1362) (Era 8 · Chapter 01)

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   Delhi, India1334-1342 CE

   Stop 7: Delhi, the city of the sultan

   From the steppe Ibn Battuta crossed Central Asia and Afghanistan and came down through the mountain passes into India. In 1334 he reached Delhi, the capital of the sultan Muhammad ibn Tughluq.

   The sultan was famous for his generosity to foreign scholars and for his sudden anger. He gave Ibn Battuta a large salary and appointed him a judge of Delhi, a post he held for several years. Ibn Battuta admired the sultan's learning and charity, and was frightened by his harsh punishments. At one point he fell out of favour, feared for his life, and withdrew to live as an ascetic.

   In 1342 the sultan forgave him and chose him to lead an embassy to the emperor of China, with gifts and a large escort.

   Read more: The Safavids & the Mughals (Era 9 · Overview)

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   The Maldive Islands1343-1344 CE

   Stop 8: The Maldives

   The embassy to China ended in disaster. On the coast at Calicut, a storm wrecked the ships carrying the gifts, and Ibn Battuta was left with almost nothing. Afraid to go back to Delhi, he sailed to the Maldives, a chain of islands in the Indian Ocean.

   The islands had become Muslim in the 12th century. Their rulers wanted a judge who knew Arabic and the law, and they made Ibn Battuta chief judge. He married into the leading families and tried to enforce the law strictly, including on the women's dress, which caused friction. After about nine months he quarrelled with the chief minister and left. He wrote warmly of the islanders' gentleness and of their trade in coconut fibre and cowrie shells, which were used as money from Africa to China.

   Read more: Monsoon winds and merchants (from the 7th century) (Era 10 · Chapter 01)

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   Samudra Pasai, Sumatra, and Quanzhou, China1345-1346 CE

   Stop 9: Samudra Pasai and China

   By way of Sri Lanka and Bengal, Ibn Battuta sailed east to Sumatra and reached Samudra Pasai, a Muslim sultanate on the northern coast. He stayed about two weeks as the guest of Sultan al-Malik al-Zahir, and admired his piety, his humility and his love of debating with scholars after the Friday prayer.

   The sultan gave him a ship, and he sailed on to China. He landed at Quanzhou, which the Arabs called Zaytun, one of the greatest ports in the world. In the Chinese cities he found Muslim quarters with their own mosques, judges and markets, and he met Muslims from his own part of the world, including a man from near his home in Morocco. He admired Chinese porcelain, paper money and the safety of travel, but he felt a stranger in a land so different from his own.

   Read more: The first sultanates of Sumatra (13th century) (Era 10 · Chapter 02); Muslims in China: from the Tang to Zheng He (7th-15th centuries) (Era 10 · Chapter 05)

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    Fes, Morocco, and Mali1349-1354 CE

    Stop 10: Home to Fes, and across the Sahara to Mali

    Ibn Battuta began the long road home in 1346. Passing through Syria in 1348, he saw the Black Death sweeping through the cities, and in Damascus he joined the crowds praying together for relief. On his way he learned that his mother had died of the plague. In 1349 he reached Fes, the capital of the Marinid sultan of Morocco, and later visited Granada in al-Andalus.

    He set out once more. In 1352 he crossed the Sahara by way of the salt mines of Taghaza and reached the Mali Empire, where he met Mansa Sulayman, the brother of Mansa Musa. He praised the safety of the roads, the care people took over the Friday prayer, and the way children were made to memorise the Quran. He also criticised some customs he found strange. He returned to Fes in 1354.

    At the sultan's command he dictated his travels to the scholar Ibn Juzayy, who completed the book in 1355. Ibn Battuta spent his last years as a judge in Morocco and died around 1368.

    Read more: Timbuktu: mosques, scholars and manuscripts (14th-16th centuries) (Era 7 · Chapter 04)