Ibn Battuta

Their life

A young Moroccan legal scholar who left Tangier at twenty-one to make the hajj and did not come home for twenty-four years, travelling perhaps 75,000 miles across North and West Africa, Arabia, East Africa, Persia, India, the Maldives, Central Asia and — by his account — China. He served as a judge in Delhi under the volatile Sultan Muhammad bin Tughluq and in the Maldives, was shipwrecked, robbed and nearly executed, and dictated the whole account, the Rihla, to a court scribe on the orders of the Sultan of Morocco. Parts of it are demonstrably lifted from earlier writers and some episodes are doubted outright, which makes it both the richest single portrait of the fourteenth-century Muslim world and a document that has to be read with care.

Known for

• The Rihla travel narrative
• Roughly 75,000 miles of travel
• Qadi in Delhi and the Maldives
• Eyewitness account of Mali
• Pilgrimage that became a lifetime
• Portrait of the 14th-century Muslim world

The road they walked

Abu Abdallah Muhammad ibn Battuta was born in Tangier on 24 February 1304, into a family of Islamic jurists, the qadis and legal scholars who gave order to the Muslim world. He grew up in the Marinid-era Maghrib, with Tangier a busy port on the strait between Africa and Europe. Trained in Maliki law, he was bred for a respectable career. In June 1325, at twenty-one, he set out to make the pilgrimage to Mecca. He later said he went alone, with no companion and no caravan he cared to join, driven by an overpowering impulse to see the holy places.

The world he walked into was unusually connected. From Morocco to Sumatra, a shared language of scripture, law, and Arabic gave a trained scholar a passport that few other travelers had. He could expect hospitality in Sufi lodges, a seat among local jurists, and often a gift from a ruler eager for news and learned company. The hajj stretched into years of travel through Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Persia, then Mecca again, then East Africa and Anatolia, the steppe of the Golden Horde, and Constantinople, where he says he visited the Byzantine court. He reached the Indus in 1333. In Delhi, Sultan Muhammad bin Tughluq made him a qadi, with a generous salary and a perilous position. The Sultan was erratic and dangerous to those around him, and Ibn Battuta fell under suspicion after a friend's disgrace. He survived, in his telling, by turning ascetic, and the Sultan later sent him as envoy to the Yuan court of China. The embassy went wrong from the start, with a shipwreck off the Malabar coast, and he did not return to the Sultan.

He spent about a year and a half in the Maldives, where he served as a judge and married into local society, and then left after quarrels over his strict reforms. He went on to Sri Lanka, Bengal, and Southeast Asia, and says he reached China, though historians doubt how much of that portion he actually saw. He returned to Morocco in 1349, then visited Granada and crossed the Sahara to the empire of Mali in 1351-53. Around 1356, at the command of the Marinid sultan Abu Inan, he dictated his recollections to the scholar Ibn Juzayy, who shaped them into the Rihla. It is a vivid and indispensable record, but it relies on memory, since his notes were reportedly lost to robbers, and some passages closely echo earlier writers such as Ibn Jubayr. Scholars still debate which episodes are firsthand.

How their story ended

Ibn Battuta died in Morocco in 1368 or 1369, the sources giving slightly different dates. After dictating the Rihla he is thought to have lived quietly, serving as a judge in a Moroccan town, and little is documented about his final years. The cause of his death is not recorded, and his tomb in Tangier is traditionally shown to visitors, though its authenticity cannot be confirmed.

In their words

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