The Travels of Ibn Battutah

The Travels of IBN Battutah, Ibn Battutah ethnographer, bigrapher, anecdotal historian and occasional botanist was just 21 when he set out in 1325 from his native Tangier on a pilgramage to Mecca. He did not return to Morocco for another 29 years, traveling instead through more than 40 countries on the modern map, covering 75,000 miles and getting as far north as the Volga, as far east as China, and as far south as Tanzania. He wrote of his travels, and comes across as a superb ethnographer, biographer, anecdotal historian, and occasional botanist and gastronome. With this edition by Mackintosh-Smith, Battuta'sTravelstakes its place alongside other indestructible masterpieces of the travel writing genre.

About the Author

Abu Abdullah Muhammad Ibn Battuta, also known as Shams ad Din (February 25, 1304 1368 or 1369), was a Moroccan Berber Islamic traveller known for his fascinating travels published in the Rihla (literally,The Journey). Spanning thirty years and most of the known Islamic world, he then extended beyond North Africa, the Horn of Africa, West Africa, Southern Europe and Eastern Europe in the West, to the Middle East, South Asia, Central Asia, Southeast Asia and China in the East, a distance surpassing his near contemporary Marco Polo. Ibn Battuta is considered one of the greatest travellers of all time.He travelled more than 75,000 miles (121,000 km), a figure unsurpassed by any individual traveller until the coming of the Steam Age some 450 years later.The Rihla supplies biographical background. He was born into a Berber family of Islamic legal scholars inTangier, Morocco, on 25 February 1304, during the reign of the Marinid dynasty. As a young man he would have studied at a Sunni Maliki madhhab, (Islamic jurisprudenceschool), the dominant form of education in North Africa at that time. In June 1325, at the age of twenty one, Ibn Battuta set off from his hometown on a hajj, or pilgrimage, to Mecca, a journey that would take sixteen months. He would not see Morocco again for twenty four years.