Qualla: The Travels of Ibn Battuta

The Travels of Ibn Battuta: Introduction

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Boubloub, CC BY-SA 4.0. Seventy-three thousand miles. One hundred seventeen thousand kilometers. In an age when most people died within a day's walk of where they were born, Ibn Battuta spent twenty-nine years in motion, and then sat down in Fez to dictate it all to a young Andalusian scholar named Ibn Juzayy. The resulting manuscript, known most commonly as the Rihla, is the single source for his adventures. There is no indication he kept a journal. When he came to tell it, he told it from memory, and sometimes from other people's books. The travelogue is imperfect, possibly plagiarized in parts, and irreplaceable. It is the closest thing we have to a fourteenth-century witness to the Muslim world from Morocco to China.

Image: Boubloub | CC BY-SA 4.0

The Travels of Ibn Battuta: The Pious Men of Alexandria

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sladew Uploaded by Sladew at en.wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0. In the early spring of 1326, after a journey of over 3,500 kilometers from Tangier, Ibn Battuta arrived at the port of Alexandria. He was twenty-one. He met two ascetic men there who set the shape of everything that followed. Sheikh Burhanuddin told him: 'It seems to me you are f...

Image: Sladew Uploaded by Sladew at en.wikipedia | CC BY-SA 3.0

The Travels of Ibn Battuta: East African Coast

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Anonymous (Turkey)Unknown author, Public domain. On his second pilgrimage, Ibn Battuta kept going south. From Aden he sailed to Zeila on the Somali coast, then to Mogadishu, which he described as an exceedingly large city in 1331 at the height of its prosperity. Mogadishu exported high-quality fabric to Egypt. Its sultan, Abu B...

Image: Anonymous (Turkey)Unknown author | Public domain

The Travels of Ibn Battuta: Delhi's Erratic Sultan

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nvvchar (talk), CC BY-SA 3.0. Ibn Battuta reached the Indus River on 12 September 1333. In Delhi he became qadi, a judge, to the Sultan Muhammad bin Tughluq, who was erratic even by the standards of the time. For six years Ibn Battuta lived a precarious life between high favor and suspicion of treason. The Su...

Image: Nvvchar (talk) | CC BY-SA 3.0

The Travels of Ibn Battuta: The Empire of Mali

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Petar Milošević, CC BY-SA 3.0. In 1351 Ibn Battuta left Fez and set out for the kingdom of Mali. He bought camels in Sijilmasa on the northern edge of the Sahara, waited four months, and joined a caravan in February 1352. Twenty-five days later he reached Taghaza, where the houses and the mosque were built fro...

Image: Petar Milošević | CC BY-SA 3.0

The Travels of Ibn Battuta: Memory, Plagiarism, and Truth

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sladew Uploaded by Sladew at en.wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0. When Ibn Battuta dictated the Rihla to Ibn Juzayy in 1354, he relied on memory and on books. Ibn Juzayy did not acknowledge his sources. Passages describing Damascus, Mecca, and Medina were copied from the Andalusian traveler Ibn Jubayr, written 150 years earlier. Palestine descr...

Image: Sladew Uploaded by Sladew at en.wikipedia | CC BY-SA 3.0