One Maghrebi’s Rihla out-mileaged Polo and Zheng He
Ibn Battuta of Tangier (24 February 1304–1368/69) spent roughly 1325 to 1354 roaming Africa, Asia, and Iberia. Near life’s end he dictated The Rihla—about 117,000 kilometres of travel in all, more than Zheng He’s roughly 50,000 or Marco Polo’s roughly 24,000.
His name is a patronymic meaning ‘son of a duckling’, and nearly everything known about him comes from his own book. He was an Arabised Berber of the Lawata, from a Tangier family of Islamic judges. On 14 June 1325, aged 21, he left alone for Mecca, a pilgrimage that normally took sixteen months, and did not see Morocco again for 24 years. Crossing the Abd al-Wadid and Hafsid sultanates by way of Tlemcen, Béjaïa and Tunis, he mostly travelled with caravans to avoid robbers, and he married in Sfax only to split up soon after.
By early spring 1326 he had covered over 3,500 kilometres to Alexandria, where a sheikh named Burhanuddin supposedly predicted his wandering life. From Cairo he took detours through Mamluk lands, including Damascus, where he spent Ramadan before a 1,300-kilometre caravan south to Medina and on to his first hajj. On 17 November 1326 he joined pilgrims crossing the Najd by night to Najaf, then broke away for six months through Basra, Isfahan and Shiraz.
In Baghdad he rode for a while with Abu Sa’id, last ruler of the unified Ilkhanate, before heading up the Silk Road to Tabriz and later to Mosul and Mardin. The Rihla says he then lived in Mecca from 1327 to 1330, though muddled dates suggest he may have left after 1328. Sewn-plank boats carried him down the Red Sea to Yemen and Aden.
He reached Mogadishu in 1332 at its height, praising its merchants and exported cloth and naming its Somali sultan, Abu Bakr ibn Shaikh ’Umar. After a night in Mombasa he visited Kilwa, whose sultan’s reach ran from Malindi to Inhambane. Then, hoping for work with Delhi’s Sultan Muhammad bin Tughluq, he struck out overland through Anatolia, meeting the young artisans’ fityan brotherhoods in Antalya.
Source: Ibn Battuta
