The Rihla

Ibn Battuta · 1325 CE – 1354 CE · Earth

The Rihla — Ibn Battuta · 1325 CE – 1354 CE · Earth — Recorded expedition route · schematic map

Make the pilgrimage to Mecca and visit the Prophet’s tomb at Medina; the wish ‘to travel through the earth’, as he called it, grew on the way.

Historical context

In the fourteenth century the Islamic world stretched from al-Andalus to Southeast Asia, bound together by pilgrimage, scholarship, trade and a shared law that let a qadi find work far from home. Ibn Battuta moved through it for nearly thirty years. All we know of his journeys comes from the Rihla, which he dictated in Fez to Ibn Juzayy, who shaped it, borrowed from earlier writers and finished it in December 1355.

The voyage, step by step

  1. Setting out from Tangier

    1325 CE

    A young jurist from a family of qadis, Abu Abdallah ibn Battuta leaves his native Tangier alone on pilgrimage to Mecca and the Prophet’s tomb at Medina, the start of nearly thirty years of travel.

  2. Pilgrimage to Mecca

    1326 CE

    Turned back from the Red Sea at Aydhab by a war, he goes round by Palestine and Syria, leaves Damascus with the pilgrim caravan and makes his first hajj in November 1326; then, instead of going home, he joins the caravan of Iraq.

  3. Judging in Delhi

    1334 CE

    After the long way round by Anatolia, the Golden Horde, Constantinople and Central Asia, he reaches the Indus in September 1333; Sultan Muhammad ibn Tughluq makes him qadi of Delhi.

  4. By sea to China

    1346 CE

    Sent as the sultan’s envoy to China, he loses the embassy in a storm at Calicut, serves as qadi in the Maldives and sails by Ceylon, Bengal and Sumatra to Quanzhou; how much of China he saw is disputed.

  5. Across the Sahara to Mali

    1352 CE

    His last great journey crosses the desert to the kingdom of Mali, where he spends eight months at the court of Mansa Sulayman before coming home by Timbuktu, Gao and Takedda.

Outcome

Travelled for nearly thirty years through North Africa, Arabia, East Africa, Anatolia, the Golden Horde, Central Asia, India, the Maldives, by his account China, al-Andalus and Mali, then dictated his account in Fez to Ibn Juzayy, who finished it in December 1355.

Ibn Battuta

Moroccan jurist and traveller who, by Ross Dunn’s reckoning, covered some 73,000 miles, about 117,000 kilometres, across Africa, Asia and Europe, and dictated the account known as the Rihla.

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Sources

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