When Abu ‘Abdallah ibn Battuta left his home in Tangier in 1325, he was twenty-one years old, a young man with a scholar’s curiosity and a pilgrim’s devotion. His original purpose was straightforward: to undertake the long journey to Mecca and fulfil the sacred duty of the Hajj. Yet what began as a religious pilgrimage became a lifelong journey.
Over the next twenty-nine years, he would traverse deserts and oceans, empires and kingdoms, travelling more than seventy-five thousand miles—three times the distance Marco Polo claimed to have covered. When he returned home decades later, he had become not only Islam’s most accomplished traveller but also one of history’s most astute observers of the medieval world.
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