In the year 1325 CE, a twenty-one-year-old scholar from Tangier left his mother's house to go on hajj. He was Muhammad ibn Abdullah ibn Battuta. He had trained in Maliki fiqh in his hometown and had received the standard education of a young North African qadi. He expected the journey to Mecca and back to take one year. He did not see his mother again for thirty.
He wrote at the beginning of the Rihla, the book he dictated on his return: I set out alone, with no travel companion whose company would cheer me, and no caravan whose part I might make. My mother's tears and my father's tears fell on me at parting. I was young; I had no wife.
He traveled east from Morocco to Alexandria. In Alexandria he met a Sufi shaykh who said: I see that you love to travel. You will pass through the lands of the Turks and the Persians and the Indians and the Chinese, and I have three brothers in those countries. When you meet them, give them my greetings. Ibn Battuta laughed at the prophecy. He was going to Mecca.
He continued to Cairo. He continued to Damascus. He performed the hajj. Then, instead of returning home, he decided to see Iraq and Persia. Then East Africa. Then the Yemen. Then he crossed the Indian Ocean to Zanzibar and Mogadishu. Then back to Mecca for another hajj. Then Anatolia. Then the Golden Horde in the Russian steppes. Then Constantinople. Then Bukhara. Then Afghanistan. Then India. He arrived at the court of Muhammad ibn Tughluq, Sultan of Delhi.
The Sultan of Delhi was a violent and unpredictable man. He gave Ibn Battuta the position of Maliki chief judge of Delhi. Ibn Battuta held it for eight years. He described the court in the Rihla in detail: the wealth, the cruelties, the executions, the pomp, the corpses left in the streets after political killings, the theological debates in the evening. He lived among these things and served the Sultan through them.
Then the Sultan sent him as ambassador to the Chinese Emperor. He was to lead a delegation and gifts to Beijing. Ibn Battuta accepted. The delegation was shipwrecked off the coast of Malabar. Most of the gifts and companions were lost. He barely escaped with his life. Rather than return to face the Sultan, who might have him killed for losing the mission, Ibn Battuta continued east on his own.
He sailed through Sri Lanka. He climbed to the shrine of Adam on the peak (Adam's Peak) and prayed there. He went through the Maldives, where he served briefly as a qadi and married the daughter of the vizier. He continued to Sumatra. He reached Chinese ports. He described the city of Guangzhou (Zaitun in the Arabic sources) in detail. He met the three brothers of the Sufi shaykh from Alexandria, in three different cities: one in the Indus valley, one in the Malabar, and one in China. He remembered the prophecy and delivered the greetings.
He came back through Persia during the Black Death. He caught the plague. He recovered. He returned to Mecca for his fourth or fifth hajj. He crossed to Damascus, where he learned that his mother had died in Morocco fifteen years earlier and had never known where her son was.
He went home, finally, in 1349 CE. He was in his forties. His mother was gone. He had married many times, had many children, most of whom he had left behind in different countries. He had grown into a middle-aged man who no longer looked like the youth who had set out.
But he was still curious. Within a year he was traveling again. He went to Al-Andalus and saw Granada, still Muslim, in the last years of the Nasrid kingdom. Then he crossed the Sahara, joined a caravan of gold traders, and reached the great Muslim empire of Mali. He met the Mansa (Emperor) of Mali. He described Timbuktu, Gao, and the cities of the Niger bend. He was the first Arab traveler to give a detailed eyewitness account of West Africa.
He finally returned to Fez in 1354 CE. The Marinid Sultan Abu Inan Faris commissioned a scribe, Ibn Juzayy, to take down Ibn Battuta's travels. Ibn Juzayy sat with Ibn Battuta and wrote out the whole Rihla, in some places from Ibn Battuta's memory, in some places from notes, in some places supplementing what Ibn Battuta had said with material from earlier travel writers. The book runs to more than a thousand pages in modern editions. It is our most detailed source for the fourteenth-century Muslim world.
Ibn Battuta had traveled some seventy-five thousand miles. He had traveled further than any human being had ever traveled, before or for a long time after. He had visited every major Muslim country of the fourteenth century, and many non-Muslim ones. He had crossed three continents.
He died in Morocco around 1369 CE.
What the story teaches. A pilgrimage becomes a life. Ibn Battuta set out on a one-year journey to Mecca. He returned thirty years later with a book. He did not plan the book. He did not know the book was coming. What he did was answer, at every fork in the road, the question: shall I keep going? And every time he answered yes, and every time he took what came, until the sum of what came was the Rihla. The Muslim world of the fourteenth century, from Andalus to China, from Bukhara to Mali, has been given to us by one man who kept walking. A hajj that lasted thirty years is not a hajj that got delayed. It is a hajj that opened out into every direction Islam had touched.