Researchers
Ibn Battuta
Ibn Battuta was born in Tangier in 1304 and left as a young man for the Hajj, not coming home for nearly thirty years. He covered about 120,000 kilometres across Africa and Asia: Egypt to Mecca, Iraq to Anatolia, the Maldives where he sat as qadi, Delhi where he served the sultan, then China which he reached as an envoy, and across the Sahara to Mali on his last journey. He married and divorced, worked and was robbed, fell ill and fought pirates — all recorded with a curious traveller's eye. Settled at last in Morocco, he dictated his memories to Ibn Juzayy, and the Rihla became Islamic civilisation's most famous travel book — a Muslim western eye on half the fourteenth-century world. In him the Tangier youth became the Muslim world's parable: that the whole earth can be a liveable Islamic home, and that a pilgrimage can turn into an entire life.