Ibn battuta biography journey concert

Maghrebi traveller and scholar (1304–1368/1369)

For other uses, see Ibn Battuta (disambiguation).

Ibn Battuta (; 24 February 1304 – 1368/1369), was a Maghrebi traveller, explorer and scholar. Over a period of thirty years from 1325 to 1354, Ibn Battuta visited much of Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and the Iberian Peninsula. Near the end of his life, he dictated an account of his journeys, titled A Gift to Those Who Contemplate the Wonders of Cities and the Marvels of Travelling, but commonly known as The Rihla.

Ibn Battuta travelled more than any other explorer in pre-modern history, totalling around 117,000 km (73,000 mi), surpassing Zheng He with about 50,000 km (31,000 mi) and Marco Polo with 24,000 km (15,000 mi).

Name

"Ibn Battuta" is a patronymic, literally meaning 'son of the duckling'. His most common full name is given as AbuAbdullahMuhammad ibn Battuta. In his travelogue, The Rihla, he gives his full name as "Shams al-Din Abu’Abdallah Muhammad ibn’Abdallah ibn Muhammad ibn Ibrahim ibn Muhammad ibn Yusuf Lawati al-Tanji ibn Battuta".

Early life

All that is known about Ibn Battuta's life comes from the autobiographical information included in the account of his travels, which records that he was of Berber descent, born into a family of Islamic legal scholars (known as qadis in the Muslim traditions of Morocco) in Tangier on 24 February 1304, during the reign of the Marinid dynasty. His family belonged to a Berber tribe clan known as the Lawata. As a young man, he would have studied at a SunniMaliki school, the dominant form of education in North Africa at that time. Maliki Muslims requested that Ibn Battuta serve as their religious judge, as he was from an area where it was practised.

Journeys

It was on a diplomatic mission for Tughlak that Battuta arrived in Kerala. On the Malabar coast, he survived a ship-wreck and a near-drowning. The adventures of Ibn Battuta in Kerala, but also pretty much everywhere on his travels, are a litany of troubles. He survives brigands, kidnappings, wars, shipwrecks, pirates, starvation, and disease. He stares death in the face so many times in his narrative that I lost count when I read it. And he is not a brave man! His rihla is full of honest detail about trembling with fear, begging for mercy, getting ready to meet his Maker, and then somehow surviving yet another danger, in some cases almost comically. At one point, he writes, the men who were directed to kill him forgot to, alhamdulillah, onwards and upwards.

This was the standard lot of the medieval traveller— danger, that is, not the escapes. Famously, the word travel is etymologically related to travail, which in turn has its origins in the Latin noun trapezium—a three-pronged metal device that ancient Romans used to torture prisoners. Today, for us, travel is a reprieve from the travails of work and daily life. But in those early days, travel was fraught with travail. Medieval roadways were infested with brigands while pirate ships trolled the high seas. In The Medieval Invention of Travel, Sharon Legassie points out that “in the Middle Ages, travel was nasty, brutish and long.” When setting out on a pilgrimage or a trading journey, medieval travellers could look forward to weeks and months of slow and life-threatening travel, which often meant that they were effectively severing domestic ties for the duration of their journeys. By the time Ibn Battuta returned home, his infant son and his parents were dead.

This excerpt from Airplane Mode by Shahnaz Habib has been published with permission from Westland Books.

Jordi Savall is a true musical pioneer, blurring boundaries between early music, world music and folk traditions, and combining vibrant performance with searching scholarship into undiscovered aspects of musical history. He has also entertained and captivated audiences at the Edinburgh International Festival for over a decade.

Savall assembles musicians from Europe and the Middle East, India, China and North Africa – alongside his own remarkable Hespèrion XXI early music ensemble – for a journey into the unknown with a man considered by many to be the greatest traveller of all time: Ibn Battuta.

Born into a family of Islamic scholars in north Africa in the 14th century, Ibn Battuta travelled to the extremes of the world as it was then known, covering an estimated 120,000km from Europe to China, Russia to Sri Lanka. His writings provide fascinating glimpses into medieval life right across the globe, as well as documenting the richness of music he encountered.

Savall’s evening-long excursion is an immense literary, historical, geographical and musical fresco that contrasts medieval European music with sounds from across Africa, Asia and the Middle East, revealing compelling insights into contrasting cultures – and the connections that unite them.

Narrated in English with supertitles.

Made possible through the PLACE programme

Welcome to this tour of Ibn Battuta's medieval travels!

You will be following in the footsteps of this famous 14th century Muslim traveler, exploring the places he visited and the people he encountered. To help you learn more about his adventures there will be images of the people and places he saw, information on the food he might have tasted, and "side trips" into the past and future.

Ibn Battuta started on his travels in 1325, when he was 20 years old. His main reason to travel was to go on a Hajj, or a Pilgrimage to Mecca, to fulfill the fifth pillar of Isla.. But his traveling went on for around 29 years and he covered about 75,000 miles visiting the equivalent of 44 modern countries which were then mostly under the governments of Muslim leaders of the World of Islam, or "Dar al-Islam".

He met many dangers and had numerous adventures along the way. He was attacked by bandits, almost drowned in a sinking ship, and nearly beheaded by a tyrant ruler. He also had a few marriages and lovers and fathered several children on his travels!

Near the end of Ibn Battuta's life, the Sultan of Morocco insisted that Ibn Battuta dictate the story of his travels to a scholar and today we can read translations of that account, which was originally titled Tuhfat al-anzar fi gharaaib al-amsar wa ajaaib al-asfar, or A Gift to Those Who Contemplate the Wonders of Cities and the Marvels of Traveling. 

That title is a bit of a mouthful so the text is generally just called Ibn Battuta's Rihla, or Journey.