Ep. 19. The Incredible Journey of Medieval Adventurer Ibn Battuta

When most people are asked to name an epic traveller from history, they usually come up with names like Marco Polo, Christopher Columbus, Magellan, or any number of other well-known European explorers and adventurers that come to mind.  Very few could name an explorer or traveller outside the realm of medieval and renaissance Europe, despite the obvious reality that there was at the same time, an enormous, incredibly diverse and highly interconnected parallel world outside their own relatively isolated domain, in which the Islamic faith had established networks of sultanates and empires extending from the Westernmost edge of Africa, all the way to China. 

This was a world in which newly conquered peoples were only just starting to assimilate the Arab Islamic culture, adopting – and adapting - this new faith to their own tastes and styles in an organic process of fusion that few Westerners ever credit other cultures as being capable of. What if I told you that around the same time of the celebrated Marco Polo, there was a young Muslim adventurer, who travelled 5 times as far. From his homeland in Morocco, through the middle East, doing numerous side-trips- north into Russia, with Mongol khans of the Golden Horde and Ilkhanate and Genoese traders, and then south again to India's Tughlaq Sultanate and South East Asia, dwelling in the court of mighty Sultans as well as hermits in lonely caves. He would go on to loop the middle East and Mediterranean and then sail down the mysterious East coast of Africa only to weave his way back north and on to modern Indonesia, Malaya and on to Yuan Dynasty China. Regularly stopping for months at a time to study and work under the greatest teachers of the day, on his journey, he would meet mystics and maniacs, firewalkers and killer elephants; princes and pirates. He would marry and divorce ten times; win and lose several fortunes; undertake the sacred Hajj 5 times; outrun the bubonic plague; and after a quarter of a century eventually make his way home, only to travel across the Sahara into deepest Africa. 

He would go on to recount his journey, the people he met and the cultures he encountered in rich and vivid detail, in a precious book that would eventually make him a hero throughout the entire Islamic world, and a household name, much as Marco Polo is to us. If this sounds like a rollicking adventure worth exploring, then join us, as we dive into the life and times of Ibn Battuta (بْنُ بَطُّوطَةُ) - pilgrim, intellectual, adventurer, hustler and all out freeloading tourist whose exploits across 40 modern countries over thirty years held the record for the longest individual journey until the advent of the jet-age, making Marco Polo’s journey look like a Contiki tour.
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To access a pdf copy of Prof Gibb's translation of Ibn Battuta's "Rihla" please visit our resource section at www.heroesandlegends.com.au  

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