The man who traveled that distance was, according to his chronicler, "the traveler of the age." He was not the Venetian Marco Polo, but Ibn Battuta of Tangier, who set out eastward in 1325, the year after Polo died. Ibn Battuta's wanderings stretched from Fez to Beijing, and although he resolved not to travel the same path more than once, he made four Hajj pilgrimages to Makkah, in addition to crossing what, on a modern map, would be more than 40 countries. He met some 60 heads of state—and served as advisor to two dozen of them. His travel memoir, known as the Rihla, written after his journeys were complete, names more than 2000 people whom he met or whose tombs he visited. His descriptions of life in Turkey, Central Asia, East and West Africa, the Maldives, the Malay Peninsula and parts of India are a leading source of contemporary knowledge about those areas, and in some cases they are the only source. His word-portraits of sovereigns, ministers and other powerful men are often uniquely astute, and are all the more intimate for being colored by his personal experiences and opinions.

Ibn Battuta was born in the port town of Tangier, then an important debarkation point for travelers to Gibraltar, beyond which lay al-Andalus, Arab Spain, by then reduced from its former extent to include only the brilliant but beleaguered kingdom of Granada.

At age 21, Ibn Battuta set forth at a propitious time in history. The concept of the 'umma, the brotherhood of all believers that transcends tribe and race, had spiritually unified the Muslim world, which stretched from the Atlantic eastward to the Pacific. Islam was the world's most sophisticated civilization during the entire millennium following the fall of Rome. Its finest period was the 800 years between Islam's great first expansion in the seventh and eighth centuries and the advent of European transoceanic mercantilism in the 15th century. During that time, Islam had breathed new life into the sciences, commerce, the arts, literature, law and governance.

Thus the early 14th century, an era remarkable in Europe for gore and misery, was a magnificent time in Dar al-Islam, the Muslim world. A dozen or more varied forms of Islamic culture existed, all sharing the core values taught in the Qur'an, all influencing each other through the constant traffic of scholars, doctors, artists, craftsmen, traders and proselytizing mystics. It was an era of superb buildings, both secular and sacred, a time of intellect and scholarship, of the stability of a single faith and law regulating everyday behavior, of powerful economic inventions such as joint ventures, checks and letters of credit. Ibn Battuta became the first and perhaps the only man to see this world nearly in its entirety

n Tangier, Shams al-Din Abu 'Abdallah Muhammad ibn 'Abdallah ibn Muhammad ibn Ibrahim ibn Muhammad ibn Ibrahim ibn Yusuf al-Lawati al-Tanji Ibn Battuta was born into a well-established family of qadis (judges) on February 25, 1304, the year 723 of the Muslim calendar. Beyond the names of his father and grandfathers that are part of his own name, we know little about his family or his biography, for the Rihla is virtually our sole source of knowledge of him, and it rarely mentions family matters, which would have been considered private. But we can surmise that, like most children of his time, Ibn Battuta would have started school at the age of six, and his literate life would have begun with the Qur'an. His class—held in a mosque or at a teacher's home—would in all likelihood have been funded by a waqf, a religious philanthropic trust or foundation, into which the pious could channel their obligatory charitable giving (zakat). Ibn Battuta's parents would have paid his teachers an additional modest sum, in installments due when the boy achieved certain well-defined milestones.

The curriculum of a 14th-century classroom would, in some ways, look remarkably up to date today. Learning, in the first instance, meant the Qur'an, but for urban children especially it did not stop there. Elementary arithmetic was obligatory, for everyone needed to be able to carry on everyday transactions. Secondary education transmitted the bulk of what are now termed vocational skills, including the more complex calculations needed for such practical purposes as the division of an estate among heirs, the surveying of land, or the distribution of profits from a commercial venture. Tertiary or higher education, however, was as much about character development as the subjects taught. Foremost were the refinements of Arabic grammar, since Arabic was not only the language of the Qur'an but also the language of all educated, let alone scholarly, discourse, and the Muslim lingua franca from Timbuktu to Canton. Other subjects taught would have included history, ethics, law, geography and at least some of the military arts.

There were differences from today's practices, too. Young Ibn Battuta's most important goal, as for most young students of his time, was to learn the Qur'an by heart: He refers many times in the Rihla to reciting the entire Qur'an aloud in one day while traveling—and a few times, when he felt he needed moral stiffening, twice. Knowledge of the Qur'an took precedence over all other intellectual pursuits, and students whose means permitted traveled from one end of Dar al-Islam to the other to learn its subtleties and its interpretation from the wisest men of the day. Every provincial scholar who desired distinction at home aspired to study in Makkah, Madinah, Baghdad, Damascus, and Cairo—a kind of scholarly Grand Tour. Wandering scholars were given modest free meals and a place to stay in the madrasas that dotted the Muslim world, or if no better accommodation were available they slept on mosque floors. No institutional degrees existed; instead the student received a certificate from his teachers. The highest accolade was adah, meaning "one who is adept" at manners, taste, wit, grace, gentility, and above all, "knowledge carried lightly."

Ibn Battuta's knowledge of the subtleties of Arabic identified him anywhere as an educated gentleman, but Tangier was not one of the great centers of learning. The knowledge of fiqh, or religious law, that he acquired there might perhaps be described as B-level work at a B-list school. So, armed with his earnest but hardly world-tested knowledge, Ibn Battuta set out eastward from Tangier to make his first Hajj, or pilgrimage, to Makkah. In the words he dictated to his scribe three decades later, one can still detect both youthful excitement and youthful misgiving:

"I set out alone, having neither fellow-traveler in whose companionship I might find cheer, nor caravan whose party I might join, but swayed by an overmastering impulse within me, and a desire long-cherished in my bosom to visit these illustrious sanctuaries [of Makkah and Madinah]. So I braced my resolution to quit all my dear ones...and forsook my home as birds forsake their nests. My parents being yet in the bonds of life, it weighed sorely upon me to part from them, and both they and I were afflicted-with sorrow at this separation."

hirty years were to pass before Ibn Battuta hung up his sandals for good. He set out a pilgrim, probably planning to return to Tangier, but along the way he grew into one of the rarest kinds of travelers: one who voyaged for the sake of voyaging. In the coming years, he would change his itinerary almost on impulse, at the merest hint of the chance to see some new part of Dar al-Islam, to visit a scholar, a revered teacher, or a sultan.

Time after time he set out for a destination in a roundabout, or even an entirely opposite, direction. Once, a mere 40 days by sail from India but facing a months-long wait for favorable winds, he instead set out on a land route that took him there by way of Turkey, a Central Asia and the Hindu Kush, a journey of more than a year.

Hints of the persistence that marked his life appear early on. From Tangier he proceeded east across Mediterranean Morocco and Ifriqiyyah (now Algeria) to Tunis. On the way, two fellow travelers fell ill with a fever. One died; from the other, unscrupulous government agents confiscated his entire estate, which he was carrying, in gold, to his needy heirs. Ibn Battuta himself was so ill that he strapped himself to the saddle of his mule. Yet fare forward he did, determined that "if God decrees my death, it shall be on the road with my face set towards the land of the Hijaz" and Makkah.

He also learned early the manners and courtesies of the road:

At last we came to the town of Tunis.... Townsfolk came forward on all sides with greetings and questions to one another. But not a soul said a word of greeting to me, since there was none of them that I knew. I felt so sad at heart on account of my loneliness that I could not restrain the tears that started to my eyes, and wept bitterly. But one of the pilgrims, realizing the cause of my distress, came up to me with a greeting and friendly welcome, and continued to comfort me with friendly talk until I entered the city, where I lodged in the College of the Booksellers.

It was Ibn Battuta's first and last recorded bout of homesickness. The pilgrim's kindness and the hospitality of the College of the Booksellers made for what was literally a rite of passage. His home was now the fraternity of the 'umma, warmed by the company of the educated men, the 'ulama, whom he would meet in palace courts and madrasas wherever he traveled in Dar al-Islam.

In Tunis, Ibn Battuta joined a caravan headed for Alexandria. There, two things happened to him that, as he relates it, set his sights forever on the travels he eventually undertook. In the first,

I met the pious ascetic Burhan al-Din,...whose hospitality I enjoyed for three days. One day he said to me, "I see that you are fond of traveling through foreign lands." I replied, "Yes, I am" (though as yet I had no thoughts of going to such distant lands as India or China). Then he said, "You must certainly visit my brother Farid al-Din in India, and my brother Rukn al-Din in Sind [Pakistan], and my brother Burhan al-Din in China. When you find them, give them greetings from me." I was amazed at his prediction, but the idea of going to these countries once cast into my mind, my journey never ceased until I had met these three and conveyed his greeting to them.

A few days later, while the guest of the pious Shaykh al-Murshidi, Ibn Battuta had a dream:

I was on the wing of a great bird which was flying me toward Makkah, then to Yemen, then eastward, and thereafter going south, then flying far eastward, and finally landing in a dark, green country, where it left me.... Next morning, the Shaykh interpreted it to me, "You will make the Hajj and visit the Tomb [of the Prophet], and you will travel through Yemen, Iraq, the country of the Turks, and India. You will stay there a long time and meet my brother Dilshad the Indian, who will rescue you from a danger into which you will fall." Never since I departed from him have I received aught but good fortune.

The life-saving Dilshad did indeed arrive to rescue Ibn Battuta from danger in India, and the last sentence quoted above must imply that one breathtaking brush with death after another was in fact "good fortune" when compared to the more catastrophic alternative.

airo was Ibn Battuta's first taste of Muslim civilization on a grand scale. He entered Egypt at a time when a far-sighted ruler, a good administrative bureaucracy and a strong economy reinforced each other and together encouraged peace, prosperity, and prestige. Egypt held a virtual monopoly on trade with Asia, which did much to enrich the Mamluk regime, swell the sails of middle-class prosperity, and drive forward the ship of state. To the young man from Tangier, it was nothing short of wonderful:

It is said that in Cairo there are 12,000 water carriers who transport water on camels, 30,000 hirers of mules and donkeys, and on the Nile 36,000 boats belonging to the sultan and his subjects, which sail upstream to Upper Egypt and downstream to Alexandria and Damietta laden with goods and profitable merchandise of all kinds. On the banks of the Nile opposite Cairo is a place known as The Garden, which is a pleasure park and promenade containing many beautiful gardens, for the people of Cairo are given to pleasure and amusements.... The madrasas cannot be counted for multitude.... The Maristan hospital has no description adequate to its beauties....

But Makkah was still Ibn Battuta's goal. He sailed up the Nile and caravanned east to 'Aydhab on the Red Sea coast, a transit town "brackish of water and flaming of air." Unfortunately, he arrived at a moment when the ruling clan was in revolt against their Mamluk sovereign in Cairo. So, making the best out of the worst—something he became quite adept at—Ibn Battuta returned to Cairo and crossed the Sinai by camel, sojourning in the khans and cities of Palestine and Syria till he reached Damascus, where he could join the annual Hajj caravan to Makkah. The fact that another caravan also left annually from Cairo tells us something of Ibn Battuta's temperament: Rather than endure a brief residence in Cairo, he chose to extend his travels.

In Damascus, one of his first stops was the great mosque, which stands today. He reflected on its pragmatic adaptiveness:

The Friday Mosque, known as the Umayyad Mosque, is the most magnificent in the world, the finest in construction, and the noblest in beauty, grace, and perfection.... The site of the mosque was a [Greek Orthodox] church. When the Muslims captured Damascus, one of their commanders entered from one side by the sword and reached as far as the middle of the church. The other entered peaceably from the eastern side and reached the middle also. So the Muslims made the half of the church which they had entered by force into a mosque, and the half which they had entered by peaceful agreement remained a church.

Later, the Umayyad rulers offered to buy the Christians out, but they refused to sell. The Umayyads then confiscated the building, but quickly made up for this lapse of civility by raising a huge sum of money that was given to the Christians to build a new cathedral.

Mosques were community centers as well as houses of worship. The first ones had been sheltered spaces where the community could come together not only for prayer, but also to discuss public issues. Friday, or congregational, mosques, where the faithful of a whole city or quarter came together to pray, occupied prime locations, and made those locations the most prestigious parts of the city. Near a Friday mosque and its madrasas one could find both the finest wares and the intellectual professionals. Ibn Battuta's description of the Umayyad mosque continues:

The eastern door, called the Jayntn door, is the largest of the doors of the mosque. It has a large passage, leading out to an extensive colonnade, which is entered through a quintuple gateway between six tall columns. Along both sides of this passage are pillars supporting circular galleries, where the cloth merchants, among others, have their shops. Above these are long galleries in which are the shops of the jewelers and booksellers and makers of admirable glassware. In the square adjoining the first door are the stalls of the principal notaries, in each of which there may be five or six witnesses in attendance and a person authorized by the qadi to perform marriage ceremonies. Near these bazaars are the stalls of the stationers who sell paper, pens, and-ink.... To the right as one comes out of the Jayrun door, which is also called "The Door of the Hours," is an upper gallery shaped like a large arch, within which are small open arches furnished with doors, to the number of the hours of the day. These doors are painted green on the inside and yellow on the outside. As each hour of the day passes the green inner side of the door is turned to the outside. There is a person inside the room responsible for turning them by hand....

Several points are notable about Ibn Battuta's descriptive accuracy. First, he appears to have regarded reportage in terms of information that might prove useful to others: The Door of the Hours served as a timekeeper for commerce. Second, he had a sense of significant detail: The number of public witnesses in the notaries' stalls testifies to a society in which bonded word and accurate memory are almost one and the same. When Ibn Battuta memorized the Qur'an, he embraced the collective assumption of the time that the mind can be relied on for accuracy just as our era relies on writing and microchips. Thus, in his descriptions, he was doing for his world something like what satellite television does for ours. And finally, it is striking not only that we can almost smell the cooking fires and hear the mongrels he describes whining at the braised-meat stalls, but also that he appears to have so clearly understood how the common moments of daily life link us all, no matter in what place or time we live. In reading the Rihla in its full extent, we gain a humbling yet embracing sense of our own place within civilization's long endurance. Seven centuries lie between Ibn Battuta and us, yet his words collapse them until we can feel many of the same things that he does.

In Damascus, Ibn Battuta also had quite a bit to say about the waqfs:

The variety and expenditure of the religious eitdowments of Damascus are beyond computation. There are endowments for the aid of persons who cannot undertake the Hajj [such as the aged and the physically disabled], out of which are paid the expenses of those who go in their stead. There are endowments to dower poor women for marriage. There are others to free prisoners [of warj. There are endowments in aid of travelers, out of the revenues of which they are given food, clothing, and the expenses of conveyance to their countries. There are civic endowments for the improvement and paving of the streets, because all the lanes in Damascus have sidewalks on either side, on which foot passengers walk, while those who ride the roadway use the center. One day I passed a young servant who had dropped a Chinese porcelain dish, which was broken to bits. A number of people collected around him and suggested, "Gather up the pieces and take them to the custodian of the endowment for utensils." He did so, and when the endowment custodian saw the broken pieces he gave the boy money to buy a new plate. This benefaction is indeed a mender of hearts.

Such an esoteric endowment as one to replace broken utensils bespeaks a broad definition of charity and implies broad support for it. Indeed, of Damascus's 171 waqfs, Ibn Battuta reports, ten were endowed by the sultan, 11 by court officials, 25 by merchants, 43 by members of the 'ulama, and 82 by military officials. Ibn Battuta sheltered at waqfs during hardship periods and in outlying towns and cities—although he much preferred the better-appointed courts of local rulers.

ith the new moon of the month of Shawwal, it was from Damascus toward Madinah, and thence to Makkah, that Ibn Battuta turned. The 1350-kilometer (820-mi), 45- to 50-day camel caravan plod took an inland route along the west coast of the Arabian Peninsula, through the region known as the Hijaz, where the semi-desert littoral of the Red Sea rises abruptly inland to the high plateau of the Arabian Desert. The peaks topping 3700 meters (12,000') were the highest Ibn Battuta had seen since the Atlas Mountains of his native Morocco. Sprinkled lightly here and there were oases, and the caravan was strategically routed to pass through them, sometimes pausing overnight, sometimes remaining for several days. Ibn Battuta recalled the sequence of oases vividly: Dwellers in one, he said, named "The Bottom of Marr," luxuriated in "a fertile valley with numerous palms and a spring supplying a stream from which the district is irrigated, whose fruits and vegetables are transported to Makkah." There was not enough soil or water for grains, so the oasis dwellers cultivated dates, peaches, apricots, pomegranates, lemons, oranges, and figs. Some of these dried well in the piercing sun and air "as clear as sparkling water" and were staples of the desert diet.

Although the journey was arduous, there was little fear of getting lost: The way was visibly worn by the sandals of all the moveable world of that age: traders, pilgrims, servants, poets, camel-tenders, menders, soldiers, singers, ambassadors, clerks, physicians, coiners, architects, stable-sweepers, scullery boys, waiters, legalists, minstrels, jugglers, beekeepers, artisans, peddlers, shopkeepers, weavers, smiths, carters, hawkers, beggars, slaves and the occasional cutpurse and thief. Under way for six to seven weeks, the Hajj caravan was a small city on the hoof, with its own kind of cruise-ship economy, which always included several qadis for the resolution of disputes; imams to lead prayers; a muezzin to call people to prayer and a recorder of the property of pilgrims who died en route. That year, Ibn Battuta's caravan was protected from bandits by Syrian tribesmen, and he was befriended by a colleague, another Maliki qadi, in the genial and collegial fraternity of the road.

Ibn Battuta's account of Madinah fills 12 pages. Much of it is a detailed history and description of the Prophet's Mosque and other sites; the rest consists of anecdotes he heard from those he met, which give us vivid impressions of life in the desert. According to one of these, a certain Shaykh Abu Mahdi lost his way amid the tangle of hills surrounding Makkah. He was rescued when "God put it into the head of a Bedouin upon a camel to go that way, until he came upon him...and conducted him to Makkah. The skin peeled off his blistered feet and he was unable to stand on them for a month." Other tales are set in places from Suez to Delhi, and it was in settings like this that the 22-year-old Ibn Battuta's imagination was surely stimulated.

Our stay in Madinah the Illustrious on this journey lasted four days. We spent each night in the Holy Mosque, where everyone engaged in pious exercises. Some formed circles in the court and lit a quantity of candles. Volumes of the Holy Qur'an were placed on book-rests in their midst. Some were reciting from it; some were intoning hymns of praise to God; others were contemplating the Immaculate Tomb [of Muhammad]; while on every side were singers chanting the eulogy of the Apostle {Muhammad], may God bless him and give him peace.

At Dhu al-Hulaifa, just outside Madinah, the hajjis changed from their weather-worn caravan clothes into the ihram, the two-piece white garment which symbolically consecrated their entry into the Holy City of Makkah. Once in the ihram, the Muslim's behavior was expected to be a model of piety, and the spiritual aura of Makkah reinforced that expectation.

I entered the pilgrim state under obligation to carry out the rites of the Greater Pilgrimage...and [in my enthusiasm] I did not cease crying, "Labbaik, Allahumma" ["At Thy service, O God!"] through every valley and hill and rise and descent until I came to the Pass of 'Ali (upon him be peace), where I halted for the night.

Had Ibn Battuta been a lone voice in that unwatered wilderness, his words would have been lost on the wind. But he wasn't. Although he never mentions how many may have been with him in the caravan, it was likely to have been several thousand, for the pilgrimage must be performed in one specific 10-day period, and the sense of culmination and community pilgrims feel is part of what gives the Hajj its unique power.

Ibn Battuta described the Great Mosque:

We saw before our eyes the illustrious Ka'ba (may God increase it in veneration), like a bride displayed on the bridal chair of majesty and the proud mantles of beauty.... We made the seven-fold circuit of arrival and kissed the Holy Stone. We performed the prayer of two bowings at the Maqam Ibrahim and clung to the curtains of the Ka'ba between the door and the Black Stone, where prayer is answered. We drank of the water of the well of Zamzam which, if you drink it seeking restoration from illness, God restoreth thee; if you drink it for satiation from hunger, God satis fieth thee; if you drink it to quench thy thirst, God quencheth it.... Praise be to God Who hath honored us by visitation to this Holy House.

Ibn Battuta allots some 58 pages to description of the Ka'ba, the Haram, or sacred enclosure, around it, the city of Makkah itself, its surroundings, the details of the Hajj prayers and ceremonies, the character of the people and the traditions in the hearts of Muslims from all over Dar al-Islam. So important is Makkah that it seems that no detail, be it the interior of the Ka'ba or the provisioning of the bazaars or the forms of worship in the Haram, seems lost on him. Although his account has the tone of something partly received and partly felt, few documents have ever painted such a multicolored canvas of Makkah.

Even so, there was the rest of the world and a lifetime of footsteps ahead. Makkah's feast of harsh natural scenery, global trade patterns, sharp mercantile acumen and abiding religious faith—all spiced with languages and dialects from Sudanese to Sindhi—no doubt whetted the young jurist's appetite for more. But unlike most pilgrims, who returned from their Hajj to their home cities and villages, Ibn Battuta did not set out westward for Tangier. He does not say why. Perhaps it was a spirit of youthful adventure; perhaps it was the memory of Burhan Al-Din's prognostication, back in Alexandria, that he would one day travel to India and China; perhaps it was word from others that jurists like himself might find work in remote places that were eager to receive scholars with more than local credentials.

Scholar Ross E. Dunn describes this significant juncture in Ibn Battuta's career in his 1986 book The Adventures of Ibn Battuta: "When he left Tangier his only purpose had been to reach the Holy House,...[but] when he set off for Baghdad with the Iraqi pilgrims on 20 Dhu al-Hijja, one fact was apparent. He was no longer traveling to fulfill a religious mission or even to reach a particular destination. He was going to Iraq simply for the adventure of it."

Setting a precedent he was to follow throughout his travels, however, Ibn Battuta did not take a direct route: Across the Arabian Peninsula's deserts, he looped through southern Iran and ventured north to Tabriz in southern Azerbaijan. It was a new year, 1327, when he entered the great walled city on the Tigris now called Baghdad.