Who was Ibn Battuta, the great Moroccan traveller?

Ibn Battuta is the name I bring up the moment a guest tells me they love to travel, because he is, very plausibly, the most travelled human being of the entire pre-modern world — and he was born right here, in Tangier, in 1304. He set out at twenty-one to make the pilgrimage to Mecca, the hajj, and simply never stopped. Over nearly thirty years he covered something like 75,000 miles, crossing North Africa, the Middle East, East Africa, Anatolia, Central Asia, India, the Maldives, and China. Marco Polo, the European traveller everyone has heard of, did not come close.

What makes him so vivid is that he wrote it all down — or rather dictated it, on the orders of the Sultan of Fes, to a scholar named Ibn Juzayy after he finally came home. The result is the Rihla, the 'Journey,' and it reads like the world's first great travel blog: he describes the food, the customs, the rulers he met, the women he married and divorced, the storms and bandits and plagues he survived. He served as a judge in Delhi, got shipwrecked, was robbed near the coast of India, and lived to grumble about all of it. It is gossipy, opinionated, and astonishingly human.

I love walking guests through Tangier with him in mind. The city he left in the early fourteenth century is still legible in the old medina — the white-walled lanes, the kasbah above the harbour, the sea that carried him out toward a world most Moroccans of his day would never see. There is a tomb attributed to him in the medina, modest and easy to miss, and the airport carries his name, which I think is the right kind of monument for a man who spent his life leaving home.

The lesson I draw from him, and share with travellers, is that Morocco has been a launchpad to the wider world for seven centuries. Ibn Battuta was not an oddity; he was the product of a confident, connected, cosmopolitan Islamic civilisation in which a scholar from Tangier could cross continents on the strength of his learning and a shared language of faith. When you stand in his city today and look across the strait to Spain, you are looking at the same horizon that first pulled him outward.