Review
Praise for the first edition: )
Eric Newby, New York Times Book Review
"A successful, scholarly, readable attempt to retell [Ibn Battuta's] story to a wider audience."
The Adventures of Ibn Battuta: A Muslim Traveler of the Fourteenth Century FROM THE PUBLISHER
Known as the greatest traveler of premodern times, Abu Abdallah ibn Battuta was born in Morocco in 1304 and educated in Islamic law. At the age of twenty-one, he left home to make the holy pilgrimage to Mecca. This was only the first of a series of extraordinary journeys that spanned nearly three decades and took him not only eastward to India and China but also north to the Volga River valley and south to Tanzania. The narrative to these travels has been known to specialists in Islamic and medieval history for years. Ross E. Dunn's 1986 retelling of these tales, however, was the first work of scholarship to make the legendary traveler's story accessible to a general audience. Now updated with revisions, a new preface, and an updated bibliography, Dunn's classic interprets Ibn Battuta's adventures and places them within the rich, transhemispheric cultural setting of medieval Islam.