Thirty Years, Three Continents, One Dictated Book: How Far Can We Trust Ibn Battuta's Rihla?

How reliable is Ibn Battuta's Rihla? The honest answer is: reliable enough to be one of our most important windows on the fourteenth-century world, but not reliable enough to be read as a diary. Ibn Battuta (1304–1368/69) was a Muslim scholar from Tangier in Morocco who spent about thirty years, from 1325 to 1354, travelling through much of Africa, Asia and the Iberian Peninsula, and near the end of his life he dictated an account of those journeys known as the Rihla. There is no sign that he kept notes on the road, so the book relies on memory, and his editor copied whole passages from earlier travellers without saying so. Modern scholars doubt that he visited every place he describes, with question marks over Bolghar, parts of Anatolia and even China. Yet some details have been confirmed in surprising ways, and even its borrowed parts tell us a great deal about how the Muslim world of his time saw itself.

A young judge's son sets out for Mecca

Everything we know about Ibn Battuta's early life comes from his own book. He was born in Tangier on 24 February 1304 into a Berber family of Islamic legal scholars, and as a young man he would have studied the Maliki school of law that dominated North Africa. His name is a family name that literally means "son of a duckling".

In June 1325, aged twenty-one, he left home to perform the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca. The trip normally took about sixteen months. He would not see Morocco again for twenty-four years. In the Rihla he describes leaving alone, without a companion or caravan, driven by a powerful inner urge, and says he left his home "as birds forsake their nests", with both he and his parents grieving at the parting. He followed the North African coast to Alexandria and Cairo, took long detours through Syria and Palestine, and completed his first pilgrimage in November 1326. Instead of going home, he decided to keep travelling.

The shape of the journeys

It is easier to understand the Rihla if you see it as several great loops rather than one straight line. After Mecca he went to Iraq and Iran, visiting Basra, Isfahan, Shiraz and a Baghdad still partly ruined by the Mongol attack of 1258. He then sailed down the Red Sea to Yemen and along the East African coast to Mogadishu, Mombasa and Kilwa, which he praised as one of the most beautifully built towns he had seen.

Next he headed for India, where he hoped to work for the fabulously rich Sultan of Delhi, Muhammad bin Tughluq. He went the long way round: through Anatolia, across the Black Sea into the lands of the Golden Horde, to Constantinople with a Byzantine princess's travelling party, and then through Bukhara, Samarkand and the Hindu Kush. He reached the Indus River on 12 September 1333. In Delhi the sultan made him a qadi, or judge, but the ruler was unpredictable, and for six years Ibn Battuta swung between the life of a trusted official and suspicion of treason.

His escape came in 1341, when he was put in charge of an embassy to the Yuan emperor of China. The mission fell apart almost at once. He was robbed and kidnapped by bandits, a storm sank one of the expedition's ships at Calicut, and the other sailed without him. Afraid to return to Delhi as a failure, he drifted to the Maldives, where the rulers kept him as chief judge for nine months; his strict judgements eventually made him enemies and he resigned. He then went on to Sri Lanka, Bengal, Sumatra and, according to his account, China, arriving at Quanzhou in 1345.

Home, then the Sahara

Heading west again, he reached Damascus in 1348 just as the Black Death was spreading, and recorded death tolls of 2,400 a day there. He learned that his father had died fifteen years earlier, and when he finally returned to Morocco in 1349, he found his mother had died a few months before. He did not stay still for long. He visited al-Andalus and Granada, and in 1352 he crossed the Sahara with a caravan, passing the salt mines of Taghaza, where buildings were made from slabs of salt, to reach the Mali Empire and its ruler Mansa Suleyman. He travelled on to Timbuktu and Gao before the Sultan of Morocco ordered him home in 1353.

The total distance is often given as about 117,000 kilometres, more than any other known pre-modern traveller, compared with roughly 24,000 for Marco Polo.

How the Rihla was made

After his return, the Marinid ruler Abu Inan Faris suggested that he record his journeys. Ibn Battuta dictated the account in Arabic to Ibn Juzayy, a scholar he had met in Granada, and the result is the only source for his adventures. Its full title can be translated as A Masterpiece to Those Who Contemplate the Wonders of Cities and the Marvels of Travelling, but it is usually just called the Rihla.

That everyday name is itself a clue. A rihla is both a journey and a genre of Arabic literature, linked to the idea of travelling in search of knowledge, and usually built around a pilgrimage to Mecca. Classic examples describe the personalities, places, governments, customs and curiosities the traveller met. The books of Ibn Battuta and of the earlier Andalusian traveller Ibn Jubayr are seen as high points of this genre rather than its inventors. In other words, readers in the fourteenth century expected a rihla to be informative and well written, not a strict log of dates.

The case against: memory, copying and doubtful detours

The biggest problem is that there is no evidence Ibn Battuta made notes during his twenty-nine years on the road. When he dictated the book, he had to rely on memory and on manuscripts by earlier travellers. Ibn Juzayy did not credit those sources. His descriptions of Damascus, Mecca, Medina and other Middle Eastern places clearly copy the account of Ibn Jubayr, written more than 150 years earlier, and most of the descriptions of Palestine come from the thirteenth-century traveller Muhammad al-Abdari.

Some journeys are probably invented or borrowed. Scholars consider it very unlikely that he went up the Volga to Bolghar, and they have serious doubts about his trip to Sanaa in Yemen, his route from Balkh to Bistam and his tour of Anatolia, where the order of towns in the book jumps hundreds of kilometres back and forth. The China section is the most debated. Some scholars think he may have lifted parts of it from other authors, and it contains clear errors, such as confusing the Yellow River with the Grand Canal and believing porcelain was made from coal. The German scholar Ralph Elger goes further and suspects that much of the content is fiction inspired by other travel reports.

The Rihla also has a darker side that modern readers should not skip. Ibn Battuta bought and received enslaved people, including young Greek women, and he wrote contemptuous remarks about the people of Mali and about Greeks. These passages are reliable in one sense: they show honestly how a well-connected traveller of his class saw the world.

The case for: what has been confirmed

Doubts are not the whole story. In 1987 the historian Ross E. Dunn was sceptical that any outside evidence would ever support the narrative. But in 2010 the writer Tim Mackintosh-Smith, after years of fieldwork in places mentioned in the Rihla, reported manuscripts of Islamic law in the archives of Al-Azhar University that Ibn Battuta had copied in Damascus in 1326, matching the date the book gives for his stay in Syria. His descriptions of West Africa include the earliest known mention of the Mande xylophone, and his route helps historians see when Islam was spreading into the heart of West Africa. Even scholars who doubt parts of the book agree that, whether or not every page is eyewitness reporting, it gives an important account of much of the fourteenth-century world.

So the sensible way to read it is the way historians do: trust the broad outline, check specific claims against other sources, and remember that some vivid scenes may be borrowed.

Rediscovery and legacy

For centuries the Rihla was barely known outside the Muslim world. European scholars only found abridged manuscripts in the early nineteenth century, and the first English translation appeared in 1829. A full critical Arabic edition with a French translation was published from 1853, and a complete annotated English translation was finished only in 1994. Little is known about his life after he finished the book; he served as a judge in Morocco and died in 1368 or 1369. Today his name is on the airport and a stadium in Tangier and on a large themed shopping mall in Dubai.

Learn with Ibn Battuta: English phrases

Phrase	Meaning	Example
to have itchy feet	to want to travel all the time	After Mecca, he still had itchy feet.
a detour	a longer route than the direct one	He took a detour through Syria.
from memory	without notes, only remembering	He dictated the whole book from memory.
secondhand	heard from someone else, not seen yourself	Some of his stories about China may be secondhand.
to take with a pinch of salt	not to believe completely	Take the dates in the Rihla with a pinch of salt.

Try this: Describe a trip from memory in three English sentences, then mark one detail that might be "secondhand".