I’m kicking off my new “Ibn Battuta’s Journey” project over at TheRihlah.com this weekend, and our first serious post talks about who Ibn Battuta was and what he did. Please check it out:
Abu Abdullah Muhammad ibn Abdullah al-Lawati al-Tangi ibn Battuta, or “Ibn Battuta” for short, was born in the Moroccan city of Tangier in 1304. By all rights he was an unremarkable man: educated but not elite, born into a comfortable but not wealthy or powerful family in a city that was not one of the dominant cultural centers of the Islamic Maghreb (western North Africa). Had he remained in Tangier it’s likely that he would have lived and died in relative anonymity, and that we wouldn’t know his name today.
Source: Who was Ibn Battuta?
The Foreign Exchanges Companion 