Ibn Battuta: A Scholar's Epic Journey
This morning I stumbled upon a video that mentions one famous traveler, Ibn Battuta. And the deeper I dig, the more fascinated I am by his journey. It is one thing to visit a place and buy merchandise before return to home, but another thing is to travel intentionally to explore foreign lands in the pursuit of knowledge and then go back home 24 years later.
The most inspiring thing about his life is that he was an outlandishly learned scholar who managed to parlay his knowledge of Islam into the most magnificent road trip in history. He went to Mali, Constantinople, India, Russia to Indonesia; he was probably the most well-traveled person before the invention of the steam engine. And everywhere he went, he was treated like a king, and then he went home and wrote a really famous book called "The Rihla" that people still read today.
Ibn Battuta was born into a family of Muslim legal scholars in Tangier, Morocco, in 1304 during the Marinid dynasty. The men in Ibn Battuta's family were legal scholars. He was raised with a focus on education; however, there was no "madrasa," or college of higher learning, in his home, Tangier. Thus, Ibn Battuta's urge to travel was spurred by his interest in finding the best teachers and libraries, which were then in Alexandria, Cairo, and Damascus. He also wanted to make the hajj as soon as possible out of eagerness and devotion to his faith.
