Sophia’s Visions · Other lives · From Tangier to China, 1325–1354 · B2–C1
Ibn Battuta: the Man Who Never Stopped Travelling
Sophia’s Visions: thirteen centuries from now, a young lawyer will leave his home town to make a pilgrimage to Mecca, and come back twenty-four years later, having crossed half the world. Writing about journeys with participle clauses (having crossed the desert…, a port called Zaitun…, travelling alone…), with Philo, Sophia, Marcos and Demetria.
Tonight I saw a young man saying goodbye to his parents at a city gate, Marcos. He was twenty-one, and he thought he would be home in a year or two.
He came back twenty-four years later. His father was dead, and his mother had died of the plague a few months before he reached her.
Twenty-four years. What does a man see in twenty-four years of travelling?
In the fourteenth century, a traveller could walk from Morocco to India, and sail on to China, while staying almost entirely inside a world of Muslim cities, rulers and merchants. They shared a language of learning, Arabic, a religious law, and the duty of every Muslim who can afford it to make the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca, at least once in their life.
A man trained in religious law could find work and a welcome in almost any of those cities, as a judge, a qadi. Travel books, called rihla, were a popular kind of writing, and travellers often borrowed from earlier books when they described a famous city.
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