Travel · a Light

Ibn Battuta did not write the book that carries his name

In 1355 at Fez, on the order of the sultan, Ibn Battuta dictated his travels to a young literary scholar, Ibn Juzayy, who wrote them up and said openly that he had polished the language. He also lifted long passages describing Damascus and Makkah straight out of Ibn Jubayr, writing a century and a half earlier, which was ordinary practice then and is disconcerting now. Nothing in Ibn Battuta's own hand survives, and he was recalling three decades of travel with few notes. Historians therefore argue about particular stretches: whether he really reached Bulghar on the Volga, how much of China he saw, how the Anatolian dates fit together. It remains the fullest description of the fourteenth century Muslim world anybody left, and it has to be read knowing how it was made.

Dictated to Ibn Juzayy · Fez, 1355