Known as the greatest traveler of premodern times, Abu Abdallah ibn Battuta
was born in Morocco in 1304 and educated in Islamic law. At the age of
twenty-one, he left home to make the holy pilgrimage to Mecca. This was only the
first of a series of extraordinary journeys that spanned nearly three decades
and took him not only eastward to India and China but also north to the Volga
River valley and south to Tanzania. The narrative of these travels has been
known to specialists in Islamic and medieval history for years. Ross E. Dunn's
1986 retelling of these tales, however, was the first work of scholarship to
make the legendary traveler's story accessible to a general audience. Now
updated with revisions, a new preface, and an updated bibliography, Dunn's
classic interprets Ibn Battuta's adventures and places them within the rich,
trans-hemispheric cultural setting of medieval Islam.

"This is an
excellent, and unusual, introduction to Islam, and to the world of the 14th
century."--H.J. Kirchhoff, The Globe And Mail

"Written in an engaging style that should easily appeal to the
non-historian, this book is very probably unprecedented in concept and
execution--placing it in a class apart and above the majority of books from
Western scholars that deal with Islamic subjects."--Julia Simpson, Saudi
Gazette

"Dunn is to be congratulated on producing a highly readable book which
will most certainly widen the circle of those obsessed by this most fascinating
of travelers."--Peter Jackson, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society

"Dunn has written a deeply satisfying book which he rounds off with a very
thorough and well-organized bibliography. It is a work which will help in the
much needed task of breaking down the artificial barriers of 'Islamic Studies'
and one which will be used with enthusiasm by many teachers of world history."--Ian
Richard Netton, Journal of Arabic Literature

Praise for the first edition:

"In 1325, at the age of twenty-one, Ibn Battuta set off from his native
Tangier on the hajj to Mecca. He did not return to Morocco until 1349, by which
time he had visited not only Mecca, but also Egypt, Syria, Iraq, East Africa,
the Yemen, Anatolia, the steppelands of southern Russia, Constantinople, India,
the Maldives, Sumatra, and China.. . . Dunn has used Ibn Battuta as a tracking
eye, as a pretext for explaining how the Muslim world worked in the early
fourteenth century.. . . An excellent synoptic introduction to the Muslim world
of the Middle Ages."--Robert Irwin Times Literary Supplement

"A successful, scholarly, readable attempt to retell [Ibn Battuta's] story
to a wider audience."--Eric Newby, New York Times Book Review

"Dunn has created, from the raw material of Ibn Battuta's travels, a
snapshot of this strangely (at least to us) unified world. It is a remarkable
achievement: the book is more than he set out to write; it is not simply a
retelling of the Ibn Battuta story for a general audience, as he rather modestly
puts it, but an introduction to the Islamic world in particular, and the late
medieval world in general."--Richard Pennell, British Society for Middle
Eastern Studies Bulletin