![]() He returned to Cairo and took a second side trip, this time to Mamluk-controlled Damascus. Upon approaching the town, however, a local rebellion forced him to turn back. Of the three usual routes to Mecca, Ibn Battuta chose the least-travelled, which involved a journey up the Nile valley, then east to the Red Sea port of Aydhab. He spent several weeks visiting sites in the area, and then headed inland to Cairo, the capital of the Mamluk Sultanate and an important city. Īt this point, he began a lifelong habit of making side-trips instead of getting where he was going. Another pious man Sheikh Murshidi interpreted the meaning of a dream of Ibn Battuta that he was meant to be a world traveller. You will visit my brother Fariduddin in India, Rukonuddin in Sind and Burhanuddin in China. One was Sheikh Burhanuddin who is supposed to have foretold the destiny of Ibn Battuta as a world traveller saying "It seems to me that you are fond of foreign travel. ![]() He met two ascetic pious men in Alexandria. In the early spring of 1326, after a journey of over 3,500 km (2,200 mi), Ibn Battuta arrived at the port of Alexandria, at the time part of the Bahri Mamluk empire. He took a bride in the town of Sfax, the first in a series of marriages that would feature in his travels. He travelled to Mecca overland, following the North African coast across the sultanates of Abd al-Wadid and Hafsid. Battuta spent the next two decades doing just that kind of exploring, and then finally returned home to write about it. But Ibn Battuta found he loved travel, and also encountered a Sufi wise man who told him that he would eventually visit the entire Islamic world. This trip could take a year to a year and a half. It all started in the year 1325, in Morocco, when the 21 year old set out on his hajj, the religious pilgrimage to Mecca expected of all followers of Islam. Ibn Battuta may have travelled farther than any other person in history up to his time certainly his account describes more travel than any other pre-jet age explorer on record.
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