Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. Pages: 29. Chapters: Zheng He, Ibn Battuta, Ahmad ibn Fadlan, Musa I of Mali, St John Philby, Muhammad al-Idrisi, Ahmad Faris Shidyaq, Nasir Khusraw, Ibn Jubayr, Sake Dean Mahomed, Rifa'a el-Tahtawi, Ahmad ibn Rustah, Yaqut al-Hamawi, Abdur Razzaq, Knud Holmboe. Excerpt: Hajji Abu Abdullah Muhammad Ibn Battuta (Arabic: ), or simply Ibn Battuta, also known as Shams ad-Din (February 25, 1304-1368 or 1369), was a Moroccan Berber Islamic traveller known for his fascinating travels published in the Rihla (literally, "The Journey"). Spanning thirty years and most of the known Islamic world, he then extended beyond North Africa, the Horn of Africa, West Africa, Southern Europe and Eastern Europe in the West, to the Middle East, South Asia, Central Asia, Southeast Asia and China in the East, a distance surpassing his near-contemporary Marco Polo. Ibn Battuta is considered one of the greatest travellers of all time. He travelled more than 75,000 miles (121,000 km), a figure unsurpassed by any individual traveller until the coming of the Steam Age some 450 years later. A 13th century book illustration produced in Baghdad by al-Wasiti showing a group of pilgrims on a Hajj.The Rihla supplies biographical background. Ibn Battuta was born into a Berber family of Islamic legal scholars in Tangier, Morocco, on 25 February 1304, during the Marinid dynasty. As a young man he would have studied at a Sunni Maliki madhhab, (Islamic jurisprudence school), the dominant form of education in North Africa at that time. In June 1325, at the age of twenty-one, Ibn Battuta set off from his hometown on a hajj, or pilgrimage, to Mecca, a journey that would take sixteen months. He would not see Morocco again for twenty-four years. "I set out alone, finding no companion to cheer the way with friendly intercourse, and no party of travellers with whom to associate...