Ibn Battûta - Voyages I. From North Africa to Mecca, by Ibn Battûta (Volume 1)

Ibn Battûta: Voyages I. From North Africa to Mecca

Ibn Battûta , a North African traveler from the early 14th century, is known as the “traveler of Islam”. He travels through all of the Islamic countries, from Mali to Sumatra and from Kenya to the Russian steppes. His thirty years of peregrinations through a fragmented, torn Islamic world converge towards a single goal: to prove that the community exists and that through its religious and social practice, through its solidarity, it remains indivisible.

This complete publication, in three volumes, includes the only existing French translation, that of C . Defremery and BR . Sanguinetti (1853-1858) . No extensively annotated complete edition having been published to date (the English edition by H . Gibb will only be completed in 1985) , this one, by the breadth of the introductions to each volume, by the richness notes and through its maps, aims to put this essential text of Islam within reach of a wide audience while providing the necessary elements for its understanding.

In this volume: From North Africa to Mecca, Ibn Battûta visits the "central lands" of Islam. Leaving Tangier, his native city, for the pilgrimage to Mecca, he visited Egypt and Syria and, the pilgrimage accomplished, went to Iraq and Persia.