![]() The young man was itching to travel, and once he set out on his first Hajj-pilgrimage to Mecca-he kept going, not returning home for nearly a quarter of a century. While that status proved handy on his travels, he was not content to carry on the family tradition in his native Tangier. Ibn Battutah was born in 1304 into a family of Muslim clerics. (Although, one can legitimately argue that the Venetian’s writing had a greater impact on Western culture than Ibn Battutah’s work has had.)Ĭaravan of pilgrims in Ramleh (31st Maqamat), a painting by Yahyâ ibn Mahmûd al-Wâsitî from the 13th century book, Maqâmât of al-Harîrî. Ibn Battutah is every bit the adventurer and storyteller that Marco Polo was, and it frankly is a damned shame that he is not as widely known in Western popular culture as is the legendary Venetian. ![]() Just as it took me some time to read Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac, embrace jazz, or learn to scuba dive, it took me some time to see what all the whispering among my fellow geographers was about. ![]() That observation was confirmed when I began teaching undergraduate geography in the current century and frequently noticed his name in the introductory discussions of the history of geography that usually whooshed by in the first chapter of the textbooks I used in my cultural, physical, and world regional geography classes. I deduced from the whispered, jazz-like references to him that he was considered cool in geographic circles-someone who contributed greatly to our knowledge of the cultural and physical geography of the medieval world one of the greatest, if arguably unintentional, geographers in history. I cannot remember any cultural references, any discussions of his travels or of his writings until I began graduate studies in geography at the University of Oklahoma in 1983. MECHANICSVILLE, Va.-Marco Polo is much more better known in the west, if only for the kids’ game I had never heard of prior to a television commercial a few years ago.Ībū ʿAbd al-Lāh Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Lāh l-Lawātī ṭ-Ṭanǧī ibn Baṭūṭah, a.k.a. Tuḥfat al-nuẓẓār fī gharāʼib al-amṣār wa-ʻajāʼib al-asfār.Ibn Battuta in Egypt, a painting by Hippolyte Leon Benett. (source: Nielsen Book Data) Included work Container of: Ibn Batuta, 1304-1377. The book also provides teachers with a wide range of comprehension, composition, interpretation, and research activities. Individual sections focus on classical grammar and stylistics, historical and cultural background and critical evaluation of the texts. This book provides a guided and scaffolded survey of Ibn Battuta's greatest travels through twenty lessons, each with extensive preparatory, explanatory, and application exercises, enabling students to read the actual words of the original text without undue difficulty.While telling a fascinating narrative as a whole, each of the twenty lessons is designed to stand alone for classroom or individual study. Students will read the authentic descriptions of Ibn Battuta's encounters with cannibals, desert bandits, Mongol chieftains, and his impressions of wonders from Timbuktu to Constantinople to Quanzhou. Ibn Battuta was the greatest traveler of the medieval period, and his narrative provides an unmatched view of medieval civilization from Spain to China, and from Russia to Mali. The Travels of Ibn Battuta: A Guided Reader is a unique Arabic literature and history textbook for students at the High Intermediate to Advanced level.
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