Elias Muhanna teaches history and comparative literature at Brown.
In the summer of 1325, Abu ʿAbdullah Muhammad al-Lawati al-Tanji, known to posterity as Ibn Battuta, left his home in Tangier to perform the pilgrimage to Mecca. He returned 29 years later, having travelled through North Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, India, Malaysia, China, Afghanistan, the Caucasus, Anatolia, Somalia, Tanzania and Mali. When he set off on his journey, Morocco was ruled...
‘I mounted the stallion of reading,’ Shihab al-Din al-Nuwayri wrote, recalling the moment, around the year 1316, when he quit his job. He had been a financial clerk in the...
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