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Reaction Paper About Ibn Battuta

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We all know about Marco Polo and his travels, which serve as one of the main historical sources about Central Asia and China for that time period. However, Muslim world has also their own “Marco Polo”. His name was Ibn Battuta and it is believed that he traveled more than 70 000 miles.[ Marlène Barsoum, “The traveller and his Scribe: In the footsteps of Ibn Battuta and their rendering by Ibn Juzayy”, The Journal of North African Studies, 11:2, (2006): 195] Muhammad Ibn Battuta was a Moroccan scholar born in Tangiers, who widely traveled the medieval world. Over a period of thirty years, Ibn Battuta visited most of the Islamic world and many non-Muslim lands, namely North Africa, the Horn of Africa, West Africa, the Middle East, India, Central …show more content…

Travelers often times didn’t write their travel accounts alone but they either wrote it with someone else, or just retold their stories and other person or people collected them. This can lead in some cases to slightly altered versions of their journeys and maybe even sometimes to completely different version. In Ibn Battuta’s case, as mentioned earlier in the paper, some historians believe that Battuta exaggerated parts of his travel reports. If this was done by him personally when telling the memories to Ibn Juzayy, or Ibn Juzayy decided to “spice up the story”, we will probably never know. The other issues could be perhaps caused by language barrier between the traveler and the one collecting his stories. This was most likely not the problem in Battuta’s case as both Ibn Battuta and Ibn Juzayy came from Morocco and therefore should speak the same language to some extent. Barsoum in her article believes that Juzayy incorporated parts from Ibn Jubayr’s travels without mentioning his source.[ Barsoum, “The traveler and his scribe”, 199] Some historians claim, that even if he took notes during his travels, it would be impossible for them to have survived through storms, shipwrecks and pirate attacks.[ Barsoum, “The traveler and his scribe”,

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