17 Rajab 703 to 769 AH
1304 to 1369 AD
Ibn Battuta was a man of Berber descent born in Tangier under the reign of the Marinid dynasty in February of 1304. His family was made up of Islamic legal scholars who belonged to the Lawata Berber tribe. Ibn Battuta himself would likely have studied at a Sunni Maliki school and was offered a job as a religious judge, but he would soon realize that his heart yearned for much, much more…
The claim of Ibn Battuta to be “the traveler of Islam” is well founded: it is estimated that the extent of his wanderings was some 75,000 miles (120,000 km), a figure hardly surpassed by anyone before the age of steam power. He visited almost all Muslim countries as well as many adjacent non-Muslim lands.