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Entry 135 of 240Economic

Ibn Battuta's Travels

1325–1354 CE/Global/The Islamic world
Today From Morocco to China (born in Tangier)Span Dar al-Islam · 14th c.

A young legal scholar left Tangier for the pilgrimage to Mecca and did not come home for twenty-nine years. Ibn Battuta covered perhaps 75,000 miles — West Africa, East Africa, Arabia, Persia, the steppe, India, the Maldives, Sumatra, China — and worked as a judge in several of them, because a shared language of law and faith meant a Moroccan could hold office in Delhi. His account is the best surviving portrait of the 14th-century world from the inside. He complains about the food.

◆ Worth knowingHe served as a judge in the Maldives and in Delhi, for a sultan he describes as generous and homicidal in roughly equal measure. A man from Morocco could be appointed to the bench in India because the qualification — knowing Islamic law — travelled better than any passport.
◆ The mechanismTrade-route shift

The path or medium of exchange moves, and a place or power rises or declines because it sits on or off the new route.

Also: Ideological movement · Information-medium revolution · Migration pressure

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