The Long Way Round
Ibn Battuta’s 30-Year Detour
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Voyages & Ventures is a bold, brilliant series that resurrects history’s most audacious journeys. These are the true tales of people who crossed borders – geographic, cultural, and personal – long before such things were mapped. Told with wit, precision, and narrative flair, each volume reimagines a legendary expedition as if it happened yesterday.
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The Long Way Round: Ibn Battuta’s 30-Year Detour is the dazzling, immersive retelling of the greatest travel saga you’ve (probably) never read. Long before Google Maps and Lonely Planet, a Moroccan jurist set out for Mecca – and kept going for three decades. No conquests, no colonies, no compass. Just a razor-sharp memory, a pair of durable sandals, and the wild notion that the Islamic world could be walked end to end.
From Tangier to Timbuktu, Cairo to China, Delhi to the Swahili coast, Ibn Battuta encountered sultans, scholars, pirates, poets, and the occasional shipwreck. He was appointed judge in India, got marooned in the Maldives, crash-landed in Sri Lanka, narrowly avoided execution in Delhi, and wandered into the court of a black Muslim king in Mali – long before the rest of the world knew Mali existed. Along the way, he found Islam not as a monolith, but as a mosaic: spoken in Persian, sung in Swahili, preserved in the deserts of the Maghreb and the libraries of Timbuktu.
This book follows the exact route of his real-life journey, using only facts that can survive a historian’s scalpel – yet tells the story with all the bite and style of a global adventure novel. There are no drones, no slow-motion epiphanies on mountaintops. Just dusty roads, paper money, architectural marvels, theological disputes, and one endlessly opinionated traveler learning that the world is stranger, wider, and far more beautiful than he’d ever imagined.
If you like your history fast-paced, funny, and ferociously well-researched, this is your passport.