Travel from Europe and the Middle East

Islamic travelers voyaged through Africa and into the Far East using established overland and sea routes from northern Africa and the Mideast. Routes were established in the Mediterranean to Spain and indirectly to the rest of Europe; overland, the great Silk Road reached into China; by sea, Arab traders reached India.

Of two important early Muslim travelers, Ibn Fadlan (Ahmad ibn Fadlan ibn al-'Abbas ibn Rashid ibn Hammad) and Ibn Jubayr (Abu al-Husayn Muhammad ibn Ahmad Jubayr), little is known. Ibn Fadlan includes little description of himself in his risala, or epistle, describing a diplomatic mission from the caliph of Baghdad in 921 to the Bulgarians of the Volga. Ibn Jubayr, a Spanish Arab traveler during the twelfth century, voyaged around the Mediterranean basin and through Mecca and Medina on a journey that he recorded in rihla form; it is the only journey for which he wrote a narrative of three that he made. What is known of his second journey is that he composed a poem celebrating Saladin's victory at Hittin.

The rihla, a genre of travel description in Arabic developed by various Islamic authors, encompassed various sorts of journey: pilgrimage, travel for learning, or travel for discovery. One of the greatest of the travelers of the Middle Ages, Shams al-Din ibn Battuta (1304–c. 1368), composed a rihla called Tuhfat al-nuzzar fí ghara'ib al-amsar wa 'aja'ib al-asfar (A feast for the eyes [presenting] exotic places and marvelous travels). This work so epitomized the genre of rihla that Ibn Battuta's work is often simply known by that name—the Rihla. Like Marco Polo, Ibn Battuta and his account were greeted with skepticism by his contemporaries, including the great Islamic historian Ibn Khaldun. Also like Marco Polo, contemporary scholarship indicates that he was essentially truthful in most of his account. All in all, Ibn Battuta's account is a compendious store of information about the Muslim world of his day.

Leo Africanus (al-Hasan ibn Muhammad al-Wassan az-Zayyati), born in Islamic Spain, is one of the most important European writers about Africa between 1500 and 1800. His description of sub-Saharan and northern Africa, Descrittione dell'Africa (Description of Africa), was completed in 1529, after he had been captured by pirates and had converted to Christianity. His writing falls into the Arabic tradition of geography rather than into the tradition of the rihla account. Since, as a stranger in a different culture, he had no access to the traditional works of Arabic geography, he needed primarily to rely upon his memory to write his work. This necessity has led many readers to identify his Description more with genres of travel writing than geography.

One of the masters of rihla writing was the seventeenth-century Sufi scholar and poet Abu Salim Abd Allah ibn Muhammad al-Ayyashi, who left a detailed account of a journey that includes elements of pilgrimage and exploration. After a journey overland from his native Morocco to Cairo, al-Ayyashi continued his pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina. He was as interested in the people and customs that he saw as he was in the holy sites that he visited. His narrative makes clear the interconnected world of North African Islam and that of the Mideast.