Ibn Battuta Author

Ibn Battuta (1304-1377) was one of the first great travellers in world history – a century before Marco Polo. He was a scholar of Islamic law and found employment all over the Muslim world as a traveling judge or advisor to the rulers. He travelled to medieval Ghana, Mecca, India, and China and wrote his travel stories after his return to his native Tangier, Morocco, which were widely translated numerous times from Arabic.

Noel King was a modern-day travelling scholar. Born and educated in British India, he taught first at Indian universities, before moving to East Africa, where he taught at universities in Kenya and Uganda before his final appointment in the 1960s as Chair of the Religion Department at the University of California in Santa Cruz.