Ibn Battuta was a Berber-Moroccan scholar and explorer who traversed most of the world within 30 years. He is the namesake behind a 5-star hotel in Dubai the likes of Oaks Ibn Battuta Gate Dubai which provides accommodation for many travellers from near and far.
Early Life
Any information known about Ibn Battuta is extracted by autobiographical entries given in his travel accounts. It records that he was born to a family of legal scholars in Morocco in 1304. His family has belonged to Lawata, a Berber tribe.
Name
Ibn Battuta’s name deviates from conventional Islamic names and it’s simply translated as ‘son of Battuta’. But it can even have just been a nickname as Battuta translates into duckling.
How He Became a Traveller
While his contemporaries travelled the world for practical reasons, Ibn Battuta did so for the sake of his enjoyment and was dead-set on never travelling in the same road twice.
Image via snappy goat
Countries Visited
During his life, Ibn Battuta travelled over 117,000 kilometres and he had visited around 40 countries in the present-day world.
