Five legendary Muslim travellers — and where they actually went

Before passports, before TripAdvisor and before the package holiday, Muslim travellers were already writing the world down. Their accounts are the reason we know what Baghdad looked like in the tenth century, what the Volga Vikings did with their dead, and how an Ottoman bureaucrat felt about the coffee houses of Cairo. Five of them are worth knowing by name.

Ibn Battuta (1304–1368) — the 120,000-kilometre man

A Moroccan scholar from Tangier who left home at twenty-one for what was supposed to be a pilgrimage and came back twenty-nine years later. He served as a judge in Delhi, crossed to China, travelled through what is now Mali, and dictated it all to a scribe at the end of his life in Fez.

The Rihla is the single best window we have onto the fourteenth-century Muslim world — and the places are still there. Tangier, Fes, Cairo, Damascus, Mecca, Delhi. If you want to follow him, our Morocco Discovery route starts in his home country and ends in Marrakech.

Ibn Fadlan (fl. 921) — the diplomat who met the Vikings

Sent from Baghdad as an ambassador to the Volga Bulgars, Ahmad ibn Fadlan wrote the only eyewitness account of a Viking funeral procession any medieval Arab ever left behind. His report on the Rus traders — their hygiene, their tattoos, their ships — is unusual for how little it moralises and how much it simply observes.

The Rihla is the single best window we have onto the fourteenth-century Muslim world — and the places Ibn Battuta described are still standing.

His route ran north through what is now Kazakhstan and Russia. It is the ancestor of every overland route across Central Asia, and central Asia is where we run our heritage trips.

Evliya Çelebi (1611–1682) — the Ottoman who described an empire

For roughly forty years Evliya Çelebi travelled the Ottoman world and wrote a ten-volume Seyahatname — from Istanbul to Vienna, Cairo to the Crimea. He is unreliable about numbers and wonderful about smells, food, street musicians and mosque courtyards.

Istanbul is still his city more than anyone else's. The Süleymaniye, the Grand Bazaar, the ferry crossings between continents — all of it is in the Seyahatname, and all of it is on our Turkey route.

Muhammad Asad (1900–1992) — the twentieth-century convert

Born Leopold Weiss in Galicia, he travelled as a journalist through Palestine, Egypt, Syria and Arabia in the 1920s, converted to Islam in Berlin in 1926, and spent the rest of his life in Pakistan, the new state whose constitution he helped draft.

The Road to Mecca is the best twentieth-century account of a Muslim traveller in the Middle East — the pilgrimage, the desert crossings and the conversations.

Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406) — the traveller who invented social science

A Tunisian who served courts in Granada, Fez, Cairo and Damascus, and who wrote the Muqaddimah in a castle in Algeria while essentially hiding from politics. It is a theory of why civilisations rise and fall, written four centuries before anyone in Europe attempted anything comparable.

His world is Andalusia, North Africa and Egypt — which is to say, our Al-Andalus route and our Morocco route between them.