Page "Ibn Battuta" Paragraph 2

All that is known about Ibn Battuta's life comes from the autobiographical information included in the account of his travels.

Ibn Battuta was born into a Berber family of Islamic legal scholars in Tangier, Morocco, on 25 February 1304, during the reign of the Marinid dynasty.

As a young man he would have studied at a Sunni Maliki madh ' hab, ( Islamic jurisprudence school ), the dominant form of education in North Africa at that time.

In June 1325, at the age of twenty-one, Ibn Battuta set off from his hometown on a hajj, or pilgrimage, to Mecca, a journey that would take sixteen months.

He would not see Morocco again for twenty-four years.