I almost threw this book across the room.

The Travels of Ibn Battúta: Explorations of the Middle East, Asia, Africa, China and India from 1325 to 1354, An Autobiography by Ibn Battuta

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


I really wished I liked this book better. Ibn Battuta's travels were utterly amazing, taking him to every corner of the Islamic world in the 13th century. I had read about him before but was eager to read his own words.

Sadly, I selected this edition, which is a republication of a 1929 translation. I'll get the good parts first. Reading and seeing the world through Ibn Battuta's eyes was fascinating. A qadi, or Islamic legal scholar, from Tangiers, he left home to make the hajj to Mecca and study with legal scholars in the great cities. He expected to be gone for four years. He came home 28 years later, having served as a legal advisor to the Mad Sultan of Dehli, been practically imprisoned in the Maldives, shipwrecked, robbed, and having seen everything from dense jungle to scorching deserts. It's a fascinating tale, and we get to know Ibn Battuta. As a worldbuilder, there were several descriptions that inspired me for things to place in a fantasy realm. That's good.

Now the bad. The first thing is this is a massively abridged version of Battuta's travels. Several times the translator notes that he cut out descriptions of courts or other things, which kind of was exactly why I was reading the bloody book! I wanted all those details, I wanted to see China under the Mongol Yuan dynasty, or the details of how the court at Delhi functioned. That's why I read history books!

The second big problem was the maps. As I said, this is a reprint of a 1929 edition, and scattered through the book are what appear to be hand-drawn maps marking Battuta's most likely track. I'm sure in the handsome volume printed in 1929 these were legible. But reduce to fit an A4 paperback? You cannot tell anything from these faint maps with tiny, tiny notes. I had to pull up resources online to follow the route. If I have to do that, why did I bother with the book?

Finally, the editing. This book is absolutely filled with typos. Really bad ones, too. I mean, near the end, we read "The Sultan was accompanied by his siller's sons, who are his heirs."

Siller? I have to assume that was meant to read "sister," but errors like that happened on almost every other page. Bad enough that the translator peppered native-language terms in without italicizing them or something. This meant I'd encounter an odd word and have to stop reading to puzzle out if it was an actual word or just a typo. This utterly destroyed my enjoyment of the book and made what should have been an enjoyable voyage a slog through the deep mud of terrible editing.

I cannot recommend this book to anyone. I'm going to be looking for a better edition, and this one is going to the used bookstore, post haste!



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