Ibn Battuta — "They are a people who do not know the religion, and they are ignorant."
They are a people who do not know the religion, and they are ignorant.
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More from Ibn Battuta
"The people of this city have a strange custom of burying their dead in trees. It is a very unusual sight."
"The water in this land is very pure and refreshing. I drank so much that I felt like a fish."
"The women of this country are very modest, and they cover their entire bodies."
"The houses in this land are made of mud and straw, and they are very small. I had to bend over to enter them."
"In the Sahara, I saw a man who claimed to be 350 years old. He looked like a dried-up lizard, but the locals believed him."
About Ibn Battuta (1304-1369)
Moroccan Muslim scholar and explorer whose Rihla (travels) covered ~75,000 miles across the Islamic world from Mali to China — the most-traveled person of the medieval world. Closely associated with Marco Polo (his Venetian counterpart, traveling 50 years earlier in the opposite direction). For an intellectual contrast, see medieval European Christian insularity, the sheltered monastic-feudal worldview of 14th-century Latin Christendom — Ibn Battuta's 30-year journey demonstrates that the 14th-century Dar al-Islam was a single intellectual ecosystem from West Africa to Beijing, while medieval Europe was still tribal and parochial. The cleanest 'connectedness vs insularity' contrast in pre-modern history — Battuta could find a familiar Maliki judge in any city from Mali to Sumatra.