I’ve got a new book out! Ibn Battuta: the journey of a medieval Muslim is the latest in my Concise Life series for Kube Publishing (after Imam Al-Ghazali and Ibn Sina) and it tells the story of the greatest traveller in history. As a young man, Ibn Battuta set off from his home in Tangier, Morocco, on the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca, but then he kept on going, travelling the world for nearly 30 years. During that time he covered 75,000 miles, visited 40 modern-day countries and provides an insight into the scholarly milieu that allowed an itinerant traveller, albeit one with his mind stocked with the tenets of Islamic jurisprudence, to rock up at a sultan’s court pretty well anywhere in the Islamic world and expect to be provided for and, indeed, advanced. And Ibn Battuta was indeed advanced, reaching some dizzylingly high positions, particularly at the sultan’s court in India, before crashing back down again. This was a life of adventure, of shipwrecks and pirates and bandit attacks, but most of all it was a life of travel. Has there ever been a man more inclined to look over the next ridge, to take a new road, to see what was round the next bend, than Ibn Battuta? Travel with him in this book as he befriends sultans and saints, vacillates between riches and renunciation, and travels onwards, to see fresh wonders. The world was a marvel to Ibn Battuta and he makes it marvellous to us.