Famous
Men

You know

because the muslim search for knowledge took them

wherever knowledge could be found,

they travelled all over the world,

and it was common for anyone serious about study

to travel far and wide to find people who knew more than they did.

And of course,

they wrote about the people and places that they came across in their travels,

documenting their geography and history.

But certainly the best known traveller of all was a man who lived in the 14th century,

and who went by the name of Ibn Battuta.

In an age before planes, cars and trains

he managed to travel through the entire muslim world,

from Tangier in Morocco, where he was born,

all the way to China.

He also visited Europe, and parts of Africa

south of the Sahara,

and all the time wrote commentaries on the political, commercial cultural and legal,

practices of the places that he visited.

He wrote of geography, natural history, race and gender,

and the religious traditions of the world,

and his writing is filled with amusing traveller's tales.

Of course, many other muslim scholars wrote about the world,

not seeing Europe as the eternal centre of the world,

but setting it in its historical position

part of a global community

that was capable of shining brightly during Europe's dark ages,

when the Indian Ocean was more vibrant a trading area than the Mediterranean.

But the astonishing range of muslim exploration

really becomes apparent in the work of Piri Ra'is,

who mapped the coastline of Africa and Europe

including the British Isles

and the Scandinavias,

and at roughly the same time as Europeans thought

Columbus was "discovering" America,

produced detailed maps of the American coastline

from Greenland down to the tip of Argentina.

Not all scholars felt the need to travel quite so far however.

Also in the 14th century

a man named Ibn Khaldun

wrote an enormous history of the world in numerous volumes,

but also a shorter introduction to the work

which is world renowned,

a book in which he tries to give a complete view of humankind

and its social organisation.

That book, called the Muqaddimah, has been called

the finest illustration of how human affairs work

that has been made anywhere at any time.

But perhaps the muslims best known for their work,

it being the foundation of much that is still studied around the world today,

are those muslims who were known for scientific discoveries.

Often they are known by names that were adapted from the Arabic

to fit the sounds of European languages,

but the scientific language and methods that they used

need little translation today.

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