Mecca is the religious heart of Islam. Islam began here when the Prophet Muhammad received the first words of the Qur’an just outside Mecca and it is toward the Ka‘ba that every Muslim in the world is required to pray five times a day and complete at least one Hajj pilgrimage in a lifetime. In the vein of medieval travel this article will focus on three aspects in the context of Mecca: Finding the Qibla (direction of prayer towards the Ka‘ba in Mecca), pilgrimage (hajj) journeys to Mecca as recounted in a specialized travelogue genre known as ‘rihla’, and images of Mecca in hajj certificates and prayer manuals.Like Jerusalem, Mecca has been a religious nexus since time immemorial or so the story goes that the Ka‘ba, built by Adam and rebuilt by Abraham and Isma‘il [Qur’an 2:125-7], was a site of pilgrimage from ancient days. Stressing the omphalotic nature of the Ka‘ba, pre-Islamic Jahiliyya stories tell us that pagan pilgrims would rub their navels on a nail sticking out of the center of the floor of the Ka‘ba as a way of uniting with god and the cosmos.

This chapter will demonstrate the breadth of travellers and travel-writing both from ‘Arabia’ and to ‘Arabia’ across the eighth to the fifteenth centuries. It begins with a definition of ‘Arabia’ and a short, succinct overview of medieval Arabic travel and travel-writing with a view to showcase the vitality of movement including but not limited to pilgrimage. The chapter will hone in on two forms of travel-writing in particular: the earliest genre of geographic literature often titled Kitab al-masalik wa’l – mamalik (‘Book of Routes and Realms’) composed in the early Islamic period and associated with the Balkhi school of geographers and the rihla, a genre developed from the twelfth century onwards by Muslim travellers from the Islamic West (Al-Andalus and North Africa) as a record of their pilgrim travels ‘to Arabia’. From here, we turn to the rihla, focusing on the Valencian ‘father’ of the genre, Ibn Jubayr who journeyed east between 1183-85. Across these examples, we will encounter different types of and reasons for travel, but all expressed in literary form. It concludes by bringing into the fold the voices of Muslim women pilgrims.

The Persian material in this chapter is first and foremost to be considered in the light of the larger evolution of Islamic traditions of travel-writing from the 8th century onwards. The Muslim tradition of rihla – the Arabic term that designates both the travel and its account – is intimately related to the ideal of talab al-‘ilm – seeking (religious) knowledge – developing as the Islamic empire spread in the early centuries of Islam. Travel-writing gradually takes shape in this context through records of transmission of hadîths and khabars – collected sayings and actions of the Prophet and holy figures – reported and discussed by lineages of mediators sought after in the course of the scholar’s journey and inventoried by him. The early genres of the risâla – epistle – and mu‘jam – (mostly geographical) dictionary – also offer glimpses of individual experiences gathered from journeys of pilgrimage, scholarly study, or trade over the vast physical expanse of the dar al-islâm – land of faith. The genre of individual travel account in Arabic is generally considered to have reached its full autonomy by the twelfth century.

Starting in 1325, Ibn Battuta set out on a pilgrimage to Mecca. Taking advantage of the routes opened up by the spread of Islam from one end to the other of the eastern hemisphere, he then travelled twenty-nine years, tracing the contours of Afro Eurasia, from North Africa to the China Sea and back. Ibn Battuta swears early in his journeys to travel the world without ever repeating a single route (2: 283; 191). and he undertook journeys three times the extent of Marco Polo’s, totalling around 75,000 miles. Ibn Battuta’s adult years devoted to journeying also involved him learning many scholarly livelihoods, and taking many forms of training and service, of which the final one, travel writer, might be considered the consummation. I will argue that Ibn Battuta was able to perform himself as a professional traveller-author of such extensive outreach because he employs extraordinary tactics at particular thresholds, essentially becoming his own passport by cultivating, adopting, or pretending to a range of roles that will secure admission. This gave him unusual, but not complete access to many thresholds otherwise rarely crossed.

This chapter surveys heterogenous lived experiences of disability throughout medieval Afro-Eurasian travel networks, examining examples from approximately the seventh through fifteenth centuries CE. It uses a broadly comparative approach to ‘religiomedical’ modes of understanding disability, illness, and other conditions, which situate the analysis of lived experience within local sociocultural understandings of the body (namely religious frameworks or historical forms of medical knowledge). Surveying disparate medieval first-person accounts of temporary or lifelong disability across Asia, Africa, and Europe, this chapter attends to disability as an adaptive practice and a venue for world transformation: an opening up of possibility, and an intellectual and artistic resource for people in motion.