Ibn Jubayr

Also known as Abu al-Husayn Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn Jubayr al-Kinani

Andalusian Arab traveller and secretary to the governor of Granada whose Rihla — the great twelfth-century Arabic travel diary — is the most quoted Muslim eyewitness account of the Crusader states at the height of Saladin's power.

Ibn Jubayr was an educated Andalusian, secretary to the Almohad governor of Granada, who in 1183 set out on a hajj that would take him by ship from Ceuta to Alexandria, overland through Cairo and the Red Sea to Mecca and Medina, and then back through Mesopotamia, Mosul, Aleppo, Damascus, and the Frankish-held Syrian coast — finally returning to Granada in April 1185 by way of Sicily.

His Rihla, the book of that journey, is the foundational Arabic travel narrative and one of the most quoted single sources for the twelfth-century Mediterranean. He is closely observed on the markets and customs duties of Frankish Acre and Tyre, on the surprising civility of the Crusader checkpoints he passed through, and on the social arrangements of mixed-religion frontier villages in the kingdom — material so vivid that almost every modern history of cultural contact in the Latin East quotes it.

His Rihla also founded a literary genre. Ibn Battuta in the fourteenth century imitates Ibn Jubayr; the Maghribi traveller-secretaries of the later Middle Ages took his form as their model. He undertook two further pilgrimages in old age and died at Alexandria in 1217 — the last of which voyages overlapped with the early movements of the Fifth Crusade.

Read more on Wikipedia: English article