EARLY LIFE

All that is known about Ibn Battuta's life comes from the autobiographical information included in the account of his travels, which records that he was of Berber descent, born into a family of Islamic legal scholars in Tangier, known as qadis in the Muslim tradition in Morocco, on 24 February 1304, during the reign of the Marinid dynasty. His family belonged to a Berber tribe known as the Lawata. As a young man, he would have studied at a Sunni Maliki madh'hab (Islamic jurisprudence school), the dominant form of education in North Africa at that time. Maliki Muslims requested Ibn Battuta serve as their religious judge as he was from an area where it was practised.