China court
Fountain in Andulusia court
Indian elephant clock
Persia court
Ibn Battutu himself was a Morrocan scholar. At the age of 21 he set off from his home town Tangier, to do Hajj, and little did he then know he would not return to his home country for another 24 years.
On his journey to Hajj, he travelled through Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Palestine (including the holy cities of Bethlehem and Jeruselum) and Medina.
All this information comes from his autobiographical accounts and personal notes.
After Hajj, he chose to continue travelling, and his next stops were to be through Persia, Iraq, Turkey, Yemen, India, South east Asia, The Maldives and China.
In China he decided to return home but couldn't quite decide where home was!
News then came to him that his father had died, so made the journey back to Tanjier with a detour through Italy on route. On arriving home his mother had died.
Its fair to say by this time Ibn Battutu had been bitten by the travel bug, and his next stops included Andulusia, Mali and Timbukto.
In 1354, the Sultan of Morocco asked Ibn Battutu to narrate an account of his travels.
And fast forward to 21st century Dubai, where a shopping mall has been erected in his honour.
Although I'm not a particularly big fan of the shops here, the mall has to be visited for its amazing architecture, which depicts each major country covered by Ibn Battutu.
I also loved the small exhibitions in each court that tells us about Ibn Battutu, and Islamic science during Islam's golden age.
The mosque in the mall is also a lovely place to pray!
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Well, Dubai is also considered with shopping that’s the reason every year one of the big festival end held beginning of the year called Dubai Shopping Festival. It will commence in the last week of January and will continue till the end of February 2011. Thanks for sharing this wonderful mall and I’d definitely visited there in my next tour to Dubai.
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