Returning home for the first time in 24 years Ibn Battuta was walking under the shadow of the black plague. The once great cities he knew were emptied, the empires whose courts he marveled at had collapsed. Bodies surrounded his route back over the once bustling villages and towns he had traveled through in his youth.
In the first days of the month of Rabīʿ I in the year forty-nine, news reached us in Aleppo that plague had broken out in Ghazza and that the number of dead there exceeded a thousand a day. I went to Ḥimṣ and found that the plague had already struck there; about three hundred persons died on the day of my arrival. I went to Damascus and arrived on a Thursday; the people had been fasting for three days. On Friday they went to the Mosque of the Footprints, as we have related in the first book. God alleviated their plague. The number of deaths among them had risen to two thousand four hundred a
day.
The plague hit even harder in the larger cities:
I went to Cairo and was told that during the plague the number of deaths there had risen to twenty-one thousand a day. I found that all the shaikhs I had known were dead. May God Most High have mercy upon them
As he travelled further he made one final Hajj and visited the blessed cities of Makkah and Madinat Al Munawarah. Then after visiting Cairo once more, finally he began to head to Morocco. He had never spoken of returning home in the years prior but perhaps, surrounded by desolation and sorrow, he was compelled to return home.
The memory of my homeland moved me,
affection for my people and friends, and love for my country which for me is better than all others: A land where charms were hung upon me, whose earth my skin first touched.
Almost a year later, about two hundred kilometres from Tangier he makes one last stop in Tāza, a small town in present-day Morocco perched on a hill where the Rif chain joins the Middle Atlas.
The year before he met a jurist in Damascus who informed him that his father had passed away 15 years earlier. Here, a year later, practically on the final steps to his home he learned the news:
I reached the city of Tāzā, where I learnt that my mother had died of the plague, God Most High have mercy upon her.
Dedicated to u/homerius786
by wakchoi_
2 Comments
Salam from r/islamichistorymeme
Returning home for the first time in 24 years Ibn Battuta was walking under the shadow of the black plague. The once great cities he knew were emptied, the empires whose courts he marveled at had collapsed. Bodies surrounded his route back over the once bustling villages and towns he had traveled through in his youth.
> In the first days of the month of Rabīʿ I in the year forty-nine, news reached us in Aleppo that plague had broken out in Ghazza and that the number of dead there exceeded a thousand a day. I went to Ḥimṣ and found that the plague had already struck there; about three hundred persons died on the day of my arrival. I went to Damascus and arrived on a Thursday; the people had been fasting for three days. On Friday they went to the Mosque of the Footprints, as we have related in the first book. God alleviated their plague. The number of deaths among them had risen to two thousand four hundred a
day.
The plague hit even harder in the larger cities:
> I went to Cairo and was told that during the plague the number of deaths there had risen to twenty-one thousand a day. I found that all the shaikhs I had known were dead. May God Most High have mercy upon them
As he travelled further he made one final Hajj and visited the blessed cities of Makkah and Madinat Al Munawarah. Then after visiting Cairo once more, finally he began to head to Morocco. He had never spoken of returning home in the years prior but perhaps, surrounded by desolation and sorrow, he was compelled to return home.
> The memory of my homeland moved me,
affection for my people and friends, and love for my country which for me is better than all others: A land where charms were hung upon me, whose earth my skin first touched.
Almost a year later, about two hundred kilometres from Tangier he makes one last stop in Tāza, a small town in present-day Morocco perched on a hill where the Rif chain joins the Middle Atlas.
The year before he met a jurist in Damascus who informed him that his father had passed away 15 years earlier. Here, a year later, practically on the final steps to his home he learned the news:
> I reached the city of Tāzā, where I learnt that my mother had died of the plague, God Most High have mercy upon her.
Dedicated to u/homerius786
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