I — A Man Who Could Not Stay Home

Abu Abdullah Muhammad ibn Battuta was born on 24 February 1304 in Tangier, Morocco — then part of the Marinid Sultanate. His family were scholars of Islamic law. He was educated as a jurist. He had, by any reasonable expectation, the kind of future that unfolds in libraries and courtrooms, not on the open sea.

He left Tangier at twenty-one to perform the Hajj. He intended to be gone for months. He was gone for twenty-nine years. By the time he returned to Morocco in 1354, he had covered approximately 120,000 kilometres — more than Marco Polo, more than any other traveller of the medieval world. He had visited the equivalent of 44 modern countries. He had served as a judge in Delhi, as a diplomatic envoy to China, as a guest of the Khan of the Golden Horde in the steppes north of the Caucasus. He had been shipwrecked, robbed, threatened by pirates, caught in the Black Death in Damascus where he witnessed 2,400 deaths in a single day, and had married — and left — multiple wives in multiple countries.

When he finally returned to Morocco, the Sultan ordered him to dictate his travels to a young scholar named Ibn Juzayy. The result was the Rihla — تحفة النظّار في غرائب الأمصار وعجائب الأسفار — formally titled “A Gift to Those Who Contemplate the Wonders of Cities and the Marvels of Travelling.” It is one of the most important documents of medieval world history. It is also one of the most vivid. Ibn Battuta wrote the way a curious man observes: with attention to food, to markets, to local customs, to the specific texture of places — not just their political or religious significance.

II — The Roads He Walked

Ibn Battuta crossed the Arabian Peninsula multiple times. His routes through Yemen and Oman are documented in the Rihla with the specificity of a man who was there — not a man summarising reports from others.

In 1328, he sailed from Jeddah down the Red Sea coast to Yemen, crossed the country by land, and set sail from Aden toward East Africa. His return journey — in 1332 — took him back through southern Arabia and Oman, through Dhofar, through Hormuz, and across the Persian Gulf to Mecca.

In 1347, returning from China via the Indian Ocean, he arrived at Dhofar after twenty-eight days at sea — the same Dhofar that Ibn Battuta himself described in the Rihla as a place where “the people are traders, and when a ship arrives, everyone on board is granted hospitality for three days.”

These are not abstract geography. Dhofar sits at the southern edge of Oman, on the border with Yemen. The mountain range that forms its backdrop — the Dhofar mountains — is part of the same geological system that extends westward into Hadhramaut, where the Wadi Do’an produces the world’s most celebrated Sidr honey. The Sidr tree grows in both territories. The beekeeping traditions in both territories trace back further than any written record can follow.

Ibn Battuta walked and sailed through this entire arc of territory — from Aden to Dhofar, from the mountains of Yemen to the coast of Oman. The same routes that caravans had used for a thousand years before him. The same routes that continued to be used for centuries after.

III — The Same Roads as Bilqis

There is a detail in the Quran that connects Ibn Battuta’s journey to a story that predates him by two thousand years.

In Surah An-Naml — the Chapter of the Ant — it is a hoopoe bird, الهدهد, that brings the Prophet Solomon news of the Queen of Sheba and her kingdom. The hoopoe is a real bird, native to the Arabian Peninsula and Yemen. It is a bird that Ibn Battuta would have seen — and did see — in his travels through the same territories.

The connection is not mystical. It is geographical. Ibn Battuta walked through the same mountain terrain that the caravans of Bilqis — بلقيس, the Queen of Sheba — had crossed going in the opposite direction two thousand years before him. She went north, toward Jerusalem, carrying gold and frankincense and the honey of the Sidr tree as tribute to Solomon. He went south and east, following the routes of trade and faith that had remained largely unchanged for millennia.

The Sidr trees that produced honey for the Queen of Sheba’s caravans still grew in those valleys in the fourteenth century when Ibn Battuta passed through. The beekeeping families of Hadhramaut were already, in 1328, doing what their predecessors had done for generations. The honey existed. The routes existed. The tradition existed. Ibn Battuta passed through it all — a Moroccan scholar with an insatiable curiosity, following the same roads that a Yemeni queen’s caravans had carved into the desert centuries before his birth.

IV — What He Actually Tasted Along the Way

Ibn Battuta was a man who paid attention to food. The Rihla is full of descriptions of what he ate, what he was served by his hosts, what impressed him and what did not. He tried mango in the Indian subcontinent and compared it to an apple. He described sun-dried fish in Oman. He noted the hospitality customs of Dhofar, where arriving travellers were fed for three days without being asked.

In the markets of Aden and Hadhramaut and along the Arabian coastal trade routes, honey was not an exotic or rare commodity. It was a staple of hospitality, medicine, and commerce. Arab hosts served honey to guests as a matter of course — as naturally as bread was served in other cultures. A scholar who spent three days as a guest of local rulers in the cities of southern Arabia would have been offered honey. It is not speculation — it is what the hospitality culture of the region demanded, and what the Rihla’s own descriptions of Arab hospitality confirm.

What honey would he have been served? In Yemen and Oman in the fourteenth century, in the mountain valleys of Hadhramaut and the markets of Dhofar, the honey of prestige and of hospitality was Sidr honey — عسل السدر. The same honey that the markets of Dubai and Sharjah today sell as a luxury product was, in the world Ibn Battuta travelled through, simply what fine honey meant.

V — From Tangier to Sharjah: The Circle That Closes

Ibn Battuta died in Morocco — in Marrakesh, around 1368 or 1369 — without having written his Rihla himself. He dictated it to Ibn Juzayy from memory, a man recounting twenty-nine years of travel without a single journal to consult. That the result is as detailed and vivid as it is says something about the quality of his attention. He did not just pass through places. He absorbed them.

He was Moroccan. Born in Tangier, in the far northwest of the Arab world. He came from the same tradition — the Arabic language, Islamic scholarship, the intellectual culture of the Maghreb — that shaped the Ksar Meski in Morocco’s Tafilalet, the village whose name and heritage live in the Meski brand today.

And here, in Sharjah in the Emirates, a honey company carries a name from a Moroccan ksar — مسكي — and sources honey from Yemen, Oman, the Hatta mountains of the UAE: the same arc of territory that Ibn Battuta travelled through seven centuries ago, describing the hospitality, the markets, the trading culture of the Arabian Peninsula with the eye of a man who noticed everything.

He would have recognized the honey. He would have recognized the routes. He might even have recognized the tree — the Sidr, شجرة السدر, whose thorned branches appear in the Quran, whose flowers produce a honey that has not changed in three thousand years, whose name is as old as the civilization that gave him his language and his faith.

The world Ibn Battuta travelled through is gone. The roads have changed. The kingdoms he visited have dissolved and reformed and dissolved again. But the tree flowers every year. And the honey it gives is the same honey.