Ibn Jubayr - Overview and Publication

Overview and Publication

Ibn Jubayr provides a highly detailed and graphic description of the places he visited during his travels. The book differs from other contemporary accounts in not being a mere collection of toponyms and descriptions of monuments, but contains observation of geographical details as well as cultural, religious and political matters. Particularly interesting are his notes about the declining faith of his fellow Muslims in Palermo after the recent Norman conquest, and about what he perceived as the Muslim-influenced customs of king William II of Sicily (see Arabo-Norman civilization).

Ibn Jubayr's travel chronicle served as a model for later authors, some of whom copied from it without attribution. Ibn Juzayy, who wrote the account of Ibn Battuta's travels in around 1355 A.D., copied passages that had been written 170 years earlier by Ibn Jubayr describing Damascus, Mecca, Medina and other places in the Middle East. Passages copied from Ibn Jubayr are also found in the writings of al-Sharishi, al-Abdari and Al-Maqrizi.

A surviving copy of Ibn Jubayr's manuscript is preserved in the collection of the Leiden University Library. The 210 page manuscript was produced in Mecca in 875 A.H. (1470 A.D.) and appears to have been written at high speed: diacritic marks are often missing, words are omitted and there is confusion between certain pairs of letters. The complete Arabic text was first published in 1852 by William Wright. An updated edition was published in 1907 by M.J. de Goeje. A translation into Italian by Celestino Schiaparelli was published in 1906, a translation into English by Roland Broadhurst was published in 1952, and a translation into French by Maurice Gaudefroy-Demombynes appeared in three volumes between 1949 and 1956.