I’ve been reading an English translation of the Rihla, an account of Ibn Battuta’s 14th-century journeys through nearly all the known world. So far, it’s fascinating. Starting from his native city of Tangier, in Morocco, the young lawyer began traveling east on Hajj in 1326: first across the Maghrib, then meandering through Egypt and the Levant, and finally turning south into the Hejaz.

Along the way, Battuta offers a sort of Grand Tour of the Medieval Islamic world: bustling urban Tunis (at roughly the time of Ibn Al-Rami, whose treatise on urbanism Besim Hakim introduced to Western readers); the last days of the crumbling ancient Pharos (that Wonderous lighthouse) at Alexandria; the maritime Nile waterfront of Cairo; the Dome of the Rock and other notable sites at Jerusalem; the cosmopolitan markets and charitable largesse of Damascus; and the long Incense Route through the ancient oases towns of the Hejaz — including Hegra and Al Ula.

Battuta wound up, as a matter of course, at the Mosque of the Prophet at Medina; and next, at his destination, he provided a fascinating account of the city of Mecca, itself, and its people, and their ways. But unlike most pilgrims, in his time or today, Battuta did not promptly return home after completing his religious obligation. Instead, he kept traveling, first with a caravan across the desert, following an eastern Hajj route, the Darb Zubayda, developed and supplied with way stations and water infrastructure by an earlier Abbasid princess; then southeast through the reedy wetlands occupied by the fierce ancestors of today’s Marsh Arabs; northeast through genteel Basra; down the Shatt-al-Arab, where the waters of the Tigris and Euphrates finally come together and exchange the outflows of the Fertile Crescent with the salty tidewaters of the Gulf; around the cities of western Iran; and finally back west to a wrecked Baghdad, in the aftermath of a siege by the Mongols — where I have recently left him on the banks of the Tigris, contemplating the destruction by the Khans.

The Table of Contents tells me that Battuta’s travels will yet take him back to the Hejaz; to Yemen; to “Rum” — that Greek-speaking remnant of the Roman Empire we’d call Byzantium, centered on Constantinople; to India and China; and later to Al-Andalus; and to the interior of Africa. And while he lived in some places for quite some time (on a second visit, he spent three years at Mecca), Battuta traveled for the better part of three decades. Anything to avoid going home to practice law, I suppose.

The Rihla also illustrates the different priorities around which a dominant society can be organized. Early in his travels, at least, Battuta found convents and religious orders in nearly every town and city, supporting countless scholars, and providing hospitality to traveling strangers. Most of these stopping-off points were supported by charitable trusts, having been established by merchants and aristocrats. Contrast this dense constellation of oases from the marketplace in the 1300s Islamic world with the hyper-Florentine values of the postmodern West, where deeply human, non-material pursuits like scholarship, travel, and spirituality must typically be self-financed. Definitions of the sacred and the profane do vary.