A time when Muslim merchants could travel virtually unobstructed from Morocco to Southeast Asia, and navigators from Ming China could boast of enormous naval expeditions reaching as far west as Hormuz, Aden, and Mombasa, Western Europeans remained almost totally confined, both physically and intellectually, to a small slice of the world...
Since the Quran said every able-bodied person should make a pilgrimage, or hajj, to Mecca at least once in their lifetime, thousands travelled from the farthest reaches of the Islamic empire to Mecca, beginning in the seventh century. As they travelled, they made descriptions of the lands that they passed through. Some of the most famous include...
In 1929, scholars working in Turkey’s Topkapi Palace Museum discovered a section of an early 16th-century Turkish world map. It was signed by a captain named Piri ibn Hajji Mohammed Reis (meaning “admiral”), and it was dated 1513. Now known as the famous “Map of America,” it was made only 21 years after Christopher Columbus had reached the New World...
A thousand years ago, accurate plans of countries, continents, and waterways were unknown. But as more people began to travel the world for trade, exploration, and religious reasons, the demand for good maps increased. Some of the world’s most precious maps were drawn by great scholars of Muslim civilization, who assembled all the geographical knowledge available to them...
