SOURCE: Tolmacheva, Marina A. “Ibn Battuta on Women's Travel in the Dar al-Islam.” In Woman and the Journey: The Female Travel Experience, edited by Bonnie Frederick and Susan H. McLeod, pp. 119-40. Pullman, Wash.: Washington State University Press, 1993.

In the following essay, Tolmacheva examines the situation of Islamic women in the fourteenth century through Ibn Battuta's accounts of women's travel.

Studies of Islamic culture have not explored the subject of travel by medieval women. It has been recently noted that, in general, “the role of travel in Muslim societies and in Islamic doctrine is not a topic which has been systematically explored by historians or social scientists.”¹ The few studies undertaken on travel by modern Islamic women have focused on religious pilgrimage or journeys to the West; legal aspects of travel have not been addressed at all. Yet the issue of women's spatial mobility under Islam is sufficiently...