Ibn Juzayy

The Andalusian scholar Ibn Juzayy al-Kalbi, commissioned by the Marinid sultan of Morocco to record Ibn Battuta's travels in polished literary Arabic. Ibn Battuta dictated his account orally — from memory, decades after many of the events he described — and Ibn Juzayy shaped the raw material into the literary Rihla, adding poetic quotations, geographical notes from other sources, and stylistic embellishments that reflect the collaborative nature of medieval Arabic literary production. This collaboration raises questions about authenticity that scholars continue to debate, but it also explains why the Rihla reads as polished literature rather than rough notes — the final product is the joint achievement of the traveller who witnessed and the scholar who wrote.

As understood in the classical tradition of Ibn Battuta and the scholars of his school.