Mamluk

Literally 'owned' — the military slave dynasty that ruled Egypt and Syria during Ibn Battuta's travels, having defeated the Crusaders and halted the Mongol advance at Ain Jalut in 1260. The Mamluk state was one of the most powerful in the Muslim world and one of its most important centres of Islamic scholarship and architecture. Ibn Battuta's vivid descriptions of Mamluk Cairo — its mosques, madrasas, hospitals, scholars, and markets — provide invaluable historical testimony about a state that was simultaneously militaristic, patronising of learning, and deeply embedded in the Islamic scholarly tradition. The Mamluks treated him with the respect due to a visiting Moroccan jurist and opened their courts and institutions to him.

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