The old and the new, Beirut, Lebanon, 2018.
French photographer Yan Bighetti de Flogny was in Pakistan when, in the course of a conversation with a hotel owner, he learned of the existence of Ibn Battuta, the fourteenth-century Moroccan explorer. Unfairly little-known, Ibn Battuta is “perhaps the greatest traveller who has ever lived”, as an article in the Courier of August-September 1981 tells us.
“At the age of 21, he started his travels by undertaking a pilgrimage to Mecca. This was the start of thirty years of wandering, during which he would travel almost 120,000 kilometres and visit all the Muslim countries. In the course of this great journey, comparable only to that of Marco Polo, he visited Mecca four times, became a judge in Delhi and in the Maldive Islands, accompanied a Greek princess to Constantinople, sailed to Sumatra and Java, and journeyed to China as ambassador of the Sultan of India. Then, in 1349, he returned briefly to his own country (“the best land in the world”) before setting off immediately to the kingdom of Granada and after that on a journey through Africa to the Niger basin. The diary which Ibn Battuta dictated to a scribe during his travels is a source of the first importance for the history of the Muslim world of his time, especially for the history of India, Asia Minor and West Africa.”
The story inspired our photographer, whose reporting project on the fight against cultural prejudices had been maturing for years, but lacked a common thread. Which he had now found: Yan decided that he would embark on a long journey, in the footsteps of Ibn Battuta! The project was launched in March 2018. It will take three years and cover more than twenty countries, from Morocco to China, following a similar itinerary to the one undertaken by the Moroccan explorer seven centuries earlier.
Continue reading
No comments:
Post a Comment