In the Footsteps of Ibn Battuta

The Travels of Ed Tabibian Through Asia and Back

In 1355 the travel memoirs of Ibn Battuta came into being and were widely read whereas his journeys surpassed both Marco Polo and Xheng He. Now centuries later the 1971 journeys of Armenian American Ed (Edwin) Tabibian through Asia are available with a perspective and mindset of a world that has changed radically to what we know of today in 2023 and is as different to us today as is the world of Ibn Battuta's book. Join Ed Tabibian back in 1971 as he travels through Asia to Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India providing what to our eyes today may seem a politically incorrect voice and world but to change a single word would be as wrong in literature as to change the words of Mark Twain in Huck Finn while also keeping in mind that Ed Tabibian's story is closer to the aftermath of the catastrophes of World War One and the Armenian Genocide than to our own times today and as distant as Ed Tabibian is from the Armenian Genocide so too is Ibn Battuta from the Byzantine Empire centered in and around much of modern Turkey when ruled by Heraclius the emperor of Armenian descent near the time of the birth of Islam which grew to include most of the Muslim lands that Ed Tabibian traveled through in 1971. Ed Tabibian is one the greatest travel writers standing with Theroux, Bryson, Twain, Irving, Goethe and of course Ibn Battuta.

“Thank you for doing this…Wonderful,” — Reverend Craig Simonian, family member and contemporary Central and West Asian trekker.

Book Life reports, “The entire narrative reads like a script from a Hollywood movie. The dangers they encountered were innumerable but add to a story no one can imagine unless they were traveling with them.“ Gary A Kulhanjian, Social Historian.

Very quick but nice

Nice story especially if you got some experiences in the same region. The ai narration is mostly accurate but you certainly do recognize it.

Some interesting anecdotes

This is the story about an American couple's travels through several Asian countries at an interesting historical moment (before the Iranian revolution or the Russian invasion of Afghanistan). Unfortunately the writing is wooden and the author had no particular interest in local history or culture. Nothing to do with Ibn Battuta. The AI generated reading works surprisingly well.

Has nothing to do with Battuta

Book title extremely misleading. Has nothing to do with Batutta except that he travelled. Story line was pedestrian.