The Rihla, formally A Gift to Those Who Contemplate the Wonders of Cities and the Marvels of Traveling, is valuable to religious history precisely because Ibn Battuta traveled as a jurist and a pious Muslim rather than as a merchant or a diplomat first: he sought out qadis, Sufi shaykhs and their lodges, and venerated tombs and shrines in nearly every region he passed through, recording which practices he found orthodox, which struck him as regional innovation, and which local rulers he judged properly Islamic in their governance. His accounts of Sufi hospice networks stretching from Anatolia to India, of the devotional life of the Delhi Sultanate's court, and of Islamic practice as far as it had spread into Southeast Asia and the West African savanna, together give modern historians a single observer's continuous, comparative view of the religious texture of the entire Islamic world in one generation, a scope no other surviving medieval source matches.
Ibn Battuta's own travels covered a distance modern estimates place at roughly seventy five thousand miles, well beyond the far better known journeys of his near contemporary Marco Polo, though the Rihla reached a wide readership only much later than Polo's account did in Europe, surviving mainly in manuscript within the Islamic world until nineteenth century French and English scholars translated and published it. Historians have long debated how much of the text, especially the Chinese sections, rests on Ibn Battuta's own eyewitness experience against material drawn from other travelers' accounts or from Ibn Juzayy's own literary embellishment in the dictation process, a genuine and still unresolved question of the text's composition rather than a settled fraud.