Between 1325 and 1354, the Moroccan scholar and traveller Ibn Battuta undertook one of history's most extraordinary journeys, travelling approximately 120,000 kilometres across the Islamic world from his home city of Tangier, Morocco, to sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia, India, Southeast Asia, and China. His navigation of the Indian Ocean relied entirely on the monsoon wind system — the northeast monsoon for outward journeys from Arabia to India, and the southwest monsoon for the return — knowledge of which had been accumulated by Arab and Indian navigators over centuries. His account, the Rihla, is one of the greatest travel narratives in world literature.

Ibn Battuta's Rihla, composed with the literary assistance of Ibn Juzayy at the court of the Marinid sultan of Morocco, is a masterpiece of Arabic prose literature that provides incomparable description of wind-dependent Indian Ocean navigation, monsoon timing, and the maritime cultures of the fourteenth-century world. His descriptions of the monsoon winds as the governing rhythm of Indian Ocean life influenced the genre of Arabic geographical literature and, through later translations, shaped European understanding of Asian maritime cultures. The Rihla's account of wind-powered navigation across three oceans makes it an indispensable document for understanding how wind structured the pre-modern world.