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Historicity

German Islamic studies scholar Ralph Elger views Battuta's travel account as an important literary work but doubts the historicity of much of its content, which he suspects to be a work of fiction compiled and inspired from other contemporary travel reports. Various other scholars have raised similar doubts.

In 1987, Ross E. Dunn similarly expressed doubts that any evidence would be found to support the narrative of the Rihla, but in 2010, Tim Mackintosh-Smith completed a multi-volume field study in dozens of the locales mentioned in the Rihla, in which he reports on previously unknown manuscripts of Islamic law kept in the archives of Al-Azhar University in Cairo that were copied by Ibn Battuta in Damascus in 1326, corroborating the date in the Rihla of his sojourn in Syria.