A note about the short story “The Last Voyage of Ibn Batt​​ûta” from Amira Géhanne Khalfallah for MQR’s Spring 2024 issue “African Writing: A Partial Cartography of Provocations”:   Onboard The Amsterdam or Ibn Battûta’s Last Voyage follows Marouane, a 22-year old Moroccan man, from his hometown of Tangier to the far regions of the world he crosses unexpectedly in his quest for survival and freedom. It all begins when the young man, with dreams of reaching Europe, secretly joins the crew of a boat. But the Amsterdam, the Dutch warship where he hides, is on its way to Syria. During the Mediterranean crossing, Marouane is discovered by Ernst, the ship's captain, with whom he develops a relationship that neither of them fully understand. Both are soon initiated into an entirely new way of viewing the world.

This novel is particularly attentive to the phenomenon of radicalization. It is also draws heavily from my investigative journalistic work. For twenty years, I reported on North Africa and Middle East. This experience allowed me to dig deeper into the question of why young men are drawn to ISIS. At the same time, this book is far from being a journalistic report; it is a story that questions identities, the meaning of exile as well as the nature of religion, and their relation to the world. It is a contemporary tragedy, the one we live everyday, through the media if we are lucky. It is the story of an ongoing war that might seem far away, but which hits us a little more every day until it reaches us in the most intimate places.