Why The Name

Since I am traveling so much across the US and I report to everyone about my travels, I thought I would try to make my writings a little bit more interesting to read plus, what else am I supposed to do on a long plane ride back to Seattle!!! That is why I am going to begin writing my experiences under this title (I am sure you can guess what it is based on). If you have a better title, please let me know. Before I begin, I wanted to comment on my pen name: Babi Batuta. "babi" is the word that my children call me. It means my dad. When Abdallah was born, I really wanted him to call me what I called my dad, Baba Jani. Since I was a new dad, I was naive and thought that if I said this to him over and over, he would eventually say it. Well, he tried, but what stuck was a combination of the two words. When he started saying this in public, people thought it was cute, so it stuck!!!! is this how words get created?

And I chose the last name as Batuta, for the famous traveler Ibn Batuta, who lived a few hundred years ago during the days when the Islamic Empire stretched from Morocco in the West (arabic for Morocco is maghreb which means west) to the Bangladesh in the East (no, Bangladesh does not mean East and Maruf can tell us what it does mean). He traveled across the empire and wrote about his experiences from what he saw to the people he met. His writings are a great historical and sociological account of people of his age. Hey, maybe one day I can publish my writings as well :)