[3] Abu'l-Fida was born in Damascus,[4] where his father Malik ul-Afdal, brother of Emir Al-Mansur Muhammad II of Hama, had fled from the Mongols.
[5] In his boyhood he devoted himself to the study of the Qur'an and the sciences, but from his twelfth year onward, he was almost constantly engaged in military expeditions, chiefly against the Crusaders.
Abu'l-Fida wrote that a person who completed a westward circumnavigation of the world would count one fewer day than a stationary observer, since he was traveling in the same direction as the apparent motion of the sun in the sky.
After sailing westward around the world from Spain, the expedition called at Cape Verde for supplies on Wednesday, 9 July 1522 (ship's time).
It was translated into Latin,[11] French and English and was the main work of Muslim historiography used by 18th-century orientalists including Jean Gagnier (1670–1740) and Johann Jakob Reiske (1754).