The great port on the Horn of Africa, in present-day Somalia, that was for centuries one of the oldest and richest Muslim ports of the Benadir coast and the wider western Indian Ocean trading world — a cosmopolitan Muslim center of commerce and learning, famous above all for its exported cloth, whose medieval golden age has been all but erased from popular memory by a later history of war.
When the traveler Ibn Battuta sailed into Mogadishu around 1331, he found a city so rich that the host who took in each new arrival would not let him leave until he had eaten his fill. He described a busy port, a sultan who held court in fine robes, and a cloth woven there that was carried across the sea and sold as far away as Egypt. Most people today know Mogadishu only as a place broken by war. The harder thing to hold in mind is that this same city was once, for centuries, one of the premier ports of the East African coast and the western Indian Ocean.