At the age of twenty-eight, in 1189, he left Baghdad and began a long period of travel in search for knowledge. First he was in Mosul for a year. There he heard people saying great things about al-Suhrawardi. He came across al-Suhrawardi’s treatises the Intimations, the Glimmer, and the Ascending Steps; but he did not find in them the knowledge that he was looking for. He left Mosul for Damascus where he joined the grammarian al-Kindi al-Baghdadi (d.1216) and he worked on a certain number of grammatical treatises. In Damascus he took more and more distance from the study and practice of alchemy. Then ‘Abd al-Latif went to Jerusalem and then to the Saladin near Acre. Here he came into contact with Saladin’s entourage: Baha’ al-Din ibn Shaddad (1145–1234), his biographer and the chief of the army and the city of Jerusalem, and ‘Imad al-Din al-Katib al-Isfahani (d.1201), the chronicler of Saladin’s deeds. With a safe-conduct document written by this latter ‘Abd al-Latif arrived in Cairo.