Literary, numismatic and epigraphic evidence makes it clear that Tughluq was the Sultan's personal name, and not an ancestral designation. His ancestry is debated among modern historians, because the earlier sources differ widely regarding it. Tughluq's court poet Badr-i Chach attempted to find a royal genealogy for his family, but this can be dismissed as flattery. This is clear from the fact that another courtier Amir Khusrau, in his "Tughluq Nama", states that Tughluq described himself as an unimportant man (""awara mard"") in his early career. The contemporary Moroccan traveler Ibn Battuta states that Tughluq belonged to the "Qarauna tribe of the Turks", who lived in the hilly region between Turkestan and Sindh. Ibn Battuta's source for this claim was the Sufi saint Rukn-ud-Din Abul Fateh, but the claim is not corroborated by any other contemporary source. Firishta, based on inquiries at Lahore, wrote that the historians of India and the books had neglected to mention any clear statement on the origin of the dynasty, but wrote that there was a tradition that Tughluq's father was a Turkic slave of the earlier emperor Balban, and that his mother came from a Jat family of India. No contemporary sources corroborate this claim of his Jat ancestry. Additionally the historian Fouzia Farooq Ahmed supports Amir Khusrau's assertion that Tughluq was not a Balbanid slave, because he was not part of the old Sultanate household or the nobility of Balban, and instead expressed his loyalty to the heterogenous Khalji regime through which he first entered military service.