Travels with a Tangerine – Tim Mackintosh-Smith

Expatwoman book club review Travels with a tangerineFollowing in the footsteps of 14th Century Moroccan traveller Ibn Battuta, Tim Mackintosh-Smith travels from Tangiers to Turkey. Always looking for connections between the contemporary Muslim world and the past of Ibn Battutah’s day, Tim Mackintosh Smith makes for a humorous and subversive guide with a wonderful descriptive eye allowing him to explore complex details in a few lines of prose.
Unlike some recent travel literature the book also feels relevant and worthwhile. Ibn Battutah covered three times as much ground as Marco Polo and yet his was a story I was not familiar with. He also travelled in the pre-mechanical, pre-telecommunications age so his observations on how Islam spread to the far corners of the world and integrated into non-Islamic and non-Arab lands offer fascinating background to today’s Muslim communities. Most of all the book is immensely enjoyable because its characters are so likeable. Ibn Battutah himself jumps vividly from the pages as a flawed but very human personality and Tim mackintosh Smith is the ideal travel companion – knowledgeable but not pompous and with a great sense of fun. Unbelievably considering the ground that is covered this book represents just the first third of the travels Ibn Battutah under took and Mackintosh Smith has continued to follow in his footsteps. Book two, ‘Hall of a Thousand Columns’, came out in 2005 and will be followed by book three, ‘Landfalls’, this September. Luckily for us in Dubai Tim Mackintosh Smith will be launching ‘Landfalls’ here as a guest of the Emirates Airline Festival of literature,

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