Landfalls: On the Edge of Islam with Ibn Battutah - Hardcover

Mackintosh-Smith, Tim

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9780719567872: Landfalls: On the Edge of Islam with Ibn Battutah

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0719567874 ISBN 13: 9780719567872

Publisher: John Murray, 2010

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Following on Travels with a Tangerine (a New York Times Notable book) and The Hall of a Thousand Columns, here is the third volume in the author's passionate pursuit of the 14th-century traveler who out-traveled Marco Polo

For Ibn Batuttah of Tangier, being medieval didn’t mean sitting at home waiting for renaissances, enlightenments, and air travel. It meant traveling the known world to its limits. Seven centuries later, Tim Mackintosh-Smith’s fascination takes him to landfalls in remote tropical islands, torrid Indian Ocean ports, and dusty towns on the shores of the Saharan sand-sea. His zigzag itinerary across time and space leads from Zanzibar to the Alhambra (via the Maldives, Sri Lanka, China, Mauritania, and Guinea) and to a climactic conclusion to his quest for the man he calls "IB" a man who who spent his days with saints and sultans and his nights with an intercontinental string of slave-concubines. Tim’s journey is a search for survivals from IB’s world material, human, spiritual, edible however, when your fellow traveler has a 700-year head start, familiar notions don’t always work.

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About the Author:

Tim Mackintosh-Smith's first book Yemen: Travels in Dictionary Land won the 1998 Thomas Cook Travel Book Award and is now regarded as a classic of Arabian description. His two books on Ibn Battutah’s adventures in the old Islamic world and in India, Travels with a Tangerine and The Hall of a Thousand Columns, were also received to huge critical acclaim. For the past 25 years his home has been the Yemeni capital San’a.

From Booklist:

In Travels with a Tangerine (2004) and The Hall of a Thousand Columns (2006), Mackintosh-Smith traced much of the journey of legendary fourteenth-century explorer Ibn Battutah, whose pilgrimage to Mecca became a 30-year journey through the medieval Islamic world and beyond. With his latest selection, Mackintosh-Smith follows IB, as he calls the explorer, on the final leg of his journey. Here, we pick up the voyage in a forgotten corner of Zanzibar before departing to the Maldives, where IB became a prominent local jurist and enjoyed as many as 10 wives; then, on to Sri Lanka and Hong Kong before returning to West Africa and, finally, Andalucia. It is, as always, a fascinating voyage. Though the enigmatic, larger-than-life IB only occasionally comes into crisp focusindeed, the trip seems to raise more questions about him than it answersthe real centerpiece is, in many ways, Mackintosh-Smith himself, whose witty observations and passion for capturing the fast and tangled flow of raw reality remind us that travel is about more than just changing ones location. As the world shrinks and a virtual visit to any of the worlds most exotic places is but a quick tap of a smart phone away, fear not: travel writing is alive and well. --Brendan Driscoll

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