Travels of Ibn Battuta

Canceled for this season

Tim Mackintosh-Smith Arabist, Traveler, and Author

Fascinated by the relationships between time, place and human character, Mackintosh-Smith’s  books include a travel trilogy pursuing the fourteenth-century wanderer, Ibn Battutah, around three continents. Ibn Battutah was just 21 when he set out in 1325 from his native Tangier on a pilgrimage to Mecca. He did not return to Morocco for another 29 years, traveling instead through more than 40 countries on the modern map, covering 75,000 miles and getting as far north as the Volga, as far east as China, and as far south as Tanzania. He wrote of his travels, and comes across as a superb ethnographer, biographer, anecdotal historian, and occasional botanist and gastronome.

About the Speaker

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Tim Mackintosh-Smith, historian and traveler, was born in 1961 and educated at Clifton College and Oxford University. As well as being named by Newsweek as one of the twelve finest travel writers of the past hundred years, his editions and translations of early Arabic texts have further enriched cross-cultural understanding. His 2019 masterwork, Arabs: A 3,000-Year History of Peoples, Tribes and Empires, written in a period of forced immobility during the Yemeni civil war, examines the past through the lenses of language and migration; it has been described as ‘a book of vast scope and stunning insight.’

Among other documentaries, Tim presented and co-wrote the major BBC TV series Travels with a Tangerine, which has the off-the-cuff feel of Michael Palin at his very best. He has been based in the Arab world for over a third of a century and is a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society and an emeritus Senior Fellow of the Library of Arabic Literature.

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