Customer Reviews

Travels With A Tangerine

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

'Travels with a Tangerine' is an excellent travel book and history book that chronicles the adventures of Ibn Battuta, one of the most famous Muslim explorers of the Euroepean 'Middle Ages'. Mackintosh-Smith, a 17-year resident of Yemen, follows "IB's" route from Morocco to Egypt to the Saudi Arabian peninsula to the Crimea and Istanbul, IB's 'Travels' as his main guide. Mackintosh-Smith's adventures are as compelling as IB's, and it is remarkable how much has not changed in the almost 700 years since IB began what was a 25-year journey that took him to China and back. The narrative is both entertaining and informative; however, it was a little dense at times, and I wish I knew more about IB and Muslim history before I started the book. The author gives one of the most balanced accounts of the modern Muslim world that I have ever read, and it's great to read about regular people who respect themselves and others, in contrast to the sensationalistic news reports we are bombarded with every night. A good book and a great adventure.

If you are interested in the genre of travel writing where it merges with history then this book is worth the effort that it takes to read it. It takes a chapter, or two, to get used to the style of writing. Unlike so many other books of this type the editor has permitted the author to keep the quirks of style that allow the reader to acknowledge the presence of the individual rather than the blandness found in so many other books. As a result you gain an insight into the worlds of the author and IB. The fact that Mackintosh-Smith speaks fluent Arabic gives a depth to the book that is rare in similar works.
I read this book slowly and with great interest. Having some knowledge of the history of the region does help but is not a prerequisite. The reader is taken on a slow journey into a region of the world that is all to often portrayed as bordering on permanent chaos. It is not a book for someone who wants to skim or is disinterested in the minutiae of traveling in the footsteps of a long gone traveler. The end result is a satisfying and enjoyable read.

A retracing of some of the journeys (Morocco, Egypt, Syria, Southern Arabia, the Kuria Muria Islands,Turkey and the Crimea)of the fourteenth century traveller, Ibn Battuta.
The author is a British born and educated Yemen resident, fluent in classical and colloquial Arabic and deeply learned in history and music. The book contains quotations in French, German, Russian (in the Cyrillic alphabet), Turkish and Greek. I thought I'd caught him misquoting Pliny, but then realized he was making a Latin joke. Some of his polyglot puns are outrageous. In The Umayyad mosque in Damascus he found Ismailis and Shiites at prayer, but that the orthodox were keeping the Sunni side up.
The long digressions on obscure Arab writers and religious teachers and the intrusive parade of erudition might put some people off. It's a bit like reading Umberto Ecco where some readers, such as myself, get entranced by the writer's flattering assumption that we are as clever as he is.
He travelled rough and travelled alone. He explains at one point that he cannot marry because he is an "ah, orientalist." He shows much interest in, and sympathy with, the Moslem religion but I got the impression that. like his fellow orientalist, TE Lawrence, he likes Arabs best if they are poor and rural, a faintly patronizing attitude.

Those lucky enough to have read Tim Mackintosh-Smith (or "Ahmad Kandash," according to some of his native Arab neighbors) on his adopted land of Yemen (I wish the American press had kept the British subtitle "Travels in Dictionary Land") will find the same strengths in this account. Outside of, say, an Omani snack of dried shark and Scotch or a jeep bounce, the report from the hinterlands is driven more by insight than ignition. In the manner of many such travellers' tales from more leisurely pens and patient eyes, not much happens in the way of thrills; a subtler, refined retelling of IB's adventure through his own retracing gives a filtered, reflective sheen to the book.

I sense throughout an unease with his "masahi," or Christian status--with many he meets understandably amazed at his command of Arabic, Tim's constantly finding himself almost apologetic for his "infidel" status. I wonder if ensuing books (long life to the author so he can tell his journey's sequel--even if he's the same age as me--not that old!) will unfold not only the geographic and personal encounters he tells so well, but his own spiritual struggles. Foreshadowed perhaps in the transcendent dervish dance he witnesses.

Anyone who can gracefully cite the apropos Edward Lear allusion, the culinary reference (some of which escaped me due to my parochial palate), or learned medieval reference and still keep a travelogue dynamic and unassumingly witty while avoiding cliche or pandering is an accomplished scholar and a skilled word-smith. His range of knowledge enters at the right moment, and then recedes; he largely does not show off what he knows. Instead, he sprinkles it into the text to flavor the immediate image or conversation he's narrating to us. Not an easy feat.

But the world he enters can never be entirely plumbed by a Westerner; skilled as he may be, this author knows the power of the unresolved detail. I have no idea how he makes a living, what he does exactly in Yemen, the depth of his Christianity, or his sexual preferences! (Despite his Crimean guide Nina.) This rendering, skillfully, shifts the focus on and off the first-person narrator. Conjuring up the aura of differance, as the French critics opine, endures and makes his encounters memorable. For instance, I wonder if Habibah's "tambul promoting, er, cohabitation" [p. 238] worked? His "research assistant" never seems to have reported back, or else Tim proves once again how mystery trumps the mundane.

I was drawn to this book after realizing that, having done my share of low budget travel in Asia, I would comprehend more from a travel narrative about Arabia then the hyperbolie in the Press and the flood of books proclaiming insights into Islam. I was not disappointed, and in fact was pleasantly surprised at how well Mackintosh-Smith tells his story. His premise, to retrace the route of the famous 14th century Morroccan traveler Ibn Battutah, allows the book to easily offer up comparisons of life in the hey day of Islamic civilization versus our own modern day time of war. This is one of its strengths and delights. You can readily see that people in many ways have not changed much.

I found it refreshing to read of MacKintosh-Smith's many encounters with everyday devote Muslims as they visited the tombs of saints and in true hospitality took him under their care. I was also delighted to learn so much about the southern coast of Oman, a place that looks totally deserted on maps of the Arabian Peninsula, but which turns out to be home to (mostly) very friendly people. It reminded me in some ways of travelogues from rural towns and the midwestern United States where life is slower and people pay more attention to travelers. And like the midwest, instead of raving fundamentalist Muslim fanatics, time after time MacKintosh-Smith encounters educated, polite people who try to help him in his quest even if it seems a bit bookish and impractical to them. (Several people try to tell him, " That was 700 years ago, things are different today!")

The book is not perfect of course - it does have it's slow moments. These seem to come chiefly when MacKintosh-Smith gets caught up in describing his own state of mind rather than keeping to his formidable powers of describing the scene around him. There is a certain awkwardness when he tries to reveal some of his own more private encounters but then at the last minute drops it and leaves you hanging. And things can get slow when due to the ravages of time he can find no connection between where he is and what was there in Battutah's day. Lastly, the book does not cover all of Battutah's travels, just the first third. Oh well - small price to pay for what is overall a very pleasurable and informative read. Through MacKintosh-Smiths's eyes I have gained a sense of how an ordinary Muslim citizen in the Middle East lives. I look foward to reading more should MacKintosh-Smith continue the journey and publish another volume.

I wanted to enjoy this book. The premise is interesting. The author is fascinated by Ibn Battutah and his travels. He sets off to follow in IB's footsteps. The author draws references from many bizarre sources presumably to help clarify or explain some of his experiences, but what it ends up being is gratuitous obscurity. I carefully sought out his references, but I did not feel rewarded. I noted with interest how often the author clarified that he was not married and did not wish to be and that he is not a Muslim and did not wish to be. These two issues arose many times. I was interested in the Eye of Joy and a couple of his jokes, but overall I felt the author was trying to impress the reader with his wide knowledge of obscurity rather than share an experience with his reader.

From a fragment in a Yemeni library retraces the some of the steps of the greatest traveller of the pre-industrial age. What is remarkable about this book is that Tim Mackintosh still encounters all the problems that Ibn Battuta did. In fact Ibn Battuta is a very modern traveller that we can empathise with, he gets a stomach bug, he wonders about getting laid, he gets ripped off by suspect guides and "wimps" out in one part of the story.
This book is not just a great travel book, but in the post 9/11 world it gives you another face to the Islamic World: the hospitality, the cultural diversity and rich culture.
Thank you very much Mr Makintosh-Smith for introducing me to our mutual 600 year old friend Ibn Battuta
Read and enjoy

Tim Mackintosh-Smith is an Englishman who is also an "Arabist," calling Sanaa, in the Yemen, home for over three decades. The Romans called the Yemen "Arabia Felix," the Happy Arabia due to its greenness and its wealth (the far eastern portions of the Yemen - present day Oman - provided the Frankincense that the Romans considered essential for dispatching their loved ones into the next world). TE Lawrence ("Lawrence of Arabia") considered the Yemen to be the primogenitor of the Arab people, with overpopulation in this lush land being the force that drove them over the deserts to Syria, and beyond. More recently, the Yemen is the tribal homeland of the Bin Laden's, including recently departed Osama. Mackintosh-Smith has used this central vantage point to report on this fascinating, and all too topical, area of the world. To do so, he chose the vehicle of following in the footsteps of one of the most peripatetic of our species, certainly in times of yore, Ibn Battutah, who left to wandered the "known" world at the age of 21, starting at its "edge," Tangiers, in 1325, for a period of over a quarter century. The author wrote this book over a decade ago, just prior to the events of 09/11/01, which have changed the West's perceptions of this area as well as their perceptions of us.

Mackintosh-Smith displays a remarkable knowledge, and even better, a visceral understanding of the Islamic world. His writing style is fresh, with a knack for selecting a telling anecdote to demonstrate a broader concept. He "drew me in" with his story about a short article on Ibn Battutah in the Royal Air Maroc in-flight magazine. The article claimed that he had been a "Muslim religious official on the Falkland Islands"! How can this be?? A century and a half before Columbus "discovered" the New World, Ibn Battutah is laboring away in the Falklands? Fortunately the author is tri-lingual (at least), as was the magazine, and he realized that there was a confusion between "Malvinas" (the Argentinian name for the islands) and the French "Illes Maldives," the small island nation off the southwest coast of India, where Ibn Battutath was indeed a judge. How could no one have caught this? Anyhow, much of the book is Mackintosh-Smith holding up that proverbial candle, in an effort to dispel Western misconceptions of the region.

The author does not attempt to replicate the entire trip of the 14th century wanderer. He figures just the first part, roughly from Tangiers to Istanbul is ambitious enough. For the chapter on his travels in Upper Egypt, he selects an epigraph from Edward Browne's 19th Century book, A Year Amongst the Persians: Impressions as to the Life, Character, and Thought of the People of Persia, Received During Twelve Month's Residence in that Country in the Years 1887-8 (Classic Reprint) : "I suppose that, wherever one goes, one sees in great measure what one expects to see." Later in the chapter, the author again quotes Browne: "Do not, like the majority of Firangis" (i.e., Westerners) "occupy yourself with nothing but dumb stones, vessels of brass, tiles..." Two admonitions Mackintosh-Smith takes to heart, unlike, for example Robert Byron, in his The Road to Oxiana who seemed to move from one "pile of stones to another" utterly oblivious of the present. Mackintosh-Smith makes his own judgments, of the present scene, but never forgetting the historical perspective that makes the past not even the past. All too often he conveys his points with similar situations in the West. Consider: "I lived, of course, in the graveyard of the Ottomans: Yemen, where, a hundred years ago, Anatolian conscripts had died by the thousand; Yemen, whose flower, as I found out later form the dictionary, is bitter cumin; a place whose name is, a century on, as sadly, musically evocative for the Turks as Picardy is for us."

Permit me to throw out a few more observations from the author in order to tempt you to read this book. Certainly the first one I wish I had known when I had to deal with some "Beards" in Riyadh: "'In Yemen, where I live,' I said, `there is a saying: "If whiskers meant anything, tomcats would be pashas."' Then there is: "But fecundity and fetidness go together. The Arabic name for the Damascus oasis, al-Ghutah, is cognate with the words for dungheap and defecation." Another retort I wished I had known, the author uses as an epigraph, and it is a quote from Bertram Thomas (the first Westerner to cross the Rub Al-Khali, the Empty Quarter), from his Arabia Felix: "Are you quite sure you are pure-bred?" It is most appropriate for his section on the Dhofar region of Oman.

Rich and wonderful is this book, a true joy to behold and read. I had previously read and reviewed Dunn's The Adventures of Ibn Battuta: A Muslim Traveler of the Fourteenth Century, Revised Edition, with a New Preface. Dunn performed a stellar effort in trying to determine the actual route of this Islamic wandered, but I think that Mackintosh-Smith is far more attuned to the spirit, and is a much more astute observer of today's world, as it has been shaped by the past.

Speaking of lines that can be used against you, we in the West do have the aphorism that the Devil can quote scripture. Risking that, I think it appropriate to quote Mackintosh-Smith's epigraph for his final chapter, which is taken from the Qur'an: "O mankind! We created you from a single (pair) of a male and a female, and made you into nations and tribes, that ye may know each other (not that ye may despise each other.)

Go forth, and wander? If so, M-S is a wanderer to emulate and who will hopefully lead you to see things that you do NOT expect to see. 5-stars, plus.

Tim Mackintosh-Smith's entertaining and informative travelogue recounts his attempt to duplicate the first part of the travels of the great Islamic traveller Ibn Batutta. He starts in Morocco, travels across North Africa to Egypt, then to the Middle East in modern Saudi Arabia and Jordan. He then travel to the coast of the Persian Gulf to modern Oman, and finally back up through Turkey and onto the Crimea peninsula. Overall, I found this to be a very informative read, but not easy and not that entertaining. You'll learn a tremendous amount about the diversity of the people who inhabit the Islamic world: their cultures, their religion, their cuisine. Each region has a tremendous amount of local history, and to sweep this all under the rug as 'Islamic' history is a tremendous disservice. TMS's book will, if nothing else, demonstrate the enormous diversity in the Islamic world - this alone is worth the price of admission for someone like me who has never visited Egypt, Jordan, etc. TMS also meets many friendly and not so friendly people along the way that spice up his travels. However, this book is a tough slog - it is almost too clever for its own good. One can only read about so many Islamic saints and shrines, after a while they all start to blend together. There is so much minutiae in this book that sometimes TMS looses the larger picture for the trees in the forest. He certainly didn't encourage me to repeat this journey, and there is no way that this can be considered an easy read - it definitely took discipline on my part to finish the book. The few times that TMS tries to inject humor into the tale of his travels, it is always in the form of body function humor - a bit scatological for an otherwise clever travelogue. The bottom line is that there is a lot to like about this journey, but it is too wordy and eclectic for its own good, and I'd be wary about recommending it to anyone. I think the glowing 5 star reviews overrate this somewhat, and you should think carefully before taking the plunge.

This book deserves a spot in the travel-writing canon. It gave me fresh hope for writing about the Middle East, which is either bogged down in political analysis or totally clueless about the nuances of Arab culture (or both). Mackintosh-Smith's approach is refreshing--he's funny, respectful and very, very well educated, so even when Ibn Battutah doesn't have much to say on a subject, he can cite all kinds of other (often hilarious or just plain weird) medieval sources. And near the end of the book, when he gets out of his depth (as he's no longer in countries where he speaks the language), he manages to stay sharp and insightful.

I did spend a few years of my life studying medieval Arabic literature, so maybe I'm just geeking out--the book might prove just a little too obscure for some. But anyone who appreciates the spirit of travel, a brilliant vocabulary and an astute eye for cultural foibles (both modern and medieval) should give "Travels with a Tangerine" a shot. I'm off to read the next books.