In this episode we will explore how the Travels of Ibn Battuta has been written and why the Travels is an important historic source with Tim Mackintosh-Smith who has dedicated his life tracing Ibn Battuta.

Tim Mackintosh-Smith is a British, Oxford-educated Arabist, writer, traveller, translator and lecturer, based in Yemen for many decades but currently nomadic. He is one of the foremost scholars of the Moroccan traveler, Ibn Battuta. Mackintosh-Smith has published a trilogy recounting his journeys in the footnotes of Ibn Battuta: Travels with A Tangerine (2001), The Hall of a Thousand Columns (2005) and Landfalls (2010). In 2007, Mackintosh-Smith presented a major BBC documentary series, Travels with a Tangerine, recounting his experiences tracing Ibn Battuta's fourteenth-century travels in the present day. In 2016 he published an edited abridgement of The Travels of Ibn Battuta with Macmillan Collector's Library.

What we cover in this episode

• Some of the Ibn Battuta’s observations on Yemen
• How the Travels of Ibn Battuta has been written
• What makes Ibn Battuta and his travels special
• Why the Travels of Ibn Battuta is an important historic source
• Rihla genre in the Islamic literature 
• Ibn Battuta’s profile and character

Conversation key insights

• ‘As a historical observer Ibn Battuta can be every exact.’ 
• ‘The travelogue is a witness to history, politics, architecture and believes. Ibn Battuta Travels is like a slice through time. Ibn Battuta was a historian despite himself, he was a geographer despite himself. You can get a history by chance in his Travels. We would not know a lot about the history of that time if not for Ibn Battuta Travels.’

A Passage from the book

‘My departure from Tangier, my birthplace, took place on Thursday the second of the month of God, Rajab the Unique, in the year seven hundred and twenty-five, with the object of making the Pilgrimage to the Holy House [at Mecca] and of visiting the tomb of the Prophet, God's richest blessing and peace be on him [at Medina]. I set out alone, having neither fellow-traveller in whose companionship I might find cheer, nor caravan whose party I might join, but swayed by an overmastering impulse within me and a desire long-cherished in my bosom to visit these illustrious sanctuaries. So I braced my resolution to quit all my dear ones, female and male, and forsook my home as birds forsake their nests. My parents being yet in the bonds of life, it weighed sorely upon me to part from them, and both they and I were afflicted with sorrow at this separation. My age at that time was twenty-two [lunar] years.’

[The Travel of Ibn Battuta, translated by H. A. R Gibb, The Hakluyt Society, volume 1, page 8, paragraph 13]

Recommended reading

• The Travels of Ibn Battuta, edited by Tim Mackintosh-Smith, Macmillan Collector's Library, 2016.
• The Travels of Ibn Jubayr, translated by Ronald Broadhurst, Good word Books, 2007. 

Thanks to the episode contributors:

• Kate O’Connell | Editor, Creative Consultant
• Aydogan Kars | Academic Advisor
• Ashkan Bahrani | Academic Advisor 
• Frank Youakim | Narrator 
• Ali Gorgin | Music
• Tia Goodwin | Cover art designer

<

We acknowledge the Aboriginal peoples as the enduring Custodians of the land from where this podcast is produced.