Travels with a Tangerine – A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah –

“Sometimes, the best travelling companion is a dead one.

Ibn Battutah, the greatest traveller of the pre-mechanical age, set out in 1325 from his native Tangier on the pilgrimage to Mecca. By the time he returned twenty-nine years later, he had visited most of the known world, travelling three time the distance Marco Polo allegedly covered. Spiritual backpacker, tireless social climber, temporary hermit and failed ambassador, he braved brigands, blisters and his own prejudices. The outcome was a monumental book on The Marvels of Metropolises and the Wonders of Wandering – in short, the Travels.

Captivated by this inquisitive, indefatigable man, Tim Mackintosh-Smith, in the tradition of earlier Arab authors, set out to write a dhayl to his book – a ‘tail’, or continuation of the original train of writing. Travels with a Tangerine follows the first stage of the Moroccan’s eccentric journey, from Tangier to Constantinople. Destinations include an Islamic Burtlin’s in the Egyptian desert, Assassin castles in Syria, the Kuria Muria Islands in the Arabian Seas, the shores of the Cimmerian Bosphorus and some of the greatest cities of Medieval Islam. Mackintosh-Smith travels both in Ibn Battutah’s footsteps and in the footnotes of his text, rooting out memorabilia of the man and his age – buffalo-milk puddings, fishbone houses, a scholar’s pen box, an Aleppan pulpit, a Crimean minaret, dancing dervishes and the scions of defunct dynasties. And there are other, unlooked-for discoveries: time suddenly regained.

Travels with a Tangerine also explores a parallel landscape: the contemporary Muslim world, filled with fresh wonders and marvels but resonant with echoes of In Battutah’s own Travels. There are no ghosts in Islam; but sometimes, as the great Islamic scholar al-Jahiz said, ‘a book can haunt you like a shadow’ … even 650 years after it was written.”