MAGAN'S WORLD:Manchán Magan's tales of a travel addict
WE IMAGINE the grand tour as something wealthy English people and enlightened Americans did in the 19th century, or, possibly, the circuitous European wanderings of Antipodeans in the late 20th century.
But Yemen-based traveller Tim Mackintosh-Smith introduces us in his travelogues to an earlier grand tour favoured by inquisitive Arabs a thousand years ago, who could journey from Morocco across Africa into the Middle East, up into Turkey and from there to Mongol China without ever leaving the Muslim world.
Far from being inward- looking, Arab society in the 11th to 14th centuries was built upon exploration, pilgrimage and wandering. The greatest vagabond was the Moroccan Islamic scholar Ibn Battutah who set off in 1325, aged 21, on pilgrimage to Mecca and spent the next 30 years roaming the world, covering 121,000km. He kept a mental blog while roaming, which he then spent his retirement crafting into a book entitled roughly The Precious Gift of Lookers into the Marvels of Cities and Wonders of Travel. It's infinitely more elegant, honest and insightful than Marco Polo's trashy tales.
Mackintosh-Smith set himself the slightly barmy mission of following Battutah's travels and has spent 21 years completing it. "I wanted to listen for echoes, however faint, of one man's footfalls long ago." His first book Travels with a Tangerine tracked Battutah's route from Tangiers to Constantinople, via Egypt, Syria and Oman. His next book The Hall of a Thousand Columnsfocused on Battutah's stay in India, wandering from Hindustan to Malabar, and his most recent Landfallsbrought him from Zanzibar to Sri Lanka, China, Mauritania, West Africa and the Costa del Sol.
Both Battutah and Mackintosh-Smith are Arab scholars – both preternaturally naughty. For example, Mackintosh-Smith describes his predecessor’s account of the Maldives thus: “IB on the Maldives is, not to mince words, a swaggering, sanctimonious, self-important d**k-head . . . The pomposity, the piety, the pettiness, the sexual braggadocio all come together in a self-portrait of unintentionally devastating, grimacing clarity.”
This is Arab scholarship on an entertaining level, similar to what Redmond O'Hanlon did for ornithology in Into the Heart of Borneo. I suppose, one earns the right to talk about someone in such terms after following their footsteps for thousands of kilometres.
Mackintosh-Smith goes on to point out that his subject’s sanctimonious self-importance regarding the Maldives makes “the historical, legendary, ethnological and linguistic information in (this section of his account) of supreme importance”. He continues: “Out here on the Islamic periphery, IB was at his most stridently orthodox, huffing and puffing – between tuna-powered visits to all those wives and concubines – at the islanders’ laxities like some mullah on Viagra.”
It is the search for temporal fault lines linking the modern world with his 14th century quarry that is most interesting about Mackintosh-Smith’s work. At one point while trying to track down Arabic-speakers in remote Sri Lankan villages who may remember old tales of wandering sages from a millennia ago, he says, “I was struck by a sudden image of what I was trying to do, translated into a European context: picture a Sri Lankan popping into country churches in, say Co Waterford, and interrogating parish priest and sacristans, in Latin, about a little-known Italian holy man who’d passed through a thousand years ago and whose dealings were recorded only by a Byzantine traveller of the time of the Palaeologues, and you have some idea of the futility of it all.”
For anyone keen to learn how to write with such perspicacity and elan, consider Mackintosh-Smith’s travel writing workshop at West Cork Literary Festival, July 4th-6th, or book a private session with him.
westcorkliteraryfestival.ie
mackintosh-smith.com