Tim Mackintosh-Smith is wary of the way Ibn Battuta is usually presented.
Popular retellings tend to cast the 14th-century Moroccan traveller as a heroic explorer who set out to conquer the distance and return with knowledge . Speaking to The National ahead of his appearance at the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature on Saturday, the British travel writer and Arabist says he does not recognise that figure.
“There was a movie a few years ago on Ibn Battuta and I was a historical consultant on it. The way it turned out is that he was some great sort of heroic explorer figure, who chose what he did and where he went,” he says. “It wasn’t that way at all. He had some idea of where to go, but oftentimes he kind of just threw himself at the world and travelled where he felt he was compelled or guided to visit.”
That distinction matters to Mackintosh-Smith, who has spent much of his writing life researching and retracing Ibn Battuta’s journeys in his acclaimed 2004 book Travels with a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah and 2019’s more scholarly accessible Arabs: A 3,000-Year History of Peoples, Tribes and Empires.
Mackintosh-Smith describes Ibn Battuta’s approach to travel as driven by his Muslim faith.
“He was a deeply spiritual person, and if you read closely, there are verses in the Quran that talk about travelling the world, visiting places, seeing what happened to people before you, and learning from their experiences,” he says.
“There is also this famous hadith, a saying of the Prophet Mohammed, which describes discovering the world as a form of talab al-ilm – a form of seeking knowledge. So for Ibn Battuta, and for other important Arabic travel writers, travel was viewed not simply as an occupation, but as a vocation.”
It is a message Mackintosh-Smith will relay to audiences in Dubai as part of a session celebrating 25 years of the Ibn Battuta Prize for Travel Literature, which was established to revive interest in Arabic travel writing.
Another notion to be dispelled, Mackintosh-Smith adds, is that Ibn Battuta was a revered thinker. “He wasn’t really a scholar. He kind of pretended a bit to be a scholar when he got to royal courts further away,” he says. “But when he got back home, you know, people were actually quite dismissive of him.”
But it worked in his favour, he explains, as Ibn Battuta – perhaps because he wasn’t taken seriously – was a sharp observer of people, customs and power. These were skills developed over those years on the road, where each interaction with countries, cultures and traditions challenged all his preconceived notions.
“He left home, I think, with the prejudices that you would have as a 21-year-old Moroccan, who’d been brought up in Tangier and everything else,” he says. “But those were quickly blown away, and he ended up as this sort of blank slate without judgement, and that’s what makes him such a good observer.”
This quality places Ibn Battuta within a much older Arabic tradition of travel writing, one that Mackintosh-Smith argues is often misunderstood through Western categories.
“If somebody describes me as a travel writer, I kind of think, ‘Oh, I’m not sure I really like that,’” he says. “Because it sounds like somebody kind of swanning around on freebies and writing about five-star hotels in nice places, or somebody writing travel guides, which, useful as they are, they’re not obviously literature.”
The Arabic counterpart, he argues, in the form of works by authors such 14th-century Tunisian scholar Ibn Khaldun, has never been about leisure, but a way of thinking about the world and history through travel.
“And this is really what writers of travel in Arabic were doing a long time ago,” he says. “The Arabic word rihla, captures this difference. It doesn’t mean a holiday, but more a journey and a sense of motion. So travel in that sense is not about sitting in the sun on a beach. It’s actually about being transported from one state to another.”
While that kind of deliberate soul-searching travel may not be practical for many, Mackintosh-Smith says some of Ibn Battuta’s travel principles can still apply today, whether travelling solo or with family.
“He never worried too much about things and left himself open to what was going to happen. That’s the equivalent of saying, if you want to do something, just kind of do it,” he says. “And when things didn’t go according to plan, he would kind of pick himself up, dust himself off and go on to the next thing or start all over again. That’s less a lesson for travel, really, and more one for life.”
Emirates Airline Festival of Literature runs until Tuesday at InterContinental Dubai Festival City
