Globe Corner Blogs

This past Monday evening I attended a Harvard-sponsored forum, moderated by acclaimed British travel writer and diplomat Rory Stewart. He is the author of Prince of the Marshes, about his year as a provincial governor in southern Iraq after the US-led invasion in 2003, and The Places In Between, which chronicles Stewart’s walk across Afghanistan shortly after the fall of the Taliban regime. Stewart is currently a professor at the JFK School of Government here in Cambridge and was eager to moderate a talk given by an author he had long admired but never met: Tim Mackintosh-Smith, a Thomas Cook Travel Award-winning author (for his travelogue Yemen-The Unknown Arabia). Mackintosh-Smith spoke about his long obsession with the 14th century Islamic scholar and world traveler Ibn Battutah and how the author’s unique views of the Middle East have been informed by the last quarter-century he has spent living in the Yemeni capital of Sa’na.

It was a pretty freewheeling discussion that ended up being as much about travel writing, the limitations of the genre, and the various socio-political complexities of attempting to accurately describe a foreign culture while still telling an entertaining story, as it did about Ibn Battutah himself.  According to Mackintosh-Smith, what had most drawn him again and again to study a relatively obscure late-medieval traveler and devote a great part of his life to following in his footsteps was the essential humanity and almost modern sense of self of Ibn Battutah.  As the author related, in many medieval chronicles and accounts of travelers, you rarely get more than “and then this happened, and then this other thing happened, and then we rested for a day” without any real understanding of what the individual actually felt or experienced. In Ibn Battutah’s chronicles, we see him eat, drink, get sick with a bad case of diarrhea, fall in love, develop blisters, and generally experience his journeys across North Africa, the Middle East, and all the way to India and China over the course of many years through his own eyes.

Read more: Afghanistan, Book Reviews, Ibn Battutah, Iraq, Middle East, News, Rory Stewart, Tim Mackintosh-Smith, Yemen


Will is a politics junkie, the only native born Bostonian on the staff (do not ask him for directions if you are driving, his guess is as good as yours), a rabid Boston sports fan who hearts Kevin Garnett in a totally non-creepy way, a terrible surfer, a bon vivant, and a burrito connoisseur. He dreams of the beach at Punta Uva and is often hit by Lisa for ill-advised remarks about her hair.

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