Arabs: A 3,000-Year History of Peoples, Tribes and Empires

History

MacKintosh-Smith, Tim

Africa

Yale University Press

A riveting, comprehensive history of the Arab peoples and tribes that explores the role of language as a cultural touchstone This kaleidoscopic book covers almost 3,000 years of Arab history and shines a light on the footloose Arab peoples and tribes who conquered lands and disseminated their language and culture over vast distances. Tracing this process to the origins of the Arabic language, rather than the advent of Islam, Tim Mackintosh-Smith begins his narrative more than a thousand years before Muhammad and focuses on how Arabic, both spoken and written, has functioned as a vital source of shared cultural identity over the millennia. Mackintosh-Smith reveals how linguistic developments—from pre-Islamic poetry to the growth of script, Muhammad’s use of writing, and the later problems of printing Arabic—have helped and hindered the progress of Arab history, and investigates how, even in today’s politically fractured post–Arab Spring environment, Arabic itself is still a source of unity and disunity.

Ibn Battutah was the greatest traveller of the pre-mechanical age, journeying for twenty-nine years and covering three times the ground Marco Polo covered. In this book Tim Mackintosh-Smith follows the first stage of Ibn Battutahs journey, from Tangier to Constantinople. Destinations include an Islamic Butlins in the Egyptian desert, Assassin castles in Syria, the Kuria Maria Islands in the Arabian Sea and some of the greatest cities of Medieval Islam. He also cleverly compares the contemporary Muslim world with the past.

Travels With a Tangerine : A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah

Travel

Specialty Travel

Picador

In Yemen: Travels in Dictionary Land Tim Mackintosh-Smith writes with an intimacy and depth of knowledge gained through thirteen years among the Yemenis. He is a travelling companion of the best sort - erudite, witty and eccentric. Crossing mountain, desert, ocean and three millennia of history, he portrays hyrax hunters and dhow skippers, a noseless regicide, and a sword-wielding tyrant with a passion for Heinz Russian salad. Yet even the ordinary Yemenis are extraordinary: their family tree goes back to Noah and is rooted in a land which, in the words of a contemporary poet, has become the dictionary of its people. Accompanied by etchings drawn from the life by Martin Yeoman, Yemen: Travels in Dictionary Land is an Arabian Grand Tour, a book in which every page is dashed - like the land it describes - with the marvellous.

Yemen: Travels in Dictionary Land

Asia

TRAFALGAR SQUARE +

Born in 1304, Ibn Battutah left his native Tangier as a young scholar of law; over the 30 years that followed he visited most of the known world between Morocco and China. In this enchanting travelogue, Tim Mackintosh-Smith retraces one leg of the Moroccan’s journey: the dizzy ladders and terrifying snakes of his Indian career as a judge and hermit, courtier and prisoner, ambassador and castaway. From the plains of Hindustan to the plateaus of the Deccan and the lost ports of Malabar, an India far off the beaten path of Taj and Rajglittering and grotesque but genuineis revealed here.

Hall of a Thousand Columns

John Murray

Following on Travels with a Tangerine (a New York Times Notable book) and The Hall of a Thousand Columns, here is the third volume in the author's passionate pursuit of the 14th-century traveler who out-traveled Marco Polo For Ibn Batuttah of Tangier, being medieval didn't mean sitting at home waiting for renaissances, enlightenments, and air travel. It meant traveling the known world to its limits. Seven centuries later, Tim Mackintosh-Smith's fascination takes him to landfalls in remote tropical islands, torrid Indian Ocean ports, and dusty towns on the shores of the Saharan sand-sea. His zigzag itinerary across time and space leads from Zanzibar to the Alhambra (via the Maldives, Sri Lanka, China, Mauritania, and Guinea) and to a climactic conclusion to his quest for the man he calls "IB"a man who who spent his days with saints and sultans and his nights with an intercontinental string of slave-concubines. Tim’s journey is a search for survivals from IB’s worldmaterial, human, spiritual, ediblehowever, when your fellow traveler has a 700-year head start, familiar notions don't always work.

Landfalls: On the Edge of Islam from Zanzibar to the Alhambra

Following on Travels with a Tangerine (a New York Times Notable book) and The Hall of a Thousand Columns, here is the third volume in the author's passionate pursuit of the 14th-century traveler who out-traveled Marco PoloFor Ibn Batuttah of Tangier, being medieval didn’t mean sitting at home waiting for renaissances, enlightenments, and air travel. It meant traveling the known world to its limits. Seven centuries later, Tim Mackintosh-Smith’s fascination takes him to landfalls in remote tropical islands, torrid Indian Ocean ports, and dusty towns on the shores of the Saharan sand-sea. His zigzag itinerary across time and space leads from Zanzibar to the Alhambra (via the Maldives, Sri Lanka, China, Mauritania, and Guinea) and to a climactic conclusion to his quest for the man he calls "IB"a man who who spent his days with saints and sultans and his nights with an intercontinental string of slave-concubines. Tim’s journey is a search for survivals from IB’s worldmaterial, human, spiritual, ediblehowever, when your fellow traveler has a 700-year head start, familiar notions don’t always work.

Landfalls: On the Edge of Islam with Ibn Battutah

Travel Writing

Our ideas of the Arabian Peninusula have been hijacked: by images of the desert, by oil, by the Gulf War. But there is another Arabia.For the classical geographers Yemen was a fabulous land where flying serpents guarded sacred incense groves. Medieval Arab visitors told of disappearing islands and menstruating mountains. Vita Sackville-West found Aden 'precisely the most repulsive corner of the world'. Arguably the most fascinating but least known country in the Arab world, Yemen has a way of attracting comment that ranges from the superficial to the wildly fictitious. In Yemen: Travels in Dictionary Land, Tim Mackintosh-Smith writes with an intimacy and depth of knowledge gained through over twenty years among the Yemenis. He is a travelling companion of the best sort - erudite, witty and eccentric. Crossing mountain, desert, ocean and three millennia of history, he portrays hyrax hunters and dhow skippers, a noseless regicide, and a sword-wielding tyrant with a passion for Heinz Russian salad. Yet even the ordinary Yemenis are extraordinary: their family tree goes back to Noah and is rooted in a land which, in the words of a contemporary poet, has become the dictionary of its people. Every page of this book is dashed - like the land it describes - with the marvellous.

In 1325, the great Arab traveler Ibn Battutah set out from his native Tangier in North Africa on pilgrimage to Mecca. By the time he returned nearly thirty years later, he had seen most of the known world, covering three times the distance allegedly traveled by the great Venetian explorer Marco Polo—some 75,000 miles in all. Captivated by Ibn Battutah’s account of his journey, the Arabic scholar and award-winning travel writer Tim Mackintosh-Smith set out to follow in the peripatetic Moroccan’s footsteps. Traversing Egyptian deserts and remote islands in the Arabian Sea, visiting castles in Syria and innumerable souks in medieval Islam’s great cities, Mackintosh-Smith sought clues to Ibn Battutah’s life and times, encountering the ghost of “IB” in everything from place names (in Tangier alone, a hotel, street, airport, and ferry bear IB’s name), to dietary staples to an Arabic online dating service— and introducing us to a world of unimaginable wonders. By necessity, Mackintosh-Smith’s journey may have cut some corners (“I only wish I had the odd thirty years to spare, and Ibn Battutah’s enviable knack of extracting large amounts of cash, robes and slaves from compliant rulers.”) But in this wry, evocative, and uniquely engaging travelogue, he spares no effort in giving readers an unforgettable glimpse into both the present-day and fourteenth-century Islamic worlds.

Travels with a Tangerine: From Morocco to Turkey in the Footsteps of Islam's Greatest Traveler

Middle East

Random House Publishing Group

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by MacKintosh-Smith, Tim. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by MacKintosh-Smith, Tim

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by MacKintosh-Smith, Tim. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Arabs: A 3,000-Year History of Peoples, Tribes and Empires

Arabs: A 3,000-Year History of Peoples, Tribes and Empires

Arabs: A 3,000-Year History of Peoples, Tribes and Empires

Travels With a Tangerine : A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah

Yemen: Travels in Dictionary Land

Hall of a Thousand Columns

Landfalls: On the Edge of Islam from Zanzibar to the Alhambra

Landfalls: On the Edge of Islam with Ibn Battutah

Yemen: Travels in Dictionary Land

Travels with a Tangerine: From Morocco to Turkey in the Footsteps of Islam's Greatest Traveler