Landfalls: On the Edge of Islam with Ibn Battutah

 

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 world—material, human, spiritual, edible—however, when your fellow traveler has a 700-year head start, familiar notions don’t always work.