Travels with a Tangerine - Tim Mackintosh-Smith

Travels with a Tangerine -A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah - Picador - 2002 - 351pp, index, line drawings, maps - Paperback as new.

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.