Turks – is one of the best things about it. For historians of 14th-century Asia Minor or Sudanic West Africa, Ibn Battutah is the major – sometimes the only – source. But, besides the beards and bazaars, madrassas and slave girls (of whom Ibn Battutah was especially fond, fathering – and abandoning – countless children during his travels),the Rihlahboasts holy men in their hundreds, Hindu and Christian as well as Muslim. Burhan al-Din the Lame, a Sufi ascetic Ibn Battutah met in Alexandria in 1326, played a particularly important role, prophesying that Ibn Battutah would meet his brother Sufis, Farid al-Din, Rukn al-Din and Burhan al-Din, in India, Sind and China. This, it seems, is the reason for his travels that meant most to Ibn Battutah himself: ‘I was amazed at his prediction, and . . . my wanderings never ceased until I had met these three that he named.’ His countryman al-Murshidi foretold his wanderings through Yemen, Iraq, Turkey and India, where he would meet ‘Dilshad the Indian’. Much later, having escaped from a band of Hindu rebels marauding near Delhi, Ibn Battutah was rescued by a mysterious figure calling himself Dilshad who vanished as swiftly as he had appeared. ‘I knew that it was he whom the saint had foretold that I should meet,’ Ibn Battutah says. The 19th-century German Orientalist Heinrich Julius Klaproth dismissed the feats of Ibn Battutah’s holy men as ‘rigmaroles’. But ‘for medieval metaphysicians,’ as Mackintosh-Smith notes, ‘dreams came not from some spidery Freudian crypt of the psyche but from the bright world of spirit

ual intellection where events and places are parallel.’ Ibn Khaldun’s explanation, anticipating Schopenhauer, is that our dreaming and waking lives function as mutually dependent metaphors, each offering a different perspective on ‘reality’ – the former presenting past and future as co-existent, the latter maintaining chronological order. Ibn Battutah’s saints and Sufis had permanent access to this dream world and were able not so much to see the future as actively to experience it, leaping across temporal boundaries (and, in the case of the yogi of Anjidiv, spatial ones too). Such heightened awareness required lengthy initiation processes. Ibn Battutah tried – and failed – to devote himself to the contemplative life on more than one occasion: his recurring battles with his nafs, his spirit, capture in close-up the tensions between the temporal and the transcendent around which the Rihlahwhirls. ‘The Travels,’ Mackintosh-Smith writes, ‘is a DIY Odysseyby a homespun Homer and the yarn, as elastic as its spinner, is prone to stretch alarmingly.’ In line with contemporary literary practice, Ibn Juzayy used the works of earlier authorities (notably the 12th-century Andalusian traveller Ibn Jubayr) to flesh out his master’s descriptions of Damascus, Medina and Mecca, occasionally filching passages wholesale, while for reasons of clarity he reorganised sections of Ibn Battutah’s erratic itinerary, a process that later copyists may inadvertently have continued. Ross Dunn, whose Adventures of Ibn Battutahprovides an overview of the historical context of the journeys,* observes that Ibn Battutah was ‘highly un

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likely’ to have used extensive travel notes or journals while working with his amanuensis. Aside from the notes on Bukhara that were lost in an attack by ‘Indian infidel’ pirates, Ibn Battutah never mentions keeping any sort of diary (although Ibn Juzayy describes his own work as an ‘abridgment’ of the taqyid, or ‘notations’, scribbled by his master on his return to Fez). Little wonder, then, that Ibn Battutah’s names, dates and places sometimes get mixed up (he occasionally confesses to memory lapses) – or that these various interpretative hazards have provided abundant fuel for academic argument. Ibn Khaldunremarks flatly that people ‘whispered to each other that Ibn Battutah must be a liar’. Al-Balafiqi, an Andalusian judge who had met Ibn Battutah in Granada, encouraged such sniping, adding snootily that Ibn Battutah had only ‘a modest share of the sciences’. But he had his allies, too. It’s perhaps to be expected that his amanuensis would describe him respectfully as ‘the sheikh learned in the law, the most trustworthy and veracious traveller’; but such notables as Ibn Marzuq, the future Grand Qadi of Cairo, also came to his defence. Despite suspicion that parts of Ibn Battutah’s trips to China and Constantinople are fabricated, recent scholarship has generally vindicated these early supporters. In any case, as Sultan Abu Inan’s vizier, Ibn Wadrar, advised Ibn Khaldun, ‘you should never dismiss accounts of other lands merely on the grounds of not having seen them,’ or you run the risk of ending up like the boy born in prison: the only creatures he had ever seen were rats and so ‘he considered all creatures to be subspecies of rat.’ Ibn Wadrar was talking about perspective, about its multiplicity and its blindspots. Mackintosh-Smith exploits the same idea: at one point, he tries to build a mental picture of Muhammad Shah’s famous audience chamber, but the real ‘Hall of a Thousand Columns’ is his book, built on the Rihlah’s foundations; having discovered that Muhammad’s hall is now a ‘spacious al fresco public lavatory’, he dodges turds and peers round pillars, trying to gain a better angle on the past, in the same way as his narrative winds in and out of the centuries, sometimes glimpsing Ibn Battutah or the traces of his world, more often finding the view obscured. Just as the things that Ibn Battutah gets right are in the end more noteworthy than his inconsistencies, so what’s remarkable about Mackintosh-Smith’s book – and what drives him – are those occasions when, despite the obstacles, a link seems to be forged across the centuries. It’s an experience he describes as ‘temporal vertigo: the feeling of looking at a spot in time, far away yet reachable in a single, breathtaking leap’. Unsettlingly, the place in India which conjures this sensation most powerfully for Mackintosh-Smith is Ambika-Jhambika, an old satisite in Madhya Pradesh, the layout of which, he discovers, corresponds exactly with that of Ibn Battutah’s ‘spot in hell’: a ‘dark place with much water and

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many trees, thick with shadows’ where, watching a widow climb purposefully onto her own funeral pyre, he nearly fell off his horse in fright. Up and down the length of the Malabar coast, Mackintosh-Smith encounters astonishing displays of religious heterodoxy: a mosque in Kottakal with a sculpture of Christ adorning its pulpit, a Shaivite trident on a mosque in Ponnani. Appropriately enough, these processes of cultural crosspollination also draw the teleporting yogi of Anjidiv into their orbit: one possible location for his meeting with Ibn Battutah is an 800-year-old temple-complex dedicated to Durga Parameshvari, Shiva’s consort, but founded by a Muslim merchant named Bappa. Besides furnishing an image for Mackintosh-Smith’s attempts to join the historical dots, Malabar’s religious atmosphere also reflects the open-mindedness sporadically displayed by Ibn Battutah: in between ticking off fellow Muslims for slaughtering birds improperly or strutting naked in mixed-sex bathhouses, he enjoys a tour round one of Constantinople’s many monasteries, where he meets a boy reading the Gospel ‘in the most beautiful voice’ he has ever heard. Mackintosh-Smith is also fascinated by the fluidity and ambiguities of language. ‘Grammars, like theatre, call for a suspension of disbelief,’ he notes in Yemen. When first learning Arabic, theqamus (‘dictionary’, but also ‘ocean’) seemed to him ‘a surreal lexical landscape whose inhabitants lived in a state of relentless metamorphosis’: zahabcan mean both ‘a messenger’ and ‘a huge deaf rat’; qutrub a ‘puppy/ demon/restless insect/melancholia’. Under these semantic conditions, somebody who had merely istanwaq, ‘mistaken male camels for she-camels’, could count himself lucky. There’s a Flaubertian yearning for the exotic at work here, and Mackintosh-Smith is aware of his position within a long line of Orient-obsessed Europeans. But it’s also clear that these philological leanings underpin his fascination with cultural genealogy.The same awareness of life’s interconnectedness that informed Burhan al-Din’s interpretation of Ibn Battutah’s dream, and which, at the practical level, facilitated Ibn Battutah’s travels through the Dar al-Islam, also plays out in Mackintosh-Smith’s donnish digressions: ‘One Attab, a scion of the early Umayyad dynasty of caliphs and thus a distant collateral of the tangal’s, gave his name to a quarter of Baghdad, which gave its name to a type of stripey cloth woven there – attabi, the English “tabby”, which gave its name to the cat.’ It’s a pity that Mackintosh-Smith can’t help over-egging the word-play, exposing himself to the charge of ‘phonetic fellatio’ that he levels at Battutah. Delhi’s Qutb Minar (‘swollen, ribbed, mottled and veined in pink’) should never be described as ‘Islamic design on Viagra’. But this remains an engaging homage to one of travel writing’s founding fathers. A lunar crater has been named after Ibn Battutah, two films about his travels are in production, and in 1994 Charles Beckingham published the final volume of the Rihlah’s full English translation, a project begun by Gibb 65 years earlier; I hope Mackintosh-Smith’s book encourages people to read it. ∆