A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah
Tim Mackintosh-Smith, 2001
Picador, 2002
Ibn Battutah was native from Tangier, which he left in 1325 (p 6).
He travelled for 30 years and covered three times the distance Marco
Polo claimed (p 9).
Tim Mackintosh-Smith is an Englishman living in Yemen,
who practices 'inverse archeology', by following 'IB',
with this one's book, The Travels, in hand
(English translation: Gibb).
Preamble: Lust and Lore, p 11
The golden fourteenth century turned to dust. Europe luxuriated in rampant melancholy and the cult of the body vile [Black Death]. The central Islamic lands fell under a succession of brutish and short regimes. In China, the Ming defeated the Tatar Yuan in 1368. In 1389 the Ottoman Turks, whom IB had seen in Anatolia in the first flush of military success, conquered the Serbs; in the following years they captured the remaining Bizantine possessions in Asia Minor. The century ended with Tamerlane and his neo-Tatars rampaging through the eastern Islamic lands and India.
The Delta, A Dark and Greenish Country, p 73
For puritans of whatever faith, God is in the details.
Cairo, The Palace on Crimson street, p 92
Few pilgrims [...] travelled in the style of the Sultan's favourite wife. She took a herd of milch cows and a portable kitchen garden, and lunched and dined all the way to Mecca and back on greens and fried cheese.
p 93
Ibn Hajar wrote at the beginning of his biographical dictionary The Concealed Pearls: 'Properly speaking, we should have started with names beginning with a long a; but since only Turkic names, like "Aqush", and those of women, like "Aminah", begin thus, I have postponed them so that the names of Islamic scholars may have due precedence.' The Mameluks were not only displaced literally, alphabetically; they were bracketed together with women.
Oman - The Coast of the Fish-eaters, p 200
The agent of ruin is variously said to have been an earthquake, a tidal wave, or the Portuguese.
p 208
[T]he Gulf is now as much Indian as Arab.
A by-product of this vast movement of labour has been the appearance of a new language, Indo-Arabic. Vocabulary is slimmed down to an anorexic minimum and the vigorous branches of the Arabic verb pruned to a binary fi ('in' = 'there is') / ma fi ('not in' = 'there is not') + infinitive.
Dhofar - The Importance of Being Rasulid, p 232
Dhofar and the neighbouring regions are part of the Ariabian Celtic fringe and home to a number of pre-Arabic tongues. At least one, Bat'hari, seems recently to have gone the way of Manx. Jibbali is alive and well but [...] its future looks bleak.
Jibbali is more correctly called Shahri, after the Shahrah people who are the oldest inhabitants of the area. Incomers, the Qara, subjugated them.
Kuria Muria -- Minor Monuments, p 262
According to the Rasulid Sultan al-Muzaffar's book of simples, [frankincense] heals wounds, staunches bood, clears darkness of vision, burns phlegm, strengthens a queazy stomach, cures diarrhoea and vomiting, expells winds, eases palpitations, protects against the plague, and warms a cold liver.