English Arabist Tim Mackintosh literally spent years eating, breathing and living this Ibn-e-Batuta’s life.
KARACHI: Your reader Lubna Jerar Naqvi, reference her letter of March 1 on Zarrar Khuhro’s article of a day earlier titled “So who is Ibn-e-Batuta?”, as well as other readers, may like to know that in a follow up to H A R Gibbs’ translations of the travels of Ibn Batuta, the English Arabist Tim Mackintosh-Smith has not only done his own translation of the book, but also travelled as far as he could in Ibn Batuta’s footsteps. And out of this came a BBC TV series and two books Travels with a Tangerine (Random House 2004) and The Hall of a Thousand Columns (John Murray 2005). He literally spent years eating, breathing and living this Maghrebi traveller’s life and has brought that part of history to life.
Muna Bilgrami
Published in The Express Tribune, March 2nd, 2012.
