![]() Continued from Second Series 110, with continuous main pagination. ![]() Translated with revisions and new annotation from the Arabic text edited by C. The observations of this intelligent representative of Islamic culture on almost all the known inhabited world beyond Europe provide fruitful comparisons with the life and geographical knowledge of the West. The travels are a major source for the political and economic life of large regions of Asia and Africa. ![]() This first complete and scholarly edition in English has proved essential to orientalists and illuminating to medievalists. Sir Hamilton Gibb's edition comprises four volumes with introduction and full notes. Some things never change.įor serious readers and writers of travel books, this book is a classic-a book to keep on your shelf and dip into whenever your get itchy feet and the urge for fresh adventures.Volume II continues with his journeys through Persia, Iraq and Arabia, Asia Minor and South Russia with detailed descriptions of the towns on the way and the customs of the inhabitants. Like any modern traveller, he feared for his safety on some journeys, ate unfamiliar and sometimes vile-tasting food, and suffered the resulting diarrhoea. Battutah, as one blurb says, "dined with sultans, khans and emperors, escaped from pirates, sired children on several continents, crossed deserts, dodged the Black Death," and he travelled by every form of transport then available. The picture of the medieval world, too, is sometimes a picture of places which still exist almost unchanged since Ibn Battutah saw them at other times he describes things which have since vanished due to disasters of various kinds, mostly war. And there are some thought-provoking accounts of easy travel amongst people whose differing religious beliefs, now, are a major cause of conflict. Nevertheless, the mixture of anecdotes, fact, magical stories, poetry and personal detail and opinion in this book has a definite charm. I was much more at home with Tim Mackintosh Smith's brief, easy-going, humorous style than I was with Ibn Battutah's. At times it reads like a name-dropper's long list of famous people met, or an extensive travel itinerary, and it is still a long and comprehensive account of the travels, even though Tim Mackintosh Smith has taken his knife to it. Ibn Battutah's memoirs, then, amazing and varied as they are, do not have the jokey, caricaturing, deliberately reader-friendly sort of style that modern readers of travel-book might expect.īelow the title on the book's cover is a quote from the Guardian which suggests that it offers "A picture of medieval civilization without equal in detail and brilliance." This is true, and the picture is often fascinating, but (for me) the length of the book was also one of its problems. In any case, the style of speech and writing in Morocco was more formal in the fourteenth-century. No doubt dictated memoirs are rather more formal than travellers tales told to a circle of friends in a garden. So, as tales about his far-flung adventures spread, the Sultan of Morocco commissioned a young writer to take down Ibn Battutah's "memoirs": "I took down from him the names of famous people he had met, and we profited greatly from him," wrote this young man. He was as full of curiosity and as attracted by novel situations and characters as any modern travel-writer, and perhaps he had a witty and ironical turn of phrase which kept those who later listened to his travel stories enthralled. Ibn Battutah set off on his travels from Tangier in 1303 at the age of twenty-one. This is a book to read and savour slowly.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |