Tim Mackintosh-Smith > Quotes

“For puritans of whatever faith, God is in the detail.”
― Tim Mackintosh-Smith, Travels with a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah

“In fact, meta- and particle physicists have more in common than one might suppose: both tug, if in slightly different directions, at the knots which hold the cosmos together, both look beyond the immediate world of sense perception into one where cause can only be deduced from effect - a quark is as invisible as an angel; both are confronted by Manichaean polarities - miracles and black magic, cheap energy versus total destruction.”
― Tim Mackintosh-Smith, Travels with a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah

“Perfume the literature you write with only the finest inks,
for literature works are luscious girls, and ink their precious perfume.
—Arabic saying ~800 AD”
― Tim Mackintosh-Smith, Arabs: A 3,000-Year History of Peoples, Tribes and Empires

“Sati was a custom religiously followed by a few, toed halfheartedly by rather more, sidestepped by many and ignored by most”
― Tim Mackintosh-Smith

“Unlike his contemporary Sir John Mandeville, who, at least in later parts of his book, got away with the travel-literary equivalent of murder, Ibn Battuta's veracity was in the dock wherever he went.”
― Tim Mackintosh-Smith, The Travels of Ibn Battutah

“Knowing now that to travel hopelessly was the only way to arrive, I made myself at home in the bus shelter and contemplated the long wait ahead. As a result, a series of lifts -- Keralan, Goan, Pakistani, Omani -- took me down the coast with wondrous rapidity.”
― Tim Mackintosh-Smith, Travels with a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah

“Free will, as C.S. Lewis said, 'is the modus operandi of destiny'. Fate, too, chooses one's fellow hotel guests. I cursed mine inaudibly.”
― Tim Mackintosh-Smith, Travels with a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah

“The Levant, the land to the east of the Mediterranean, is almost without doubt the region in which the ‘Semitic’ family of tongues originated, and Arabic has preserved, pristine, many of the earliest features of those tongues.”
― Tim Mackintosh-Smith, Arabs: A 3,000-Year History of Peoples, Tribes and Empires

“Ibn al-Khatib says: Ibn Battutah has a modest share of the sciences. He journeyed to the East in the month of Rajab 725 [1325], travelled through its lands, penetrated into Iraq al-Ajam, then entered India, Sind and China, and returned through Yemen. In India, the king appointed him to the office of qadi. He came away later and returned to the Maghrib [...]. Our Shaykh Abu l-Barakat Ibn al-Balfiqi told us of many strange things which Ibn Battutah had seen. Among them was that he claimed to have entered Constantinople and to have seen in its church twelve thousands bishops. He subsequently crossed the Strait to the Spanish coast [...]. Thereafter the ruler of Fez summoned him and commanded him to commit his travels to writing.”
― Tim Mackintosh-Smith

“This, the ’arabiyyah, was not everyday speech but a ‘mystical tongue’ used for ‘oracle giving and recitation of poetry’. Those who could command this special tongue – above all the sha’ir, later on a ‘poet’, but in its oldest sense probably more like a seer or a shaman – could attract followers. In time of raids, the sha’ir also played the role of Whitman’s poet, ‘the most deadly force of the war . . . he can make every word he speaks draw blood’.”
― Tim Mackintosh-Smith, Arabs: A 3,000-Year History of Peoples, Tribes and Empires

“The teacher spoke: 'There could of course be some rational explanation. But why shouldn't a karamah operate by rational means? After all, miracles aren't the same as magic.'

I asked if he thought al-Shadhili would perform a karamah for a non-Muslim.

'If your intention in visiting him is good, why not?' said the teacher.”
― Tim Mackintosh-Smith, Travels with a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah

“Robert Burton was right: maps are a certain cure for melancholy.”
― Tim Mackintosh-Smith, Travels with a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah

“In the fourteenth century, Arabs like IB had headed for the Sultanate of Delhi, drawn by its immense wealth. In the twentieth, however, the demographic tide had turned: the Gulf is now as much Indian as Arab.”
― Tim Mackintosh-Smith, Travels with a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah

“Poetically if not geographically, the Kuria Murias belong to the same harmonious archipelago as Serendip, the Celebes, Tahiti and Taprobane, Andaman and Nicobar, the Isle of Grain and the Isle of Dogs. I had fallen in love with the name years before, in the atlas.”
― Tim Mackintosh-Smith, Travels with a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah

“By Allah! Never have I seen the discipline I’ve seen this day, and in men who have come from here, there and everywhere . . . No, not among the noble Persians, nor the Byzantines with their braided locks!”
― Tim Mackintosh-Smith, Arabs: A 3,000-Year History of Peoples, Tribes and Empires

“In Arabic ‘the written symbol is considered to be identical with the sound indicated by it’. Letters are not just phonetic; they are phonic, acoustic,’… script that fills the ears of him that sees it’, as poet al-Mutanabbi was to call them.”
― Tim Mackintosh-Smith, Arabs: A 3,000-Year History of Peoples, Tribes and Empires

“For a moment, I felt a strange sensation. Perhaps I could call it temporal vertigo: the feeling of looking at a spot in time, far away yet reachable in a single, breathtaking leap.”
― Tim Mackintosh-Smith, Travels with a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah