Pubdate: Sat, 11 Jan 2003
Source: New York Times (NY)
Copyright: 2003 The New York Times Company
Contact:  http://www.nytimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/298
Author: Neil MacFarquhar

FOLLOWING THE PATH OF A MEDIEVAL ARAB WANDERER

SANAA, Yemen - The mildly hypnotic effects of his daily khat chew had 
barely kicked in before Tim Mackintosh-Smith made an odd admission for a 
travel writer.

"I don't like traveling in itself," he confessed, shredding another 
mouthful of the tender, slightly bitter khat leaves from a branch he was 
holding. "I would much rather stay here and chew khat. But when I do 
travel, I have been blessed with good luck."

The luck Mr. Mackintosh-Smith referred to is not the ordinary kind 
associated with travel in these uneasy times. He was talking about his 
chance encounters with the myriad saints, rogues and savants - mostly 
living - who lend zest to his books.

"A third eye opens when I travel, and it sees a lot," he said during a day 
spent eating lunch and chewing khat (pronounced cot), a stimulant whose 
ingestion is the afternoon pastime of most men here in Yemen's capital, his 
home for two decades. "Things cease to be mundane when you have this third 
eye open."

In his latest effort, "Travels With a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes 
of Ibn Battutah" (Welcome Rain Publishers), which appeared in the United 
States last summer, he endeavors to follow the route of a famous 
14th-century Arab traveler, Ibn Battutah. I. B., as he is referred to in 
the book, set off from his hometown, Tangier (hence the title), on the 
annual Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca in roughly 1325 and returned some 29 
years and 75,000 miles later.

He had wandered as far east as China, well into Russia and as far south as 
Tanzania, officially marrying at least 10 women along the way - not to 
mention entertaining himself with prodigious numbers of slave concubines - 
and siring five children.

Mr. Mackintosh-Smith, 41, proposed retracing Ibn Battutah's steps. Except 
for the marriages, that is, because "travelers never fall in love because 
love is connected with stasis," he said. He wanted to unearth what traces 
of I. B.'s spiritual and physical world survive.

To his delight, he found men along the way who could quote whole passages 
from Ibn Battutah's "Travels" and came upon certain scenes that might have 
been lifted from it wholesale. The task proved somewhat too daunting for 
one book, however, so this first episode covers Morocco, Egypt, Syria, 
Oman, parts of the Crimea and Turkey. Mr. Mackintosh-Smith is writing a 
second volume, restricted to India, and finds his editor welcoming even more.

"You end up in the middle of bloody nowhere and you think you could do this 
forever," he said.

Walking into an afternoon khat chew at a friend's new house, Mr. 
Mackintosh-Smith noted the incorrect grammar in an inscription above the 
door. (His first book, "Yemen: Travels in Dictionary Land," depicted his 
early years learning Arabic and teaching English here.) Although Yemen has 
recently earned a rather dim reputation as Osama bin Laden's ancestral 
homeland and a possible refuge for fleeing Qaeda veterans, Mr. 
Mackintosh-Smith finds his life here unaffected by events since Sept. 11.

His sweeping command of Arabic, which he began acquiring as an Oxford 
University undergraduate, gives his meanderings far more texture than most 
chronicles about the Middle East. He draws inspiration from the Arabic 
literary tradition of springing verbal surprises - nawadir, or rare words - 
on the reader.

"The odd one is an ornament, like a mole on a beautiful face," he said, as 
if he were quoting an Arabic proverb, as he often does. "I think it's good 
for the reader to have a puzzle every so often, though not too many," he said.

Describing a beached whale in Oman, for example, he writes in "Travels With 
a Tangerine," "I tried to imagine this inert, axungious blob alive, flexing 
and somersaulting through the deep ocean." His editor, unable to find the 
adjective axungious in any dictionary, queried him. Mr. Mackintosh-Smith 
was able to cite a 17th-century writer who used the word (it's from Latin) 
to describe something resembling lard.

Mr. Mackintosh-Smith also weaves in descriptions drawn from unusual Arab 
writers, especially at times when his main inspiration, Ibn Battutah, fails 
to provide flavor. When I. B. gives scant attention to what he did in 
Cairo, for example, Mr. Mackintosh-Smith quotes other medieval travelers on 
subjects, like hailing a donkey cab, that retain a ring of truth today. 
This is from Ibn Sa'id, a poet as well as a wanderer:

The city is sheer hell, alas

For him that hires a taxi-ass.

I, driver, on your donkey sit,

Eyeless in Cairo from the grit.

Mr. Mackintosh-Smith often translates Arabic poetry when not traveling, and 
for that, too, he gives partial credit to his khat chews.

"It's brilliant for reading; you can plow through some really solid texts 
with khat," he said, comparing himself to Albus Dumbledore, the good wizard 
and headmaster in the Harry Potter series who stores all his memories in a 
bowl. "Khat seems to have a similar sort of effect; it's great for making 
connections. Rhythms just come to you when you are chewing."

Mr. Mackintosh-Smith swears the stimulant is not addictive. Although 
illegal in the United States, where the Drug Enforcement Agency compares 
the effects of heavy consumption to those of amphetamine abuse, khat is 
legal in most of Africa, the Middle East and Europe. Mr. Mackintosh-Smith 
said the real allure of the plant lay in the ritual: scouring the market 
for the right leaves, washing them and gathering with friends in some 
rooftop aerie overlooking old Sanaa to chew and sip water or soft drinks.

Mr. Mackintosh-Smith, born in England to a father who played the viola and 
a mother who worked as a nurse, first came to Yemen in 1982 to continue 
studying Arabic after a banking job failed to materialize. "I always felt 
that I would like to be here for a good long time, if not for good, and now 
I do think it's for good," he said, blue eyes glinting under black hair 
well gone to gray.

When not traveling to research his books - "Tangerine" took a year - he 
often refurbishes old houses in Sanaa, towers whose tilting mud-brick 
construction and white trim make them seem like gingerbread confections run 
slightly amok.

His current project is a house for himself that is roughly five stories, 
with one room on each floor. The previous tenants are responsible for some 
of the holes that he is using for wiring. Just before moving out, the owner 
had an apparition of a breed of snake that symbolizes buried treasure in 
Yemeni lore, so she returned to bash holes in the wall with a pickax to 
look for the lucre.

Mr. Mackintosh-Smith's conversation, like his books, overflows with lore. 
Driving past a street called Choppy Sea in this landlocked city, he 
explained that the name probably stemmed from the blood that used to flow 
from the butcher shops there.

Earlier the same afternoon, Mr. Mackintosh-Smith had shown up for lunch 
wearing a long white robe and a double-breasted pinstripe blue blazer from 
a local secondhand shop, a tattered head scarf thrown around his neck and 
his feet in sandals.

He waded into the crowd on the main square, heading for a narrow storefront 
where blackened stone pots teetered atop blazing open fires. The largely 
outdoor restaurant served a bubbling dish called salta.

He quoted a Yemeni from 1,000 years ago describing the benefits of the 
searingly hot dish, made of beef, wheat bread and fenugreek and scooped out 
of the pot with delicious chunks of fresh flat bread.

"This is the best place in Sanaa for salta and therefore the best place in 
the world," he said, perched on a rickety sidewalk picnic table of welded 
aluminum. "All the wicked people who say this came from the Ottomans are a 
load of rot."

It was another street meal that launched the "Tangerine" travels. Mr. 
Mackintosh-Smith had bought a potato from a vendor when a neighbor, who, as 
he put it, "takes gentle pleasure in publicly eroding my bookish 
reputation," suggested that the word potato came to English via Arabic from 
the name Ibn Battutah.

Mr. Mackintosh-Smith did not take long to discover that it didn't, but the 
gleam of inspiration was born.
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