DAR AL HARB - U.K.: REPLACING MARCO POLO WITH IBN BATTUTAH

Move over Marco Polo
It took the Muslim scholar and author of Travels, Ibn Battutah, 29 years to make his epic journey from Tangier to China via the wonders of India and Africa. Over 650 years later, Tim Mackintosh-Smith set out to retrace his steps

Prefaces just aren't what they used to be. The one to Ibn Battutah's Travels, published in 1356, runs to 12 pages of luxuriant Arabic prose. According to his editor, the aim of the renowned traveller from Tangiers (a "Tangerine'') was "to give entertainment to the mind and delight to the eyes and ears, with a variety of curious particulars by the exposition of which he gives edification and of marvellous things by adverting to which he arouses interest.'' The original even rhymes; so, too, in Arabic, does the book's full title, The Precious Gift for Viewers of the Marvels of Cities and Wonders of Travel.

What all this verbiage boils down to is that the Moroccan wanderer wanted his book both to educate and entertain; or, to use a portmanteau word I heard recently, to "edutain''. What's more, he wanted to do this in a visible and audible way, giving delight to the eyes and ears of his readers - or, as the title calls them, "viewers''. It all sounds a bit like a TV documentary. In fact, it reads more like a video diary, on an epic scale.

"Seek knowledge,'' the Prophet Muhammad said, "even if your journey takes you to China.'' Ibn Battutah took him at his word. His wanderings began in 1325 with the pilgrimage to Mecca; when he finally got home 29 years later, he'd been not only all the way to China, the other end of the known world, but also as far north as the Volga and as far south as what is now Tanzania. Along the way he sponged off princelings and potentates, making the most of his kudos as a scholar of Islamic law - and of an innate mixture of charm and cockiness. He also suffered pirates, storms and shipwrecks, dodged the Black Death, nearly died from eating undercooked yams, and survived - but only just - working for the psychopathic Sultan of Delhi, "of all men the most addicted to the giving of gifts and the shedding of blood''.

He even found time to marry 10 times, quite apart from enjoying countless concubines. And he did it all with gusto.

The other traveller with whom Ibn Battutah is often bracketed, his earlier contemporary Marco Polo, seems in comparison perfectly bloodless; few if any adventurers before or since have matched the Moroccan's verve, his optimism, and his propensity for disaster. Perhaps the only travellers truly comparable to Ibn Battutah are fictional - Odysseus and Candide.

The record of all these adventures lives up to that promise in the preface. While it's not without its set-piece descriptions and poetic digressions (many of them slipped in by Ibn Battutah's wordy editor), much of the Travels is prose at its most pictorial. In a sense it had to be. In the Arab literary world there was no tradition of illustrating travel books (with the occasional exception of writers such as the 12th-century Abu Hamid of Granada, who included sketches of such oddities as skis). Instead, Ibn Battutah painted in words.

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Marco Polo didn't marry 10 times, so his journey's are bloodless and not interesting enough...Let us replace them with the travels of Ibn Battutah...

WOOO HOOOOOO ! ! !

Just another step in replacing the West's history with Islams to make the weak Europeans feel greatful to their moslem masters...

Pertinent Links:

1) Move over Marco Polo
(The Sunday Telegraph Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge)