There is nothing better than hearing some Arabic Poetry on a Monday morning. Today, aka the Monday in question, was a talk by Tim Mackintosh-Smith. Tim has written some wonderful travel books following in the footsteps of Ibn Battutah, as well as a few other books about living in Yemen and now Arabs: A 3,000-Year History of Peoples, Tribes and Empires which looks really good and is in one of my reading piles. Today’s talk was hosted by the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton and was on “Stringing the Necklace: Arabic Poetry as Arab History.”
Here is the blurb: “Tim Mackintosh-Smith is a fan of Arabic travel literature, and the author of several books of his own travels. Of these, his trilogy on Ibn Ba????ah (Travels with a Tangerine, The Hall of a Thousand Columns, and Landfalls) retraces the Moroccan?s wanderings around three continents. Tim?s work has earned him the 1998 Thomas Cook/Daily Telegraph Travel Book Award and, appropriately, the Ibn Ba????ah Prize of Honour, awarded in 2010 by the Arab Centre for Geographical Literature. He has also co-written and presented a BBC TV series on Ibn Ba????ah, described by the Guardian as ‘marvellous, memorable television’. Tim has delivered the Hamilton A.R. Gibb Lectures at Harvard, and his writing has been anthologized in a number of collections, from The Picador Book of Journeys to The Howard Marks Book of Dope Stories. His most recent work, published by Yale University Press, is Arabs: A 3,000-Year History of Peoples, Tribes and Empires – ?a book,? according to the Spectator, ?of vast scope and stunning insight?; it ‘rebalances’ Arab history, seeing Islam as part of it, not the start of it. He is currently at work on a new edition and translation of ?Abd al-La??f al-Baghd?d?’s Kit?b al-If?dah, an eye-witness account of late twelfth-century Egypt and its devastating famines. Tim is a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain, and an emeritus Senior Fellow of the New York University Library of Arabic Literature. He has been based for more than a third of a century, through thick and thin, in the Yemeni capital Sana?a, but since late 2019 has been ?on sabbatical? in Kuala Lumpur” (https://nes.princeton.edu/events/stringing-necklace-arabic-poetry-arab-history)
