Travels with a Tangerine

Mackintosh-Smith, an Arabist long settled in Sanaa, set out to follow Ibn Battutah – the tangerine of the title, being a man from Tangier – across North Africa, Egypt, Arabia, Anatolia and beyond. He reads the fourteenth-century Travels on the ground, hunting down shrines and tombs that may or may not still exist. The scholarship is real and worn lightly, and the comedy comes from the gap between the text and what survives.