In the footsteps of Ibn Battutah

There are probably as many forms of travel writing as there are journeys. In fact, as the great 19th-century storyteller Robert Louis Stevenson wrote, “There is a sense ... in which all true books are books of travel”. Reading, rambling, writing are all connected in a delightful chicken-and-egg circularity. The Arabic language recognises this: the related words sifr, a scroll or volume, and safar, travel, are both to do with unrolling – of paper in the hand, of ground beneath the feet.

Given the vastness of travel literature, we’re all bound to have our likes and dislikes. Patrick Leigh Fermor, in his nineties but yet to finish his great trilogy on walking across Europe in the 1930s, is a particular favourite of mine; so too are the almost forgotten Norman Douglas, brilliant illuminator of the Italy of a hundred years ago, and Samuel Johnson and James Boswell, describing their rambles in the highlands of18th-century Scotland. Freya Stark and Wilfred Thesiger are my giants of Arabian travel, while among the Arab travellers themselves, the14th-century Moroccan Ibn Battutah is the colossus (so colossal, indeed, that I sometimes feel my own three books on him have only scratched his surface). Among my dislikes, I particularly recall a book entitled Baghdad Without a Map as having nothing at all to recommend it except its rather catchy title. It was an example of travel narrowing a mind that was prejudiced before it set out.

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