Tim Mackintosh-Smith is widely recognized as one of the foremost chroniclers of the Arab world and its literary heritage. For over four decades, he has lived in the Arab world, most of that time in the Old City of Sana’a, Yemen. This long immersion has given him not only scholarly authority but also a lived perspective that breathes authenticity into his writing.
His body of work exemplifies a rare blend of academic depth, first-hand experience, and captivating storytelling. His celebrated trilogy on retracing the footsteps of Ibn Battutah—Travels with a Tangerine, The Hall of a Thousand Columns, and Landfalls—invites readers to relive the adventures of the great 14th-century Muslim traveler while reflecting on their significance in today’s world. This trilogy has been hailed as a landmark in modern travel literature.
Beyond this trilogy, Tim is also the editor of the most widely read English translation of Ibn Battuta’s Travels. His contribution to the NYU Abu Dhabi Library of Arabic Literature began with Accounts of China and India, the earliest known Arabic travel text that documents how the medieval Islamic world perceived the Far East.
Venturing into fiction, Tim authored Bloodstone, a thriller set in the Alhambra, weaving history, imagination, and suspense with Ibn Battutah as a central character. His monumental 2019 work, Arabs: A 3,000-Year History of Peoples, Tribes and Empires, offers one of the most comprehensive explorations of Arab history. The book not only traces the Arab peoples across three millennia but also examines their identity through two enduring forces—language and mobility—which have shaped Arab civilization across centuries.
His works have reached audiences worldwide, having been translated into more than a dozen languages, and his storytelling has extended to film and television, including a major BBC series on Ibn Battuta.
In the academic sphere, Tim has served multiple times as Senior Research Fellow at the NYU Abu Dhabi Library of Arabic Literature, notably in 2018 and again in 2023–2025. He is currently Visiting Professor of Arab Crossroads Studies at NYUAD. Today, he is engaged in two major projects: preparing a new edition and the first complete English translation of Ibn Khaldun’s autobiography, and writing a forthcoming book about Gibraltar, a land rich in the histories of civilizations meeting and clashing.
Through his works, Tim Mackintosh-Smith does more than document history—he revives it. By bridging past and present, he makes the stories of Arab peoples and their civilizations accessible, vivid, and profoundly relevant to readers of our time.
