Quotes from Tim Mackintosh-Smith

In fact, meta- and particle physicists have more in common than one might suppose: both tug, if in slightly different directions, at the knots which hold the cosmos together, both look beyond the immediate world of sense perception into one where cause can only be deduced from effect - a quark is as invisible as an angel; both are confronted by Manichaean polarities - miracles and black magic, cheap energy versus total destruction.

For puritans of whatever faith, God is in the detail.

Perfume the literature you write with only the finest inks, for literature works are luscious girls, and ink their precious perfume. —Arabic saying ~800 AD

By Allah! Never have I seen the discipline I've seen this day, and in men who have come from here, there and everywhere . . . No, not among the noble Persians, nor the Byzantines with their braided locks!

Free will, as C.S. Lewis said, 'is the modus operandi of destiny'. Fate, too, chooses one's fellow hotel guests. I cursed mine inaudibly.

The teacher spoke: 'There could of course be some rational explanation. But why shouldn't a karamah operate by rational means? After all, miracles aren't the same as magic.' I asked if he thought al-Shadhili would perform a karamah for a non-Muslim. 'If your intention in visiting him is good, why not?' said the teacher.

In the fourteenth century, Arabs like IB had headed for the Sultanate of Delhi, drawn by its immense wealth. In the twentieth, however, the demographic tide had turned: the Gulf is now as much Indian as Arab.

The Levant, the land to the east of the Mediterranean, is almost without doubt the region in which the 'Semitic' family of tongues originated, and Arabic has preserved, pristine, many of the earliest features of those tongues.

Sati was a custom religiously followed by a few, toed halfheartedly by rather more, sidestepped by many and ignored by most

Robert Burton was right: maps are a certain cure for melancholy.

In Arabic 'the written symbol is considered to be identical with the sound indicated by it'. Letters are not just phonetic; they are phonic, acoustic,'… script that fills the ears of him that sees it', as poet al-Mutanabbi was to call them.

Poetically if not geographically, the Kuria Murias belong to the same harmonious archipelago as Serendip, the Celebes, Tahiti and Taprobane, Andaman and Nicobar, the Isle of Grain and the Isle of Dogs. I had fallen in love with the name years before, in the atlas.

Knowing now that to travel hopelessly was the only way to arrive, I made myself at home in the bus shelter and contemplated the long wait ahead. As a result, a series of lifts -- Keralan, Goan, Pakistani, Omani -- took me down the coast with wondrous rapidity.

For a moment, I felt a strange sensation. Perhaps I could call it temporal vertigo: the feeling of looking at a spot in time, far away yet reachable in a single, breathtaking leap.

Unlike his contemporary Sir John Mandeville, who, at least in later parts of his book, got away with the travel-literary equivalent of murder, Ibn Battuta's veracity was in the dock wherever he went.