Night and Horses and the Desert

"It’s been said before by others, but I think reading is travel and travel is reading. As a travel writer I’m very conscious that they are twins or different sides of the same coin. In Arabic, the word for travelling is safar and from the same Arabic root you get the word sifr , meaning an old-fashioned volume of a book or a scroll. The reason they come from the same root is because when you travel, you are unrolling the world beneath your feet. And when you are unrolling a scroll you are unrolling a scroll beneath your gaze. So there is a very close relationship between reading and travelling. Irwin does have quite a lot of travelling in the book. His title itself comes from one of the great lines of Arabic poetry by the great poet Al-Mutanabbi. I am very into Arabic verse and the meters of Arabic verse are supposed by some to have come from the different paces of camels. The classical Arabic ode really describes a journey. The meters themselves in Arabic poetry are supposed by some to have come from the trotting, galloping, walking and ambling of camels and horses. Arabic literature and particularly poetry are absolutely suffused with motion and travel. You could say that if a piece of literature moves you in a metaphorical sense it can move you almost physically. It can move you to different places and move you to different times. I talked before about time travel, but I think reading a book like this is the closest you can get to time travel. I think you can learn a lot more about the Arab and Islamic world from a book like this than you can from reading political narrative history. It’s classical Arabic literature and he takes us from pre-Islamic poetry in the sixth century to the 16th century. He doesn’t encroach on later times. He’s really looking at the great period of classical Arabic. He divides his book into the pre-Islamic period, then the courtly times of the Abbasid caliphs, and then there is a long chapter on the wandering scholars, which shows the connection between travel and literature. The last chapter is about the Mamluk period and the Turkic people taking over, and the Arabic literature this period generated. I think he says in the book that, “You may think I have got a lot of poetry, but I haven’t got enough.” Poetry is the life and soul of Arabic literature. But he’s got a good mix of poetry and prose. His commentary that joins it together is superbly balanced. There is no better anthology of Arabic literature. It’s a book that I wish I had compiled myself."