Tim Mackintosh-Smith is a British, Yemen-based, Oxford-educated Arabist, writer, traveller and lecturer.
Education
Mackintosh-Smith was educated at Clifton College, a boarding independent school for boys in the suburb of Clifton in the port city of Bristol in South West England, between the years 1971-1978, followed by a musical scholarship to the University of Oxford, where he read Classical Arabic.
Career
Mackintosh-Smith lives in an ancient tower house off the "Market of the Cows" in the old city of San"a, Yemen. He is the author of the Yemen: Travels in Dictionaryland (1997) and Yemen: The Unknown Arabia (2000). He is one of the foremost scholars of the Moroccan traveller Ibn Battutah.
Mackintosh-Smith has published a trilogy recounting his journeys in "the footnotes" of Ibn Battutah.
Travels with A Tangerine (2001), The Hall of a Thousand Columns (2005) and Landfalls (2010). He has additionally written widely on subjects as broad as alabaster, the collection of frankincense, the stories of Mont Rose James and the history of umbrellas.
Macintosh-Smith presented a major British Broadcasting Corporation documentary series Travels with a Tangerine (2007) recounting his experiences tracing Ibn Battutah"s fourteenth-century travels in the present day. He was featured in a documentary film The English Sheik and the Yemeni Gentleman.
The Daily Telegraph has described him as "the sage of Sana"a.".