(Ebook) Yemen: The Unknown Arabia by Tim Mackintosh-Smith ISBN 9781468308822, 1468308823

(Ebook) Yemen: The Unknown Arabia by Tim Mackintosh-Smith ISBN 9781468308822, 1468308823

Arguably the most fascinating and least understood country in the Arab world, Yemen has a way of attracting comment that ranges from the superficial to the wildly fantastic.A country long regarded by classical geographers as a fabulous land where flying serpents guarded sacred incense groves, while medieval Arab visitors told tales of disappearing islands and menstruating mountains. Our current ideas of this country at the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula have been hijacked by images of the terrorist strongholds, drone attacks, and diplomatic tensions. But, as Mackintosh-Smith reminds us in this newly updated book, there is another Arabia. Yemen may be a part of Arabia, but it is like no place on earth.Yemen: The Unknown Arabia (I’ll come back to that) is usually categorisedas a ‘travel’ book. But, as I’ve suggested, it is perhaps more correctly abook of untravel, a book about being in a place rather than passing throughit. (Certainly I am an intrepid untraveller: I still live in Yemen, chewing qatin my top room, looking at the tremendous view.) Also, it is more aboutcontinuity than change – about the procession through its landscape ‘of sonsand sons of sons’, as the epigraph puts it – and in that sense it is also a bookof unhistory. It would be strange, therefore, to end here with a recital ofrecent and current events. To me, personally, to add to a book I was writingtwenty years ago seems like trying to write on the surface – iridescent,unattainable – of a bubble.