Journeys to the Other Shore : Muslim and Western Travelers in Search of Knowledge

by Euben, Roxanne L.

• ISBN13: 9781400827497
• ISBN10: 1400827493
• Copyright: 2008-09-02
• Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr

Summary

The contemporary world is increasingly defined by dizzying flows of people and ideas. But while Western travel is associated with a pioneering spirit of discovery, the dominant image of Muslim mobility is the jihadi who travels not to learn but to destroy.Journeys to the Other Shorechallenges these stereotypes by charting the common ways in which Muslim and Western travelers negotiate the dislocation of travel to unfamiliar and strange worlds. In Roxanne Euben's groundbreaking excursion across cultures, geography, history, genre, and genders, travel signifies not only a physical movement across lands and cultures, but also an imaginative journey in which wonder about those who live differently makes it possible to see the world differently. In the book we meet not only Herodotus but also Ibn Battuta, the fourteenth-century Moroccan traveler. Tocqueville's journeys are set against a five-year sojourn in nineteenth-century Paris by the Egyptian writer and translator Rifa'a Rafi' al-Tahtawi, and Montesquieu's novelPersian Lettersmeets with the memoir of an East African princess, Sayyida Salme. This extraordinary book shows that curiosity about the unknown, the quest to understand foreign cultures, critical distance from one's own world, and the desire to remake the foreign into the familiar are not the monopoly of any single civilization or epoch. Euben demonstrates that the fluidity of identities, cultures, and borders associated with our postcolonial, globalized world has a long history--one shaped not only by Western power but also by an Islamic ethos of travel in search of knowledge.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. xi
Note on Transliteration and Spelling	p. xiii
Frontiers: Walls and Windows--Some Reflections on Travel Narratives	p. 1
Traveling Theorists and Translating Practices	p. 20
Theory and Theoôria	p. 20
"Seeing the Entire World as a Foreign Land"	p. 24
Exposures and Closures	p. 29
Islam, Travel, and talab al-'ilm	p. 34
The Double-Edged Nature of Travel	p. 38
Travel as Translation	p. 41
Liars, Travelers, Theorists--Herodotus and Ibn Battuta	p. 46
Herodotus	p. 52
Ibn Battuta	p. 63
Conclusion	p. 86
Travel in Search of Practical Wisdom: The Modern Theôriai of al-Tahtawi and Tocqueville	p. 90
Authorizing Autopsy	p. 98
Travels across Time and Space	p. 108
Multiple Mediations	p. 114
Conclusion	p. 132
Gender, Genre, and Travel: Montesquieu and Sayyida Salme	p. 134
Montesquieu's Persian Letters	p. 144
Sayyida Salme's Memoirs	p. 156
Conclusion	p. 171
Cosmopolitanisms Past and Present, Islamic and Western	p. 174
Notes	p. 199
Glossary	p. 267
Bibliography	p. 271
Index	p. 303
Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.