Journeys to the other shore : Muslim and Western travelers in search of knowledge
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Journeys to the other shore : Muslim and Western travelers in search of knowledge
（Princeton studies in Muslim politics）
Princeton University Press, 2008
- pbk
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Note
Originally published: 2006
Includes bibliographical references and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
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 Shore challenges 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 novel Persian Letters meets 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 xi Note on Transliteration and Spelling xiii CHAPTER 1: Frontiers: Walls and Windows--Some Reflections on Travel Narratives 1 CHAPTER 2: Traveling Theorists and Translating Practices 20 Theory and Theooria 20 "Seeing the Entire World as a Foreign Land" 24 Exposures and Closures 29 Islam, Travel, and talab al-'ilm 34 The Double-Edged Nature of Travel 38 Travel as Translation 41 CHAPTER 3: Liars, Travelers, Theorists--Herodotus and Ibn Battuta 46 Herodotus 52 Ibn Battuta 63 Conclusion 86 ChAPTER 4: Travel in Search of Practical Wisdom: The Modern Theoriai of al-Tahtawi and Tocqueville 90 Authorizing Autopsy 98 Travels across Time and Space 108 Multiple Mediations 114 Conclusion 132 CHAPTER 5: Gender, Genre, and Travel: Montesquieu and Sayyida Salme 134 Montesquieu's Persian Letters 144 Sayyida Salme's Memoirs 156 Conclusion 171 CHAPTER 6: Cosmopolitanisms Past and Present, Islamic and Western 174 Notes 199 Glossary 267 Bibliography 271 Index 303
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