Euben Journeys to the Other Shore

Muslim and Western Travelers in Search of Knowledge
Course Book
ISBN: 978-1-4008-2749-7
Verlag: De Gruyter
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 344 Seiten

Reihe: Princeton Studies in Muslim Politics

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.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Euben, Roxanne L.

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Politikwissenschaft Politikwissenschaft Allgemein Politische Geschichte
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziologie Allgemein
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Naher & Mittlerer Osten
• Sozialwissenschaften Politikwissenschaft Politikwissenschaft Allgemein Politische Theorie, Politische Philosophie

Inhaltsverzeichnis

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 Theoôria 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 Theôriai 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

Über Autor(innen)

Roxanne L. Euben is the Ralph Emerson and Alice Freeman Palmer Professor of Political Science at Wellesley College. She is the author of Enemy in the Mirror: Islamic Fundamentalism and the Limits of Modern Rationalism (Princeton).