Journeys to the Other Shore

Muslim and Western Travelers in Search of Knowledge

Roxanne L. Euben

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9780691138404, 9780691127217
• eBook ISBN: 9781400827497
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

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.

Chapter 1

FRONTIERS: WALLS AND WINDOWS

SOME REFLECTIONS ON TRAVEL NARRATIVES

Because many people of diverse nations and countries delight and take pleasure, as I have done in times past, in seeing the world and the various things therein, and also because many want to know without traveling there, and others want to see, go, and travel, I have begun this little book.

—Gilles Le Bouvier, Le Livre de la Description

des Pays (1908)

IN A GLOBALIZED world grown smaller by progressively dizzying flows of people, knowledge, and information, “travel” seems to have become the image of the age. Porous borders, portable allegiances, virtual networks, and elastic identities now more than ever evoke the language of mobility, contingency, fluidity, provisionality, and process rather than that of stability, permanence, and fixity.¹ Scholars who traffic in the lingo of deterritorialization and nomadism increasingly traverse disciplines and regions, mining disparate experiences of displacement such as tourism, diaspora, exile, cyberculture, and migration as “contact zones,” sites that articulate the preconditions and implications of cross-cultural encounters.²

In a geopolitical landscape scarred by colonialism and the workings of global capital, however, such encounters often proceed under conditions of radical inequality between and within regions, cultures, nations, and transnational and subnational communities. The corrosive consequences of such real and perceived disparities of power are evident in daily newspaper headlines around the world, demanding and receiving attention if not redress. The events of September 11, 2001, the U.S.-led war on terrorism, and growing opposition to it have galvanized interest in the haunting of contemporary politics by grievances rooted in poorly understood historical narratives of marginalization and persecution. Long a feature of political discourse within postcolonial societies, such grievances and narratives now press on European and American political consciousness in unprecedented ways. What Foucault aptly called research into “the history of the present” is no longer of interest only to scholarly specialists, for the imperatives of geopolitics have lent a new sense of urgency to attempts to bring these pasts into an often “presentist” social science.³

The recent emphasis on mobility and displacement as both features of and metaphors for an increasingly globalized world has thus been accompanied by detailed investigations of the historical relationship between travel and imperialism, mobility and domination. Within the last twenty years, there has been a virtual explosion of scholarship on “Western” travels to the “non-West” (I will turn to these terms in a moment): travel writing by Europeans in particular has come to be regarded as a window onto the production of knowledge and, more specifically, onto the mutually constitutive images of colonizer and colonized. These efforts are vital interventions into the operations of power, particularly in a postcolonial world in which such operations establish distinctions between center and periphery and constitute their relationship hierarchically. Yet paradoxically, attempts to deconstruct these mechanisms of domination have tended to reproduce this structure and organization. From hermeneutically informed ethnography that aims at the “comprehension of the self by the detour of the comprehension of the other” to investigations into the way colonial European travel writing “produced ‘the rest of the world’ for European readerships at particular points in Europe’s expansionist trajectory,” the West is continually reconstituted as epicenter.⁴ Seeking to displace a hubristic self-image of the West as the beacon that “shows to the less developed the image of its own future,” these analyses inadvertently reestablish Western primacy, now refigured from model to hegemon whose global reach has called forth new powers of the nether world it can no longer control let alone understand.⁵

What would it mean to invert the questions that reproduce the West as the epicenter of the world? Instead of only investigating how Western travel writing produces the “colonized other,” what features of travel, politics, and knowledge past and present might be brought into view by shifting the theoretical perspective? How, for example, have travel and exploration by Muslims produced and transformed their own sense of self and other, of membership and to which communities? How do journeys by Muslims within and beyond the Dar al-Islam (Abode of Islam) as well as travels by Westerners serve to articulate and transfigure the parameters of home and a scale of the strange and estranging? If the Syrian poet Adonis is right that frontiers can be either walls or windows, where and when do such borders emerge for Muslim and Western travelers and who are the assorted Others that mark them?⁶ What is the shared knowledge presupposed and reworked by way of practices of translation between familiar and unfamiliar, home and abroad? And what might such itineraries, exposures, and mediations suggest about the scope and scale of moral and political obligations among human beings enmeshed in a dialectic of localism and cosmopolitanism characteristic of membership in communities with fluid and fluctuating boundaries?

To even ask these questions in this way is to beg a series of others, perhaps most obviously what it could possibly mean in these shape-shifting times to invoke “the West,” “non-West,” and “Islam” as if they correspond to stable, fixed, and clear entities. Indeed, to conjure these categories without explanation would reinforce the very essentialism the present inquiry aims to destabilize. The worry about essentialism here is not mere academic cant. Words have power, and whether the opposition is between “the West and the Rest” or the “West and Islam,” the presupposition of two uniform and identifiable entities whose boundaries are clearly demarcated from one another carves up the world in ways that erase fissures within each category and the mutual historical indebtedness between them, not to mention the extensive cross-pollination of the present.⁷ Such Manicheanism presumes and reinforces a view of the world in which messy, multiple, and interpenetrating histories and identities are pressed into the service of binaries that distort rather than illuminate the political landscape. As this way of seeing the world gains steam, it becomes increasingly difficult to hear and see, for example, all the people and evidence that challenge, complicate, or contradict it. Under these circumstances, such manicheanism becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, and the attention continually paid to this worldview, even if it is to detail the ways in which it both creates and deforms political life, becomes yet another expression of its scope and power.

In this context, it becomes politically and intellectually crucial to (again) recall that the West is not a civilization with homogeneous roots and clearly delineated historical and contemporary boundaries. As a geographical marker, it is virtually impossible to pinpoint exactly where the West begins and ends, and this is especially so now that peoples, information, and material goods traverse cultural and national borders at will, creating all kinds of transnational and subnational identities that shift and reconstitute themselves in unpredictable ways. Many suspect that what are defined as Western interests are really only the interests of the most powerful of the developed nations; thus while the West may once have been shorthand for Europe, it is now shorthand for the United States and its global reach.⁸ The West is also an amalgamation of multiple traditions—the Greek, Roman, Judiac, and Christian to name a few—and has been perpetually influenced by and shaped in terms of other cultures and civilizations.⁹ Indeed, crucial components of Western intellectual history may not be Western in any meaningful sense at all; as one scholar argues, “the real heirs of Roman civilization were not the chain-mailed knights of the rural West, but the sophisticated Byzantines of Constantinople and the cultivated Arab caliphate of Damascus, both of whom have preserved the Hellenized urban civilization of the antique Mediterranean long after it was destroyed in Europe.”¹⁰

Moreover, the West is today made up of citizens who embrace radically diverse ethnic, religious, and racial identities. There are those who are American by birth who, by virtue of race or ethnicity or some other marker of difference, feel themselves at once in but not of the West, and scholars have come to designate certain situations within the West as colonial—for example, mining communities in central Appalachia.¹¹ Furthermore, while it is now obvious that colonialism has shaped the “Third World, ” more recently many scholars have pointed out the ways in which the West has been profoundly transformed by its colonial encounters as well.¹² Those who take the West as shorthand for a series of “values”—for example, democracy, liberalism, constitutionalism, freedom, the separation of church and state—rarely recognize the extent to which such values are defined in contradictory ways and are belied by the very diversity of practices within the West. Finally, such invocations capture as uniquely Western ideas and norms that appear elsewhere in other guises, or whose most powerful articulations emerge in confrontation with, not as an expression of, EuroAmerican power.¹³ Indeed, “many of the standards exported by the West and its cultural industries themselves turn out to be of culturally mixed character if we examine their cultural lineages.”¹⁴

Critical assessments of nearly every aspect and claim associated with the West have, of course, become commonplace. By contrast, such endless parsing is not commonly brought to bear on Islam, detailed knowledge of which largely remains the purview of specialists. Yet Islam is inescapably diverse, multiethnic, and defined as much by disagreement as consensus. The very term Islam in the singular obscures the fact that this is a religion embraced by more than a billion people in countries ranging from the United States to China. If Islam is defined as the religious practices of actual Muslims, one can only conclude, along with Aziz al-Azmeh, that there is no such thing as a single Islam, but rather many different Islams practiced by millions of different people in a stunning variety of places.¹⁵ Positing multiple Islams may finesse but cannot solve the problem of essentialism, however. As Peter Mandaville points out, to “speak of ‘Islams’ is to be haunted by a sense of boundaries; it gives the impression that there is some point where one Islam leaves off and another picks up, ” while simultaneously flying “in the face of the fact that the vast majority of Muslims, despite a clear cognisance of their religion’s diversity, see themselves as adhering very firmly to a single Islam.”¹⁶

Yet to speak of a singular Islam is almost invariably to speak of the sacred texts (the Qur

an and hadith, the reports of the words and deeds of the Prophet), an emphasis that has tended to privilege juridical Islam and its gatekeepers at the expense of more heterodox, popular, and mystical practices.¹⁷ Moreover, despite the historical ebb and flow of claims about an “authentic Islam” constituted by fixed and self-evident truths residing in the “original texts,” scriptural Islam is multiply indeterminate. As Khaled Abou El Fadl has argued, for example, while the Shari

a (Islamic law) is presumed to be Divine and necessarily perfect, Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh) is by contrast a human and imperfect endeavor, a fluid and fallible process that “ultimately justified the practice of juristic diversity and culture of juristic disputations.”¹⁸ Far from conveying one single message clearly, Qur

anic verses have long confronted scholars with a wealth of indeterminacies that have, in turn, generated a dizzying variety of interpretive strategies designed to finesse if not resolve instances of apparent Qur

anic contradiction. There are entire disciplines and literatures devoted to distinguishing fabricated from authoritative reports of the Prophet’s life, with much riding on the outcome: hadith judged sahih (sound) may further illuminate the meaning of revelation itself, particularly when unclear or contradictory. And there are four schools of Islamic Law just in Sunni Islam, not to mention those of Shi

i Islam and even less well known branches. To make matters more complicated, Shari

a is not really fixed even within any single school (madhhab), in part because ...

Table of contents

• Table of Contents
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• CHAPTER 1 Frontiers: Walls and Windows—Some Reflections on Travel Narratives
• CHAPTER 2 Traveling Theorists and Translating Practices Theory and Theôria
• CHAPTER 3 Liars, Travelers, Theorists—Herodotus and Ibn Battuta
• CHAPTER 4 Travel in Search of Practical Wisdom: The Modern Theôriai of al-Tahtawi and Tocqueville
• CHAPTER 5 Gender, Genre, and Travel: Montesquieu and Sayyida Salme
• CHAPTER 6 Cosmopolitanisms Past and Present, Islamic and Western
• NOTES
• GLOSSARY OF ARABIC AND GREEK TERMS
• Bibliography