Journeys to the Other Shore: Muslim and Western Travelers in Search of Knowledge (Princeton Studies in Muslim Politics)

8vo, br. ed. 338pp. 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 Eubens 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. Tocquevilles journeys are set against a five-year sojourn in nineteenth-century Paris by the Egyptian writer and translator Rifaa Rafi al-Tahtawi, and Montesquieus novel Persian Letters meets with the memoir of an East African princess, Sayyida Salme.