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    Journeys to the Other Shore: Muslim and Western Travelers in Search of Knowledge
    Journeys to the Other Shore: Muslim and Western Travelers in Search of Knowledge
    Journeys to the Other Shore: Muslim and Western Travelers in Search of Knowledge
    Ebook540 pages9 hours

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

    By Roxanne L. Euben

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    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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPrinceton University Press
    Release dateJul 1, 2008
    ISBN9781400827497
    Journeys to the Other Shore: Muslim and Western Travelers in Search of Knowledge

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      Journeys to the Other Shore - Roxanne L. Euben

      Journeys to the Other Shore

      PRINCETON STUDIES IN MUSLIM POLITICS

      Dale F. Eickelman and Augustus Richard Norton, Editors

      Diane Singerman, Avenues of Participation: Family, Politics, and Networks in Urban Quarters of Cairo

      Tone Bringa, Being Muslim the Bosnian Way: Identity and Community ina Central Bosnian Village

      Dale F. Eickelman and James Piscatori, Muslim Politics

      Bruce B. Lawrence, Shattering the Myth: Islam beyond Violence

      Ziba Mir-Hosseini, Islam and Gender: The Religious Debate in Contemporary Iran

      Robert W. Hefner, Civil Islam: Muslims and Democratization in Indonesia

      Muhammad Qasim Zaman, The Ulama in Contemporary Islam: Custodians of Change

      Michael G. Peletz, Islamic Modern: Religious Courts and Cultural Politics in Malaysia

      Oskar Verkaaik, Migrants and Militants: Fun, Islam, and Urban Violence in Pakistan

      Laetitia Bucaille, Growing up Palestinian: Israeli Occupation and the Intifada Generation

      Robert W. Hefner, editor, Remaking Muslim Politics: Pluralism, Contestation, Democratization

      Lara Deeb, An Enchanted Modern: Gender and Public Piety in Shi‘i Lebanon

      Roxanne L. Euben, Journeys to the Other Shore: Muslim and Western Travelers in Search of Knowledge

      Robert W. Hefner and Muhammad Qasim Zaman, eds., Schooling Islam: The Culture and Politics of Modern Muslim Education

      Loren D. Lybarger, Identity and Religion in Palestine: The Struggle between Islamism and Secularism in the Occupied Territories

      Journeys to the Other Shore

      MUSLIM AND WESTERN

      TRAVELERS IN SEARCH

      OF KNOWLEDGE

      Roxanne L. Euben

      PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

      PRINCETON AND OXFORD

      Copyright © 2006 by Princeton University Press

      Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

      In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW

      All Rights Reserved

      Second printing, and first paperback printing, 2008

      Paperback ISBN: 978-0-691-13840-4

      The Library of Congress has cataloged the cloth edition of this book as follows

      Euben, Roxanne Leslie, 1966–

      Journeys to the other shore : Muslim and Western travelers in search

      of knowledge / Roxanne L. Euben.

      p.cm. (Princeton studies in Muslim politics)

      Includes bibliographical references and index.

      eISBN: 978-1-40082-749-7

      1. Travel, Medieval. 2. Voyages and travels. 3. Travelers—Arab countries.

      4. Travelers—Europe. 5. East and West. I. Title.

      G89.E93 2006

      910.4—dc22 2006017894

      British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

      This book has been composed in Palatino

      Printed on acid-free paper. ∞

      press.princeton.edu

      Printed in the United States of America

      3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

      For Jonathan

      He who does not travel will not know the value of men.

      Travel, you will see the meaning [of things].

      —Moroccan proverbs, Edward Westermarck,

      Wit and Wisdom in Morocco (1930)

      CONTENTS

      Acknowledgments

      Note on Transliteration and Spelling

      CHAPTER 1 Frontiers: Walls and Windows—Some Reflections on Travel Narratives

      CHAPTER 2 Traveling Theorists and Translating Practices Theory and Theôria

      Seeing the Entire World as a Foreign Land

      Exposures and Closures

      Islam, Travel, and talab al-cilm

      The Double-Edged Nature of Travel

      Travel as Translation

      CHAPTER 3 Liars, Travelers, Theorists—Herodotus and Ibn Battuta

      Herodotus

      Ibn Battuta

      Conclusion

      CHAPTER 4 Travel in Search of Practical Wisdom: The Modern Theôriai of al-Tahtawi and Tocqueville

      Authorizing Autopsy

      Travels across Time and Space

      Multiple Mediations

      Conclusion

      CHAPTER 5 Gender, Genre, and Travel: Montesquieu and Sayyida Salme

      Montesquieu’s Persian Letters

      Sayyida Salme’s Memoirs

      Conclusion

      CHAPTER 6 Cosmopolitanisms Past and Present, Islamic and Western

      Notes

      Glossary

      Bibliography

      ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

      THE RESEARCH for this has taken me literally and figuratively through many epochs, regions, languages, literatures, and disciplines. In the process of crisscrossing these domains, I have incurred innumerable debts to scholars, colleagues, assistants, and librarians who have patiently and generously given of their time and expertise to critique a particular chapter, point out a relevant argument, track down an elusive hadith, or locate a rare nineteenth-century Arabic monograph. This book is thus in many ways a collaborative enterprise, although I bear full responsibility for the use (and misuse) of the resources, knowledge, and materials put at my disposal.

      First and foremost, I wish to express my profound gratitude to Lawrie Balfour, J. Peter Euben, and Keith Topper for reading every word of this book at least once. The project has benefited immeasurably from their imagination, expertise, expansive intellect, and willingness to endlessly discuss travel by telephone, e-mail, and in walks around Chicago; Washington, D.C.; Boston; and Durham. I am also grateful to a variety of colleagues dispersed in academic institutions located everywhere from Massachusetts to Morocco whose engagement with various aspects of this project continually challenged me to think at once more broadly and deeply. In this connection, I want to thank Rachid Aadnani, Shahrough Akhavi, Dale Eickelman, Wael Hallaq, Nabil Matar, Louise Marlow, Pratap Mehta, Susan Miller, J. Donald Moon, Abderrahmane El Moudden, Anne Norton, James Petterson, Nancy Rosenblum, Jeremy Waldron, Stuart Warner, Muhammad Qasim Zaman, and my fellow fellows at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (2004–5). A special note of thanks is due to Carol Dougherty and Marilyn Sides, my dedicated and generous partners in an interdisciplinary research group on travel narratives sponsored by Wellesley’s Multicultural Education and Research Initiative (MERI). Their expertise and humor were indispensable to this endeavor at its inception.

      This book could not have been completed without the help of several research assistants I have been fortunate to work with, even briefly, at one time or another over the years. Their various investigative talents and linguistic skills, not to mention an electronic expertise far surpassing my own, have often made a daunting interdisciplinary project substantially more manageable. In this regard, I would like to thank Samia Adnan, Lamees al-Ashtal, Katherine Flaster, Rachel Isaacs, Hilary Jaffe, Mary (Kathy) Roche, Himmet Taskomur, Abdallah Salam, Tarek Shamma, and Rachael Ward, as well as Michael Fodor and Deborah Hayden in particular for assisting me with the French translations. In addition, I am grateful for the support of several fellowship programs under whose auspices I have conducted much of the research for and writing of this book at various stages: the American Council of Learned Societies, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and the Mellon Foundation Mid-Career Enrichment grant program. I also want to thank my students at Wellesley College, particularly those in my comparative political theory classes: their enthusiasm for the subject and willingness to engage in heated debates about travel and translation greatly enlivened the early stages of research for this book. I am, moreover, very grateful for the generous financial, intellectual, personal, and institutional support provided by administrators and colleagues alike at Wellesley College. Last but most certainly not least, I am indebted to the diligent, efficient, and hardworking staff in the Interlibrary Loan office at Clapp Library at Wellesley College, who gamely and successfully delivered on an unending barrage of requests for even the rarest of Arabic materials.

      This book is dedicated to Jonathan Perry who, despite his intense distrust of airplanes, is my fellow-traveler in all voyages of discovery, both literal and imaginative.

      NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION AND SPELLING

      to represent the letter ayn ilmto represent hamza an). For the sake of consistency and accessibility, in the renderings of common Arabic words and Muslim names, I have followed the conventions established by the International Journal of Middle East Studies.

      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

      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 (fiqhanic 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 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 law is a mirror of society . . . [such that] the evolution of Islamic law reflected a degree of pluralism and religious heterogeneity which was possibly more ingrained than in any other contemporary society.¹⁹

      As the current political climate attests, however, there is much more at stake here than whether or not categories such as Islam and the West are accurate, in the sense of corresponding, more or less precisely, to actual geographic, political, historical, and/or normative borders in the world. Islam versus the West is an entire system of representation embraced with equal intensity by many contemporary Islamists²⁰ and American neoconservatives, both of whom apparently have the will to remake the world in this image.²¹ Moreover, the political purchase of such categories extend well beyond these narrow circles; there are, after all, many people for whom Islam versus the West is not only a powerful system of representation but for whom Islamic and Western designate zero-sum identities to which they feel an intense loyalty despite persistent disagreements about the precise object of such allegiance. Given what Muhammad Bamyeh characterizes as the heteroglossic properties of Islam enacted in a unity imagined rather than disunity proclaimed, a singular Islam thus captures and organizes the subjectivities of millions who self-identify as Muslim (among other things), even or especially if such identities enact a reworking of Islamic norms and practices.²² As Talal Asad points out:

      While narrative history does not have to be teleological, it does presuppose an identity (India, say) that is the subject of that narrative. Even when that identity is analyzed into its heterogeneous parts (class, gender, regional divisions, etc.), what is done, surely, is to reveal its constitution, not to dissolve its unity. The unity is maintained by those who speak in its name, and more generally by all who adjust their existence to its (sometimes shifting) requirements.²³

      Importantly, such categories are secured not only by an individual’s subjective identification but also by what Robert Gooding-Williams calls those third-person practices of classification—racial, ethnic, and religious—that establish the range of self-conceptualizations available to describe our intended actions and prospective lives.²⁴ In other words, to identify oneself as Muslim at this moment in history is not just a matter of where and how one prays but also of, for example, security practices of racial and religious profiling at American and European airports, train stations, and seaports.

      What this means is that those engaged directly or indirectly with the dilemmas of contemporary politics cannot simply dispense with such categories by reference to all that they miss, distort, or exclude. Instructive in this connection is Linda Zerilli’s discussion of how it is that the category of woman persists as part of a passionate system of reference despite mounting challenges to its strategic utility and empirical validity—from feminist objections to the exclusions enacted by any attempt to define woman to scientific repudiations of sexual dimorphism.²⁵ Expressed in and reinforced by the daily linguistic practices of ordinary people, Islam and the West are similarly part of a system of representation that resists argumentation and counter-evidence because, to quote Ludwig Wittgenstein, what stands fast does so, not because it is intrinsically obvious or convincing; it is rather held fast by what lies around it.²⁶ It is not that those who hold fast have failed to think critically or rationally, then, but rather because such categories and identities are embedded in mythologies whose force derives from a deeply human desire to make sense of the world around us:

      A mythology cannot be defeated in the sense that one wins over one’s opponent through the rigor of logic or the force of the evidence; a mythology cannot be defeated through arguments that would reveal it as groundless belief. . . . A mythology is utterly groundless, hence stable. What characterizes a mythology is not so much its crude or naive character—mythologies can be extremely complex and sophisticated—but, rather, its capacity to elude our practices of verification and refutation. A mythology, as Jacques Bouveresse observes, is the force of an idea, a form of representations, a manner of speaking that provides a universally valid explanation of my world, convincing me a priori because of the desire, and not the thought, that it should be able to account for every case.²⁷

      The point here is that in the everyday practice of ordinary lives such categories come to constitute a grammar that is not a metaphysical given but a form of representation that sets limits to what it makes sense to say and that is held in place—I do not say justified—not through grand theories but small acts: daily, habitual practices of speaking, acting, and judging.²⁸ As part of what Wittgenstein describes as a passionate commitment to a system of reference, such grammar is "really a way of living, or of assessing one’s life . . . it’s passionately seizing hold of this interpretation, the relinquishment of which will not be achieved by the piling on of contradictory evidence but rather, as Zerilli puts it, coming to see differently what has been there all along."²⁹

      As all politics entails the making of claims for this or that community which are inevitably partial and thus exclusive, Zerilli suggests abandoning the rehearsal of feminist arguments against such claims in favor of attending to the multiple ordinary contexts in which words such as woman are used and acquire particular and variant meanings—and then are contested and challenged. By asking, for example, how travel and exploration by Muslims have produced and transformed their own sense of self and other, home, and frontier, I would similarly like to set aside the endless rehearsal of inaccuracies and exclusions erased by terms such as Islam, non-West, and West. I do so not because such arguments are unimportant but, on the contrary, because their very logic points to the next step: of moving beyond incantations about hybridity, fluidity, and translation to a substantive and textured inquiry into how particular imaginaries and identities are at once articulated and transfigured by way of jagged and unpredictable exchange with other practices and peoples.³⁰

      Shifting the focus from inevitably contested and infinitely contestable abstractions means resisting the temptation to wrap quotation marks around such terms as the West and Islam in an attempt to finesse the tension between categories that are clearly inadequate and their obvious political purchase.³¹ It also means retaining these terms despite the fact that they are not parallel constructs, however construed; as the West is not a religion (although it can elicit religious devotion), a contrast of equivalents would juxtapose Islam and Christianity or contrast Islam with Judaism. Moreover, while Islam is a discursive tradition with a long and rich history,³² the West is a category of relatively recent provenance through which history is increasingly organized (the ancient Greeks, for example, understood themselves as geographically west of the barbarians, but not Western in the contemporary sense).³³ Indeed, historians suggest that even the First Crusade, that supposedly paradigmatic moment in the clash of civilizations, was read as such only after the fact.³⁴ Given all this, I deploy these terms in a very specific way, as instances of master signifiers along the lines suggested by Bobby Sayyid and Peter Mandaville in connection with Islam; here Islam as well as the West does not refer to a specific set of beliefs or practices, but rather . . . functions as a totalising abstraction through which meaning and discourse can be organized.³⁵ Taken as master signifiers, then, the West and Islam capture what is imagined as continuous and unitary in dialectical relationship to those concrete articulations and enactments by which they are transformed and adapted in different contexts for plural purposes.

      To return, then: travel narratives have been particularly suspect for the representational power they enact over those they survey, not to mention the Western imperial endeavors the travel genre is said to both express and facilitate.³⁶ Yet this does not exhaust all that travel narratives can reveal, particularly if the travelers and narratives are pluralized to incorporate precisely those perspectives and peoples silenced or eclipsed by the almost single-minded focus on Western journeys abroad.³⁷ Rather than adding to the ongoing anatomization of the past, present, and future of Euro-American peoples—our histories, our intellectual traditions, even our erasures of others’ histories and intellectual traditions—in the chapters that follow, I seek to shift the theoretical perspective by bringing into view the ways in which travelers of all kinds, past and present and from many directions, produce knowledge about others and themselves comparatively. Doing so not only contributes to a more textured history of our present complex, overlapping, disjunctive order, but also answers Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s call to

      not only compare from within our boxes, but spend some time and effort to transcend them, not by comparison alone, but by seeking out the at times fragile threads that connected the globe, even as the globe came to be defined as such. This is not to deny voice to those who were somehow fixed by physical, social and cultural coordinates, who inhabited localities . . . and whom we might seek out with our intrepid analytical machetes. But if we ever get to them by means other than archaeology, the chances are that it is because they are already plugged into some network, some process of circulation.³⁸

      Toward this end, the following inquiry is concerned less with matters of historical and empirical accuracy and more with those representational practices that arrange human experience into narrative accounts, and in particular, what such practices disclose about the ways in which these travelers make sense of themselves and the worlds through which they move. As Mary Gergen argues, such practices are themselves embedded in

      traditions of storytelling, dramatic performance, literature and the like [that] have generated a range of culturally shared forms of emplotment, or narrative forms. When the individual attempts to understand him/herself, these culturally embedded forms furnish a repertoire of sense making devices. It is through embedding one’s actions within one or more of these forms that one’s actions take on meaning; they belong to a person with a certain past, heading in a certain direction, and with a future that will represent an extension of this past. Yet . . . narrative constructions are not the mere product of cultural history. The particular form that they acquire for any person is an outgrowth of the social relationships in which one is currently embedded. One’s narratives typically include the positioning of others in relationship to self. . . . Likewise, others’ self-narratives contain constructions of other individuals embedded in their mutual social surrounds. Thus, the narrative constructions within a community of interlocutors may be viewed as a communal achievement.³⁹

      ite, West and East, male and female, white and nonwhite, Muslim and Christian, among others—that are plastic, contingent, and persistent. In contrast to those who take identity and membership as given by God, nature, lineage, or territorial locality, the continual traction and mutability of these polarities suggest that home and away, self and other, familiar and foreign are not an instant property or possession but rather emerge, transform, and recede in the course of the journey itself, much like the flow of a river nested between solid embankments.⁴⁰

      As I will suggest by argument and example throughout this book, there is more at stake in pluralizing the investigation of travel as a metaphor for and practice of the pursuit of knowledge than simple recognition that non-Westerners travel too. This pluralization is, in fact, part of a wider effort to recuperate a more capacious understanding of political theory than one defined in terms of a parochial mapping of Western answers to fixed questions posed by a pantheon of (almost exclusively) Euro-American philosophers. This builds on my argument for comparative political theory advanced elsewhere, and in particular the claim that theorizing involves examining and making explicit the assumptions and commitments that underlie everyday actions, a practice on which no time, culture, or institution has a monopoly.⁴¹ Inasmuch as such examination requires a measure of critical distance, theory so defined entails a kind of journey to a perspective that makes larger patterns and connections visible. What this means, then, is that theory is not only embedded in actual practices and experiences, but that theorizing is an inherently comparative enterprise, an often (but not inevitably) transformative mediation between what is unfamiliar and familiar and, by extension, between rootedness and critical distance. In this context, then, travel signals both a metaphor for and a practice of journeying, in Nietzsche’s words, to the other shore, to worlds less familiar, and in terms of which a traveler may well come to understand his or her own more deeply and fully.⁴²

      This argument and enterprise can be usefully illuminated by way of a contrast with Edward Said’s Traveling Theory, an essay that tracks how theories and ideas circulate, and in particular how they are adapted, transfigured, undone, reworked, and domesticated from person to person, from situation to situation, from one period to another.⁴³ As the particular journey that preoccupied Said was the academicization of theory as it moved from European contexts to the universities in the United States, the essay was, no doubt, intended to simply offer a metaphor for reading certain aspects of intellectual life.⁴⁴ Yet its own peregrinations through subsequent academic scholarship has invested it with enormous methodological and political weight, transforming Traveling Theory from a brief set of provocative reflections into an entire methodology and mode of inquiry. Setting aside such ex post facto freight, what is particularly instructive here is how the present inquiry differs from Said’s in the way it defines and locates the practice of theory, a shift in focus that brings into view aspects of the production of knowledge that traveling theory, as either metaphor or method, cannot.

      In Said’s analysis, theory is largely used synonymously with ideas, both of which are opposed to a critical consciousness whose job is to provide resistances to theory, to open it up toward historical reality, toward society, toward human needs and interests, to point up those concrete instances drawn from everyday reality that lie outside or just beyond the interpretive area necessarily designated in advance and thereafter circumscribed by every theory.⁴⁵ For Said, the fact that every text and every reader is to some extent the product of a theoretical standpoint, however implicit or unconscious such a standpoint may be is part of what makes theory inevitably incomplete and necessitates the oppositional services of the humanist critic.⁴⁶ By contrast, I define theory as a practice of inquiry in which critical distance plays an integral role, thereby shifting the emphasis from theory as a body of ideas subject to domestication or in need of constant chastening to theorizing as a reflective activity engaged in by ordinary people at particular moments in time. In this way, the particular standpoint at work in all theorizing represents not an inadequacy of the theoretical enterprise but a critical component of it, along the lines suggested by Sheldon Wolin’s description of political theory as a practice of vision inevitably dependent on where the viewer stands.⁴⁷

      The focus here is not on the circulation of ideas through concrete contexts but rather on embodied travelers whose sense of self, knowledge, time, and space at once emerges and is transfigured by the doubled mediation between rootedness and distance, familiar and unfamiliar. Tracking subjectivities rather than theories places front and center much that transpires between and below those moments when ideas touch down in different scholarly settings. It suggests, for example, that what Said describes in the passive voice as the distance traversed by ideas is often rough terrain negotiated by ordinary people whose identities are themselves the product of travel and the conduit by which meaning moves and changes from place to place.⁴⁸ But more important for my purposes, the circulation of big ideas through the work of extraordinary thinkers at epoch-making (or profession-establishing) junctures rarely brings alive what I want to call those theoretical moments that erupt erratically in ordinary lives, those less than grand encounters with what is strange and estranging that occasion the translating practices I am arguing are central to theory. Travel narratives that enact these mediations, moreover, enable generations of readers to witness vicariously those instances in which quite ordinary people willingly and unwillingly run up against the disorienting friction between what they think they know and what they do not yet know, and the openings and closures this sometimes explosive tension produces.

      Such theoretical moments may or may not ultimately be systematized into a body of knowledge that rises to the level of what most would call theory, and there are examples of both in the chapters that follow. Yet I want to suggest that in themselves such moments are windows onto what Charles Taylor calls social imaginaries, that is, the ways people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations.⁴⁹ Both factual and normative, a social imaginary may be informed by and in turn transform intellectual ideas about social reality, yet because of its indefinite and unlimited nature, it exceeds those explicit doctrines and theories that largely remain the possession of a small minority.⁵⁰ Understood in these terms, what I am referring to as theoretical moments are not only windows onto social imaginaries in flux but are also crucial instances of the everyday cultural practice through which the work of imagination is transformed.⁵¹ Whether the imagination transformed is that of the traveler or of the reader, then, such practices are more than quaint exercises in fantasy; they represent those rare moments by which people might not only come to see differently what has been there all along but also conceive of themselves living differently.⁵²

      So understood, such journeys need not be across vast distances; indeed, depending upon where and how one lives, they might entail simply crossing the street. Moreover, as I will discuss in the concluding chapter, in some instances they may not even require physical movement. If L. P. Hartley is right that the past is a foreign country, imaginative travel across history, for example, may well involve exposure to what is strange and estranging, a dislocation that can initiate awareness of and reflection on modes of life other than one’s own.⁵³ Needless to say, not all journeys, imaginative or literal, by definition produce enlightenment. In fact, as becomes clear in the chapters that follow, the motivations for travel as well as its consequences are contingent and unpredictable, a complex and mercurial interaction of the personal, political, historical, and institutional at once suggestive of loose patterns and resistant to any attempt to model which journeys and conditions will produce or predict a critically reflective or tolerant attitude.

      Much as the field of political theory is itself organized around rich texts, this inquiry tends, somewhat unavoidably, to privilege those experiences that ultimately issue in written form (although several here originate in oral cultures or were first delivered orally). There is much about the phenomenon of human mobility not captured in writing, and many travelers past and present do not have the education, leisure, or institutional power to produce a written text of what often were and continue to be harrowing experiences of dislocation.⁵⁴ Nevertheless the capacity of written narratives to convey how people see and refashion the world through contrast provides an invaluable window onto the double mediations I am arguing are constitutive of comparative theorizing. This is precisely why the stakes of an investigation of travel narratives from all different directions exceed the matter of simple inclusion: just as the add-women-and-stir approach to accommodating questions of gender within political theory avoids interrogation of its constitutive assumptions, the following analyses raise questions about the relationship between how political theory is defined—as an institutionalized discipline, a canon of books, a set of interrogatives, a philosophical genre, or a practice of inquiry—and who may be recognized as theorizing, in what locales, and in which genres.⁵⁵

      The genre of Arabic literature known as the rihla, a book recounting travels, and particularly those undertaken in pursuit of knowledge (talab al- ilm), is an opportunity to explore just these questions. This is not because all Muslim travel is theory, or because all accounts of travel in pursuit of knowledge

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