Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875
http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2006/788/bo9.htm
Discovering the world through non-European eyes
Other Routes: 1500 years of African and Asian Travel Writing, Tabish Khair,
Justin Edwards, Martin Leer & Hanna Ziadeh, eds., Oxford: Signal Books, 2006.
pp420
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Click to view caption
EAST IS WEST: (Above) the world according to Al-Sharif Al Idrisi Al
Qurtubi (1099-1166), from Nuzhat al-Mushtaq fi Ikhtiraq al-Afaq (The delight of
him who desires to journey through the climates); and (right) River Nile
according to Ibn Hawqal (943-969), from the author's revision of Al-Istakhri's
Kitab al-masalik wa al-mamalik (Book of Routes and Kingdoms)
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Travel! Set out for pastures new
Life tastes richer when you have road-worn feet.
No water that stagnates is fit to drink,
For only that which flows is truly sweet.
--- Attributed to Imam al-Shafi'
Drama is life with the dull bits left out, according to master filmmaker Alfred
Hitchcock. The same could be said of good travel writing. However, in Other
Routes: 1500 years of African and Asian Travel Writing, this piece of wisdom
sometimes seems to have escaped the editors, notwithstanding the valuable, and
sometimes exciting, material they present.
Part of an ambitious project to resurrect non-European travel writing as proof
of a longstanding tradition of the genre outside the European continent, the
editors of this book argue that eurocentrism is an unsatisfactory way of
understanding the contemporary world, as this world has grown out of a colonial
experience that was strongly associated with the desire on the part of the
European colonisers to subjugate the colonised peoples by "discovering,"
"stereotyping," or otherwise "categorising" them. Though the book's project is
a worthy one, highlighting the need for further exploration of this subject,
too often this comes at the cost of having to go through texts that seem either
to be irrelevant to the book's general theme, or are filled with the dull parts
of life without apparently serving any larger purpose. The inclusion of
extracts from the diary of Queen Emma of Hawaii, whose relevance to African or
Asian routes is not explained, is a case in point.
As a result, the book is perhaps best read backwards, starting with the last
section entitled Travel Accounts. This includes some informative and
entertaining tales of travel by masters such as the mediaeval Arab traveler Ibn
Battuta, as well as by less well-known wanderers, at least in the Arab world,
such as the Japanese poet Basho (1644-1694). Born into a noble family, Basho
rejected the world and chose instead to wander in it, and he is represented
here by a rich and dreamy travel piece whose originality lies in the insertion
of poetry into the text, its subjective feel and its use of the first person,
which is rare among late-17th and early 18th-century Asian writings.
The lengthier texts in this section also give a better sense of the book's
subject and help to establish a more intimate connection between reader and
author, which is hard to feel in the case of some of the shorter texts. While
the editors note that lack of space has prompted them to abridge some texts and
to do away with others, fewer, but lengthier, extracts, might have served their
purposes better. However, one benefit of having so many texts collected
together in one place, irritating though this might be for the lay reader, is
that it furnishes researchers with a wealth of references useful for further
investigations. It also provides a conspectus of an alternative way of travel
writing, besides the familiar pattern of the western visitor traveling into
non-western regions, and instead involves easterners visiting and writing about
the east, for example, as well as easterners visiting the west.
Travel writings bringing these alternatives to life are included in this book
under the headings of Pilgrimages, Studies, Autobiographies, Diaries and
Memoirs, and Travel Accounts, all preceded by an engaging foreword by the
Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh and a less- accessible introduction by one of the
book's editors, Tabish Khair.
Ghosh presents an alternative vision of travel writing, placing it in a
framework different form the usual western one of discovery and exploration.
The travel writers included in the book, he says, "do not assume a universal
ordering of reality; nor do they arrange their narratives to correspond to
teleologies of racial or civilized progress," and he gives the example of the
supposed French "discovery" of Angkor Wat in Cambodia as a case of the tendency
of past European travel writing to construct its version of reality regardless
of the facts on the ground. Ghosh points out that it was only after the French
discovery of this "lost city" in the 19th century that the monks, who had
previously continued to inhabit parts of the site, finally abandoned it. The
European discovers, the French in this case, not only then re-wrote the
complicated story of the site's past, but also "recast the actual structure to
accord with their telling of the tale."
Despite the value of Ghosh's piece, the travel writings themselves are
unnecessarily delayed by the editor's subsequent introduction, which is filled
with academic jargon that distracts from the theme of the book. Khair
nevertheless points out that in the dominant western tradition, "travel writing
is an account of the unusual for the home market, while in other traditions,
such as the Chinese, travel is a meditative immersion into place." He then
outlines the contents of the book's four sections, giving brief accounts of the
different writers included, these being thankfully supplemented by full
introductions when one reaches the texts themselves. These mini-biographies are
especially welcome in that they provide fascinating accounts of the travelers'
often adventure-filled lives; at times they are even more informative and
relevant to the book's theme of non-European travel than are the selected texts
themselves.
In the Pilgrimages section of the book, for example, the life of the
12th-century Andalucian traveler Ibn Jubayr illustrates the sometimes shaky
notion of a strict religious differentiation between east and west. As the
biographical summary introducing the extract from Ibn Jubayr's writings
explains, "the west" was not exclusively seen as Christian at this time, any
more than "the east" was considered to be exclusively Muslim, and Ibn Jubayr
was as much part of Europe geographically as he was part of the Arab world
culturally. However, the extract that follows does little to develop this
notion, though it does includes a noteworthy description of a Christian bridal
procession in the city of Tyre in present-day Lebanon.
Another unique figure whose legacy transcends the seemingly perennial
distinction between east and west is "Leo Africanus," originally Hassan bin
Muhammed al-Wazzan al-Fasi, who also adopted other names as his odyssey
unfolded on the heels of the fall of Granada in 1492. According to Leo's own
account, the only one to survive, he led a turbulent life: recently elevated to
contemporary fame by Lebanese writer Amin Maalouf in his book Leo the African,
having been driven out of Spain Leo Africanus settled in Morocco before setting
out on his travels through North and Sub-Saharan Africa. His capture by Spanish
corsairs, and later conversion to Christianity, turned him into a subject of
the Medici Pope Leo X (1532-21) in Rome, and the study of North Africa that Leo
Africanus wrote while in the Pope's service is an illuminating case-study of
the European discovery of Africa, presented in the form of a text and seen
through non- European eyes, as well as being an interesting example of how a
man who was a Muslim by birth portrayed Muslim North Africa to the Christian
world.
These accounts by Ibn Jubayr and Leo Africanus date back centuries and predate
European colonialism. However, significant texts shedding light on the
complicated and sometimes fuzzy relationship of east and west during the later
colonial period are also included. Among them are reports by a 19th-century
Parsee journalist, Behranji M. Malabari, who published a book entitled The
Indian Eye on English Life in 1893 presenting the author's love- hate attitude
towards all things British. It also reveals the impact of colonialism on the
identity of the colonised, Malabari seeming to be particularly fascinated by
British women. Another extract included here, this time from a work entitled T
he Shah of Iran in European Corridors written by Nasser-ed-Din Shah in the
later part of the 19th century, is one other, perhaps less amusing, account of
east-west relations during the colonial period. It contains a revealing and
chilling tale of the then ruler of Iran's encounter in Paris in 1873 with
Jewish businessman Gustav de Rothschild, who wanted to talk about the "Jewish
problem".
Other revealing and sometimes bizarre anecdotes are scattered throughout this
book. These include quotations from a 15th-century manual for incubating
chickens, the brutish rituals of a Viking funeral as described by a Baghdad
merchant, and the 13th-century reputation of Cambodian woman as over-sexed and
able to regain their virginity after giving birth using a poultice of hot rice
and salt.
Also included is the tale of an Arab sailor who might have passed on the secret
of the sea route from East Africa to the Indies to the Portuguese mariner Vasco
De Gama, long held to be a central figure in the European Age of Discovery.
Reviewed by Hicham Safieddine
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