Journeys to the Other Shore. Muslim and Western Travelers in Search of Knowledge * BY ROXANNE L. EUBEN

Abstract

In this highly stimulating book, the title of which is borrowed from Nietzche's Thus Spake Zarathustra, Roxanne Euben examines the role of travel in the formation of one's picture of societies Islamic and Western. She is one of the rare scholars who can demonstrate thorough knowledge of both the Islamic and European material—classical Greek, English and French literature (the last in translation). Such knowledge is an essential requirement for anyone who embarks on cross-cultural studies of this nature. If the demands made on the reader's cultural resources appear so exacting, the rewards he can expect are also generous. The riḥlas Professor Euben analyzes span several centuries, from Herodotus's Histories in the fifth century bc when Greeks viewed non-Greeks as ‘barbarians’ to those written in the nineteenth century. They therefore facilitate a comparative analysis of such journeys in the pre-colonial and colonial periods. In Chapter 1, serving as an...