Journeys to the other shore Muslim and Western travelers in search of knowledge

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 thes...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Euben, Roxanne Leslie, 1966- (-)
Format: eBook
Language:Inglés
Published: Princeton : Princeton University Press c2006.
Edition:Course Book
Series:Princeton studies in Muslim politics.
Subjects:
See on Biblioteca Universitat Ramon Llull:https://discovery.url.edu/permalink/34CSUC_URL/1im36ta/alma991009426426706719
Description
Summary: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.
Item Description:Description based upon print version of record.
Physical Description:1 online resource (327 p.)
Issued also in print
Bibliography:Includes bibliographical references (p. [271]-301) and index.
ISBN:9781282086883
9786612086885
9781400827497