World Literature, Contrapuntal Literature May Hawas

Despite the influence travel literature has had on major Western philosophers (from John Locke to Adam Smith), writers (from Jonathan Swift to Bill Bryson) or politicians (as propagandist literature and data generation for imperial expansion), Orientalism (1978) is often seen as the first work of contemporary criticism to take travel writing as a major part of its corpus, seeing it as a body of work which offers particular insight into the operation of colonial discourses. Since then different fields and sub-fields have approached travel writing: gender has sought gender themes in women’s travel writings, for example, while travel writing has also been looked at in the fields of translation studies, anthropology, geography and history (Hulme et al 8-10).

In Arabic literature the interest in travel writing is of longer standing. In Arabic, that ‘trans-local’ corpus of letters despite itself, one form or another of ‘travel writing’ has been revered and occasionally canonised (taught and studied) for over a millennium. In the face of the substantial evidence on the subject –literary, historical, linguistic, cultural or material– it seems a truism that there was a great deal of mobility of varying degrees of intensity between Africa, Asia and Europe for at least half a millennium before 1500 (G. Hourani; Risso; Chaudhuri),¹³³ and which has continued with variations until the present day. Although directions (to/from certain centres), means (sea or land), and certainly incentives varied, there can be no doubt that an immense and at times overwhelming number of people travelled over similarly overwhelming distances and in spite of immense odds.

Judging by the huge number of travel texts that circulated widely and that were consistently produced even through the so-called ‘age of decadence/decline’ (traditionally described as the ‘cultural isolation’ of Arabic letters under Ottoman occupation from about 1300-1800), it is for good reason that the ‘rihla’ lurks like an overreaching mythical presence in Arabic letters. Both action and genre, the significance of the rihla in Arabic, meaning ‘voyage’ but also the ‘account of the voyage’ or ‘travelogue,’ ranges from a religious obligation to an academic requirement, from form of narration to subject of narration, from motif and metaphor to ecumenical view:
Because they [the travellers] traveled in order to know, some among them gave a cognitive foundation to their experience of expatriation, while others gave it an ethical content. All…followed the paths of knowledge as an asceticism that was both physical and intellectual. By their incessant coming and going through the ‘empire of Islam’ (mamlakat al-islām), a spatiotemporal entity that the geographers promoted to the rank of a frame of intelligibility and meaning, they wove a vast web that became part of classical Islamic culture. Thus, thanks to their efforts, the voyage, more than a means for acquiring knowledge, became the prime modality for creating it. (Touati vii)
As the term in Arabic stands then, the rihla-voyage was, and to some degree remains, both means and ends, both a proper subject for scholarly and sophisticated knowledge, and a method or proof of authenticating knowledge and validating and qualifying the knowers. The rihla-voyage was never just a way to know other people, or to contemplate oneself and one’s community, but was integrally a way to achieve some degree of intellectual, ethical and professional formation; a movement that could all too literally translate into upward mobility in various spheres resulting from the education and experience that one might receive, the trade one might garner and the people one might network with. As ‘a base for all genres and an independent genre’, ‘both flint and spark’, as Mouadden puts it, travel accounts in Arabic have necessarily been prolific, possibly the very reason why there remains a great confusion in theoretical terms (26).¹³⁴

Today, the “genre” concept of travel narratives in Arabic from the 9^th-14^th centuries is often seen to exclude geographic-historical books (ranging from so-called annalistic histories to works of astronomy and cartography) even if these were based, by the tradition of scientific verifiability, on real travels, and despite their writers’ sometimes extensive obiter dicta on their personal experiences and observations. Also excluded are al-masālik w-al mamālik (itineraries and provinces) in spite of what they comprise of an urban and ethnographic topography. Similarly excluded are imaginary tales which are considered different genres (and some of which became very popular in Western translations). Travel writing is seen to include in the first place diaries or journals, reports and travel accounts. Whether or not the texts happened to have been initially ‘published’ for a ‘general’ readership, travel writing is that in which the voyage forms an organising aim of the narrative, and that which focuses on conveying the personal experiences of the traveller, whether self-composed or written by a biographer (Touati; Mouadden; Nassār; al-Muwāfi). Travel accounts that aim to be literary might be seen as those in which the voyage is indispensable to the intellectual and aesthetic qualities of the text (Mouadden 34), which convey the traveller’s impressions and perhaps something of the writer’s personality, or which aim in the first place to entertain and attract readership (Nassār 131). Finally, by almost complete agreement, travel literature is seen as a ‘shape-shifter’, a genre with necessarily fluid borders.

It is no passing fancy then that motivated the large numbers of volumes on the Arabic rihla and the highly-esteemed rahhāla (travellers) of the mediaeval and modern worlds.¹³⁵ There is yet, however, to be an established or foundational corpus of scholarship presenting an organised or agreed-upon critical approach to it. This is possibly under the influence of modern Western aesthetic criteria of what literature is or should be,¹³⁶ but undoubtedly it is also because of the sheer bulk of the writings and their eclectic and generically-complex nature that defies dichotomies of genre and disciplines, and also mingles at will prose and poetry, the secular and the religious, and oral and written transmission. Thus, most in-depth scholarship of various lengths has attempted to organise this endless range of material by focusing on a single traveller or text (most famously, the Ibn Battuta-Ibn Fadlan-Ibn Jubayr trinity generally categorised under ‘Sinbad-Other’), a single purpose of travel (such as pilgrimage), a certain area (such as the Holy Land or Egypt), or on the writings of a certain group (such as Christian or Jewish communities). The dilemma increases if any attempt is made to take the ‘Islamic world’ in its subaltern entirety and delve into the many subsumed languages within Arabic –precisely the kind of discussion this chapter would like to start. Only recently have exciting attempts been made to cross such boundaries by compiling collections of edited and translated material from several languages written by travellers across Afroeurasia.¹³⁷

Meanwhile those interested in the Arabic rihla as a generic form have commonly classified it either by the objective or destination of the voyage or by the writer’s incentive in writing. The former classification fails to accommodate the usually mixed reasons for travel, and thus becomes overwhelmed by too many ‘exceptions’ to the taxonomy (see, for example, al-Fāsi (qtd. in Nassār 17-19); al-Muwāfi; Nassār; al-Sāwiri 97-100). It seems more useful to contextualise the travel account by contextualising the writer, in some way as Boym states that the kind of travel writing you write depends on the kind of writer you want to be (26). The rihla-voyage in Arabic mediaeval learning was important because it was deemed a necessary way for professionals and scholars to prove their worth, and so it was almost essential for those interested in social mobility. Defining the travellers’ objectives to write, however, makes it easier to contextualise the class or circle in which the traveller’s writings were intended to circulate (and, subsequently, among which readers or by whose patronage the writer expected to rise).This suggests the mode of writerly culture the text was intended to fit, whether academic, popular, courtly and so on.

This latter approach appears in classificatory and cataloguing endeavours as early as the thirteenth century, and has continued in fits and starts to the present day. In his massive geographical dictionary Mu‘jam al-buldan [dictionary of places] the meticulous Yāqūt al-Hamawi (d.1228), for example, divides books concerned with travel according to writers’ objectives and/or potential readers, or more specifically, by what and whom the texts would serve. He differentiates between texts that focus on ‘science’ (for geographers, astronomers, medical men, etc.), administration (documentation of taxes due to the caliphate), entertainment (epics, news, anecdotes, biographies and mirabilia), polite literature (works that focus on beauty of expression intended for littèrateurs), or travels-general (for readers of the general public or al-‘ammah, such as travel manuals for pilgrimages, histories of Mohammed and his companions, etc.). Al-Hamawi goes on to sub-divide the geography books into two categories: those that described the ‘inhabited world’ in the tradition of Plato and Pythagoras and their followers who wrote on similar and divergent routes; and those, usually linguists and ‘littèrateurs’ who wrote on Arab places and bedouins (10-11).¹³⁸ Closer in time, both Nicola Ziyada (1956) and G. F. Hourani (1952)¹³⁹ use the popular modern division of Arab travel writers into two broad types: geographers and historians (whose works paid great detail to distances and cartographic data, and pointedly expanded on previous research) and tourists/travel writers (who focused on relating what they observed and supplementing it by what they had read).

Two recent works of either classificatory approach stand out. Shawkat M. Toorawa’s article “Travel in the Medieval Islamic World” provides a useful taxonomy of the most common reasons behind the travel of groups and individuals (66-67). Commendable for its brevity and precision, the list is divided into thirteen ‘motives’ for travel, covering the most commonly cited, such as ‘religion’ or ‘learning’ and ‘slavery’, to some less alluded to, such as patronage, exploration and commerce. Toorawa’s list also comprehensively sub-divides each category. Religious travel, for example, (typically only considered as the annual hajj pilgrimage to Mecca), is sub-divided more precisely into the hajj pilgrimage (which he describes as annual, since it occurs at a specific season), but also the ‘umra (pilgrimage to Mecca which may occur any time, and any number of times per person), as well as visits to shrines, which could occur year-round, and more importantly, were neither restricted to place, for there were shrines all around Afroeurasia, nor to Muslims.

Meanwhile Houari Touati’s excellent Islam and Travel both acknowledges the important difference between the motives to go on a voyage and to write the voyage account, as well as the fine lines between the various forms of written accounts. Positing that the rihla-voyage formed the epistemic foundation of mediaeval Islamic culture, Touati argues that the rihla-voyage was a complex, necessary and authoritative methodology for science or knowledge-gain and transmission, since it combined the importance of travel with autopsia (‘iyan) and audition (sama‘). Moving gradually through a huge body of Arabic letters, Touati eruditely explores the discrete difference between various articulated (written/oral) forms of the Arabic journey as each led to the other, and how some eventually emerged as comparative methodologies of enquiry with distinctive ‘genres’, ‘fields’ or ‘schools’. Touati skilfully finds a method to approach the travel accounts that is both particular to Arabic culture and its tradition of knowledge acquisition at the time, but also prioritises world linkage, namely how scholars writing in Arabic were often working within the Hellenistic methods they saw themselves as both inheriting and bequeathing. In doing so Touati offers a much-needed systematic link between the impetus to go on a voyage, to write the voyage, and to read it, suggesting ways in which this entire process affected the final ‘forms’ of the voyage account. Unsurprisingly, Touati ends by stressing the need for a comparative expansion of scholarship on the linked travel literature in other languages to gain a fuller picture of the time.
Challenging Boundaries: Knowledge, History, the State

The problems inherent in systematically approaching travel literature arising from the ‘East’ embodies in interesting ways the problematic presented in Antique Land of cultures and cultural knowledge posed between limiting national canons on the one hand and an ‘unboundaried’ world culture on the other. Antique Land’s central critical position, echoed and expanded in many of Ghosh’s other works,¹⁴⁰ problematises and critiques the nation-state by questioning its categorisation and ossification of bodies of knowledge: in this case, history and historiography. If a critical relation can be found between travelogues and the expansion of ancient and modern empires, and the novel and nation-formation, Amitav Ghosh’s “mediaeval travel in postcolonial times” (Mongia), both a travelogue and a novel, blurs and therefore subverts norms. Looking to both the past and the present, Antique Land constructs the alternate and resistant ‘history’ of the diverse community intersections in the twelfth century and after, thereby resisting the homogenising story of an unchanging Islamic ‘state’ or region. To question historical narratives and the way History is written, Ghosh: (1) critiques written or official History as put forth by those in power (that is, by drawing parallels between military might and knowledge organisation and diffusion), (2) gives voice to the ‘small histories’ left out of or submerged under mainstream historical narratives, and (3) questions the view of linear progress from antiquity to modernity that starts with the Classics, skips over a few hundred years, relaunches with the Renaissance and proceeds onwards to the end of history.

Although the story of the dislocation of the Geniza documents (Antique Land 54-60; 80-105) read as a textbook example of Saidian Orientalism makes obvious Ghosh’s condemnation of imperialist/empirical theft, it also censures the Egyptian government for being an accessory to the theft,¹⁴¹ remaining, in the new political divisions of the Middle East and North Africa, “content to excise…[the memory of its Jewish population] from Egypt’s history” (“Slave of MS. H. 6” 116). As British scholars armed with “beribboned credentials” (Antique Land 91-92) appropriated the Geniza documents and then ‘wrote’ a history of the ‘Orient’ that denied the very diversity and vitality which had enabled the letter-writers’ existence and the letters’ preservation in the first place, the colonialists were helped by Egyptians, including the Jewish community of Egypt, who supported the British imperialist mission’s efforts to displace the civilisational monuments of the colonised world. These were followed by subsequent Egyptian governments’ efforts to rewrite a national History that erased the heritage of its once-indigenous Jews. Nothing remains in Egypt of the Geniza: its papers are dispersed, the storehouse torn down, and its worshippers silenced. Ghosh’s marvellous prose supplements history from absence as well as from presence by explaining what the lack of the Geniza in Egypt and its presence elsewhere signifies. It throws into relief the way texts of the mediaeval world, from which Ghosh took such inspiration, have circulated and been re-interpreted today, and the way the history of the letters and the letter-writers has been constructed and reconstructed, sold and bought to sustain diverse personal and collective agendas. To delve into the twelfth-century world of letters, Ghosh taps into the vast trove of travel writing of the time. Being preserved by chance and against all odds, much like the Geniza documents, but having been made public much earlier, such texts have lived within scholarship until today on the borders of disciplines, and have travelled across networks for centuries, sustaining in practice a cultural global mobility that Ghosh propounds in theory. Such texts too, have been used, in the same way as the Geniza documents, to construct and reconstruct the Histories of the nation-state.

It has often been held that many of the mediaeval travelling scholars within the region used their accounts to delineate the borders of an ecumenical Islamic empire.¹⁴² The ‘view from above’ of an ‘Islamic civilisation’ makes it much harder to define and prioritise the everyday dealings or practices of daily life governed by the secular God known to his friends and relations as Incentive, and under whose ruling there flourished networks of one or more of the three Ts: travel, trade and telling-tales. Maintained by relatively open borders, open markets, secured travel routes, a flourishing hospitality sector in major centres, various lingua francas, a seemingly large availability of disposable income and an observable literacy rate, the three Ts offered opportunities for unity that members of this vast region seemed more than eager to seize. Such travel texts give a valuable image of an ‘everyday nation’: the way that people have navigated around –if not intentionally resisted then wilfully derouted– a universalising ‘state’ discourse, in this instance a politically-religious one, and in the interests of a pragmatic and tolerant cohabitation with others. The letters that Amitav Ghosh describes as ‘the stuff of history and history itself’, or what Ranajit Guha memorably calls the “small voice of history” (Guha History), mock and refute the History and Civilisation curricula taught in schools around the world by presenting a lived history rather than a written one. Under the grand narratives of the nation-state, or its pre-modern ‘equivalents’ of caliphate or empire, the business of everyday living continues as usual. As an example of transnational relations, this mode of imaginary community, the ‘everyday nation’, is not the exceptional one, but the (arguably large) numbers of undocumented real people whose voices have not ‘sung the nation-state’.

Antique Land starts as the Crusades reach a historical crescendo in Palestine in 1148. Yet the Crusades are only ‘background’. The mediaeval letters written by Jewish traders take central place for it is the letters and their writers that point to a completely different narrative. Ghosh writes: “Within this tornado of grand designs and historical destinies, [the]… letter[s]…open a trapdoor into a vast network of foxholes where real life continues uninterrupted” (15-16). A passage written by one of Ghosh’s ‘mediaeval brethren’, prototype travel-writer Ibn Jubayr (d.1214), describing precisely this time of the Crusades offers a vantage point for comparison. Ibn Jubayr marks the rich composites of daily life under the canonical gaze of political hostilities in (what was then) Damascus, specifically near Mt. Lebanon:
Of the most astonishing things we hear is that the flames of sectarian division rage between the two groups, Christians and Muslims [in Damascus]; the two armies may meet in battle, but their peoples travel among them unimpeded …we saw at this time Saladin leaving with all the Muslim soldiers to lay siege to al-Karak fort. One of the strongest of Christian forts, it obstructed the way to Hijaz and the pilgrimage route, and is [also] a little less than one day’s journey from Jerusalem, the heart of Palestine, so the Sultan approached it, closed in upon it and the siege continued for a long time.

And the caravans travel from Egypt to Damascus and from there to the lands of the Franks uninterruptedly; and the Muslims travel from Damascus to Acre as well; and the Christian merchants are not stopped or hindered on these routes either. The Muslims pay the required taxes to the Christians in the latter’s provinces levied on security of merchandise, and the Christians pay the same tax on their merchandise to the Muslims in the latter’s provinces. And everything between them is in accord and moderation. So the people of war are busy with their war, while people are concerned with their well-being, and this world is left to whoever wins. [My translation] (260)¹⁴³

As each army was fighting the other infidels, business seems to have continued as usual in the twelfth century over land and by sea (as it would remain, according to Braudel, along with the manifest antagonism, in the Levantine-Mediterranean three centuries later). This is not to draw a wonderful picture of people-power resisting state politics. Ibn Jubayr himself seems to have had no observable reservations on enemies of the ruler/Islam being anything else than his own; nor is it to argue that the ‘Islamic world’ was a haven of tolerance (either between Muslims and non-Muslims or between Muslims and other Muslims) before ‘the Europeans came’. This is to nuance and refine relations between politically-organised ‘peoples’ or ‘cultures’ often categorised as mutually antagonistic or acquiescent or otherwise collectively homogenous by prioritising cultural relations and transactions between smaller groups of people and between individuals, which is arguably one of the aims of World Literature in its many approaches. By focusing on the small matters of the everyday –the relations of family members, barter, conversations, etc.– Ghosh attempts to bypass borders of ‘imagined communities’ that may be inherently restrictive; writing about the everyday becomes “one way of not writing about the nation (or other restrictively imagined collectivities)” [italics and brackets in original] (“Correspondence” 147).

In an Antique Land starts then, with a challenge to History. Ghosh’s sub-title to Antique Land, ‘history in the guise of a traveller’s-tale’, blurs and complicates the demarcation between ‘History’ (the dominant official narrative) and the ‘tale’ (the individual’s or even community’s unofficial narrative). The sub-title is more than a random witticism or an allusion to Ghosh’s ‘mixture’ of field experience and historical excavation; it also subtly and succinctly questions empirical modes of knowledge (how we know) and the iron curtains distinguishing fields of knowledge (what we know).¹⁴⁴ Embedded within the sub-title is a critique of ‘historiography’ both as a process and a subject. Conceptualising the process of history-writing can happen in many ways, one of the most favoured “in the rational, scientific discussions of academic social theory…[has meant taking for granted] the universality of the analytical categories of the modern disciplines of the social sciences” (Chatterjee The Nation and its Fragments 33). Ghosh’s sub-title, resonating in the Arabic texts he quotes, challenges this ‘universality’, for, as Ghosh knew, the disciplines of knowledge those travellers took for granted were quite different. There was often no large discrepancy between ‘history’ and ‘traveller’s tale’ either as process or subject of study in the mediaeval writings. History-writing in Arabic starting in the eighth and ninth centuries was often, and was often academically required to be, an account of the historian’s own travel.¹⁴⁵

If historical accounts can potentially be little more than collections of personal ‘tales’, the question arises as to why History is not subsumed under fiction or literature. Yet for the mediaeval Arabic writers, history was indeed something just like that, a kind of refined reading material subsumed under ‘art’ or belles-lettres (adab). The empirical significance of the rihla-voyage often automatically gave quality or status to its written accounts, raising it from the realm of popular story tales, while its pragmatic relevance to people’s concerns gave it a potentially wide readability. Inasmuch as there can be said to be a non-Quranic literary canon for mediaeval Arabic belles-lettres, generally defined as a body of texts organised around a transmitted understanding within learned groups that these texts constituted the ‘best’ of what was said and known within polite society, travel literature was from early on and in its various guises enmeshed within this category.