World Literature, Contrapuntal Literature May Hawas

Thus, in addition to method of knowledge, Ghosh’s reformulation of these Arabic texts starts a series of questions about the institutionalisation of knowledge, specifically, the boundaries of disciplines, and the nature of literature. The use of the term “literature” in English for writing that is open to aesthetic evaluation is relatively recent, and the development of a field of study devoted to it is yet more recent (with the study in the West of non-Western literary traditions being even more so). In Arabic the term for “literature” is adab, often translated as belles-lettres, paideia or Bildung, all terms which convey the concept’s inherent combination of aesthetic and didactic elements. As is the case with many literary traditions, the origins of the Arabic term lie in the realms of correct or polite behaviour, and as is the case within Western literary traditions, this early category included ‘non-literary’ genres like biography and history (see ‘adab’ in Encyclopaedia Britannica). The significance of the contemporary argument of how to classify Antique Land (as well as, in Arabic, how to classify the mediaeval Arabic travel writings) underlies the basic disciplinary questions in most fields of knowledge today, and sheds light on ‘national’ disciplines and aesthetic standards as organised or institutionalised systems of knowledge: created, imported, interactive and developing.

Beyond the aesthetic or disciplinary criteria that pose definitional problems for travel-writing either as a ‘genre’, or as a genre within a discipline, problems are multiplied ten-fold when attempting, as happens in the historical-vortex of Antique Land, to lift these disciplines (and genres) out of the national boundaries within which they have been delineated. The phrase ‘Arabic travel literature’, considered in the narrative of Antique Land which focuses on the connections between India and the Middle East and North Africa, points to the problematic of considering Arabic as a lingua franca. The intrinsic problem of the word ‘Arab’ lies in the use of the same word to denote both ethnic affiliation and language, a link not always obvious or self-explanatory for many Arabic-speakers themselves. The further correlation of the seemingly indivisible terms Arab and Islamic then excludes a massive number of peoples and languages, that is, Arabic-speakers who are not Muslim and Muslims who are not Arabic-speakers, and so presents a methodology of exclusion and re-appropriation that various modern nation-states in Africa and Asia have enthusiastically adopted while writing exclusionist national ‘Histories’. It is precisely a refutation of the assumption of an ancient monolithic, homogeneous and unchanging ‘Arabic-Islamic empire’ lying as a precursor to a series of modern nation-states that any non-hegemonic approach to travel writing in Arabic needs to consider.

Unity in Diversity: Subalterns and Others, Languages and Religions

The administrative (bureaucratic-official) use of Arabic among the different caliphate-centres from the eighth and ninth centuries onwards both threatened the status and effaced the memory of many other languages spoken or written within the region, some of which the small voices conjured up by Antique Land refer to. Some of those languages naturally died (initially emerging au courant with the spread of the Muslim armies in the seventh century) like the Judeo-Arabic used by Ben Yiju (Antique Land 100-4), and some have never been properly used as a written language, such as spoken Arabic dialects. The differing significations of ‘‘arabi’ (Arab/Arabic language], whether positive or negative, a source of pride or shame, denoting political power or lack thereof, have raised issues of communal identity at least as far back as the ninth century (as exemplified in the shu‘ubiyya debates). The seemingly indivisible terms Arab and Islamic have made it even easier to efface the memory/history of the thriving non-Arab, non-Muslim but Arabic-speaking and literature-producing communities living within the huge expanse of a Muslim-majority region (see A. Hourani Minorities in the Arab World). In much the same way as Gilroy declares in The Black Atlantic that it is time for modernity to be narrated from the slaves’ point of view (55), Arab-Islamic history needs to be narrated from the view of its non-Arabs and non-Muslims, not just by adding a number of representative texts of various languages, religions, etc., in the region, but by a close reading of the Others embedded in the Arabic texts themselves.

Refuting the ‘Arabic-Islamic’ umbrella as some ethno-monolithic referent, stressing that the cultural traffic between centres and ports, kingdoms and caliphates was never one-way requires stressing today that Arabic language and literature has always been in constant flux with the different languages of the world, Eastern and Western. It requires, too, reconstructing the lost connections between the religions, cultures and communities of the region, sometimes in creative ways, precisely as Ghosh has done.

The division of the mediaeval world itself into ‘dār al-islām’ (the abode of Islam) and ‘dār al-harb’ (the abode of war) embodies the fate of any theoretical descriptive dichotomy taken too literally, (and most obnoxiously in modern times within the discourses of political Islam).¹⁴⁶ From a literary perspective such dichotomies have always been simplistic, and stand at variance with an understanding of Arabic literature at its most classic in the (9^th-13^th century) ‘golden age’ of Islam, formed by, most famously, Persian, Byzantine, Turkish and Hellenistic fusion:

The emergence of a distinct, urban adab, including literature and Arab-Muslim paideia, reinforced the position of Arabic as a global language. In contrast to the body of pre-Islamic poetry, this Arabic literature was never “genuinely” Arabian, but it reflected the vivid urban intellectual milieus and was inspired by emerging Muslim religious sciences…Arab philology… and by translations from Byzantine and Persian traditions. (Al-Bagdadi “Registers of Arabic” 449)
Al-Bagdadi is by no means a lone voice in stressing that cultural fusion was the powerhorse of Arabic cultural prosperity. The ‘Dean of Arabic letters’ Taha Hussein would go so far as to claim in a well-known scandal in 1923 that the stories of the Quran themselves owed their value to cultural assimilation and transfer. Although the same might be reasonably argued of any body of literature –and Ghosh reacts similarly to the Sanskritic Hinduisation of high culture in India¹⁴⁷ –the impetus to insist on cultural connections and exchange as a yardstick for national literature has yet to take hold. This is arguably, however, one of the many crossovers between Postcolonial Literature and World literature. For the first, excavating the ruptures rendered by colonialism insists on the acknowledgment of represented and subjugated cultures on their own terms. For the second, expanding the list of classics and delving into the circulation networks of texts challenges an essentialist nationalist vision of literary texts and cultures.

Just who were the many inhabitants of the ‘abode of Islam’, then? Ghosh focuses on non-Arabs (Bomma) and non-Muslims (Ben Yiju). Bomma seems doubly silenced because he is a slave, appearing on the stage of history at “a moment in time when the only people for whom we can imagine properly human, individual existences are the literate and consequential” (Antique Land 17). As Soueif rightly remarks, although of course there is a danger of complacency in this line of thought, the institution and (changing) concept of slavery under various Islamic rulers differs from the commonly-understood Western conception, and accounts and biographies of slaves appear frequently in Arabic (“Intimately Egyptian” 7). Arabic slave biographies and writings also reveal a large degree of social mobility. Not insignificantly, and in different ruling dynasties, many slaves were subsumed into the army under the system of paid ‘patronage’ or ‘foster parentage’ by the ruler, often ending up ruling themselves, either by eventually becoming adopted or through militant coups d’état.¹⁴⁸ Slave-to-Sultan accounts too abound in Arabic.¹⁴⁹ This appears to be the case with the other slave mentioned in Ghosh’s account, the Greek Jawhar al-Rumi, who, leading a hundred thousand men, founded what would become one of the strongest urban centres of the 11^th-13^th centuries, Fatimid Cairo (Antique Land 36). Yet many more undocumented, Bomma-like allusions, “faint, elusive and often jeering” (“Slave of MS. H.6” 167) as Ghosh puts it, inhabit much mediaeval travel writing in Arabic, and all too faintly hint at its dense unarticulated subaltern stratum. For example, an unnamed Indian male guide/servant of Naseri Khusraw’s (d.1077) guides the traveller in the opening pages of the Safarnameh (49). ‘Three Muslim ladies’ in al-Idrissi’s Nuzhat al-musthāq, similarly unnamed, show generous philanthropy in constructing three large wells of water (literally, the life source in the desert), and enable the city of Tunis to flourish as a trading post and pilgrim stop (283-84). Such subaltern presences, as Said says (referring to the presence of imperial possessions in English and French novels) are “usefully there…their existence always counts, though their names and identities do not, they are profitable without being fully there….people on whom the economy and polity…depended” [italics in original] (Culture and Imperialism 75).

In narrating the fortunes and travails of Ben Yiju, Ghosh explores the three Ts (travel, trade and telling-tales) of daily interactions flourishing between an intricate network of communities, families and individuals, with such groups creating linked overlapping communities in larger dense networks, getting on with the daily matter of living, even during times of extended warfare and religious persecution. Rather than smack too much of nostalgia or denial, the picture the texts offer is more akin to pragmatic survival or, less urgently, simple incentive, an impetus that classic Arabic writers (less so, modern ones), seemed to express quite matter-of-factly.

This is the case for al-Idrissi, for example. At a time when a conglomeration of European powers were regaining Jerusalem in the eastern provinces of the Islamic world, when al-Idrissi’s home region Ifriqya (Tunisia) was so frequently attacked by Roger II from 1143 onwards that for several years not a single year went by without a Sicilian attack on the North African coast (Ghosh “Slave of MS. H. 6” 211), al-Idrissi, a refugee in King Roger’s court, manages to keep his head about him and uses the same adjectives to describe all kings. Hence, “great” King Roger II “opens” (a polite word really meaning ‘conquered’, in Arabic often exclusively used with Muslim armies) the cities of Ifriqya in the same manner as the Muslim armies ‘opened’ the same cities before him, including the city of Sbeitla, after killing its (likewise) “great” Roman king George. Noting the havoc caused by Roger’s armies which had brought trade to a standstill, al-Idrissi notes that in previous times, ‘before the [still] great King Roger, the cities of Tunisia used to be the ports of call for ships from Hijaz, carrying travellers and valuable merchandise from the countries of East and West, from Andalusia and Byzantium and elsewhere’ (281-85). The attitude reveals not so much sycophantism (Khair et al describe it as ‘ambivalence’) as much as scientific professionalism –and undoubtedly an interest in survival. As Ghosh implies, it also reflects in double-mirrors the incentives for travel and migration of labour from the third world today: “Why does anyone leave [to work/live abroad]?” asks Shaykh Musa of Antique Land rhetorically when Ghosh wonders how a common Egyptian acquaintance could stand the loneliness in modern war-torn Iraq, “the opportunity comes, and it has to be taken” (152).

If the voices of Jewish communities seem muted in modern Arabic historiography, those that fall outside of the ‘Abrahamic faiths’ (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) appear even more so, for the three religions are acknowledged by canonical Islamic doctrine as theoretically similar, and their adherents referred to as ‘the people of the Book’. Until today these three religions remain the three ‘major’ ones in Egypt. As the Egyptian peasants, bewildered at finding an Indian in their midst, obsessively ask Ghosh when he tells them he is a Hindu: “What is this ‘Hinduki’ thing?...If it is not Christianity nor Judaism nor Islam what can it be? Who are its prophets?” (47) Or as the sceptical Egyptian police officer muses at Ghosh’s presence in the small village: “Neither Jewish, nor Muslim, nor Christian –there had to be something afoot” (334-35). Yet the mediaeval travellers, with fewer centuries of living in Muslim-majority contexts behind them, were perfectly (and sometimes imperfectly) knowledgeable about the various religions outside of the holy tripartite. While the most famous of such travellers is probably al-Biruni/Alberonius (973-1048) (whom al-Hamawi quotes), three of the travellers discussed here also describe India and its beliefs in some detail, having studied and journeyed to the region themselves: al-Idrissi, Khusraw, and al-Mas‘udi. As Ghosh travels from the Egyptian countryside to Mangalore, retracing Bomma’s possible origins and religious beliefs and the trade routes around south and east India, he also retraces the faded footprints of such mediaeval travellers.

The way Muslim travellers regarded or conceived of non-Muslims in some of these texts is a moot point –sometimes overstated, since the moral advantage or superiority seen in being Muslim is the same inherent confidence assumed by any given pious member of any religion, and sometimes generalised, since most Arabic travellers did not simply and solely transcribe people into broad categories of ‘non-Muslim’ and ‘Muslim’. More tangibly, what seems to have struck many of these worldly travellers beyond historical and ethnographic details was what certain religious affiliations seemed to guarantee or lack of a politico-social infrastructure: an administrative hierarchy and a canonical law (generated from scriptures and prophets). It is thus no coincidence that the first questions which the Egyptian peasants ask Ghosh about Hindus are “Do you have a holy book?” (170) and “Who are your prophets?” (47; 170). As Shboul puts it on al-Mas‘udi, who like most scholars at some time or the other in this versatile region was personally affected by the religious debates of his day:

In dealing with the religions of various peoples al-Mas‘udi seems to perceive a distinction between two types of religion. The first type consists of organized religion with a more or less clear concept of a deity, prophethood, sacred scriptures, a priesthood, and organized places of regular worship. To this group belonged (in addition to Islam), Judaism, Christianity, Zoroastrianism, and to a lesser extent, ‘Sabianism’ and Manichaeism. The second type of religion is that which had no articulated religious principles, and lacked hierarchy and canon law. Al-Mas‘udi terms the peoples among whom such religion prevailed as jāhiliyya. His view of a state of jāhiliyya is thus not confined to the religious life of the Arabs before Islam –whose state of ‘ignorance’ and ‘darkness’ is a rule piously contrasted in Islamic literature with the enlightened knowledge which Muhammad’s mission brought. Indeed al-Mas‘udi uses the term jāhiliyya… as a description of primitive religions in general. (286)
Shboul’s ‘primitive’ comes as near as possible to the ‘civilisational’ view the travellers’ gaze often implied, not signalling biological or racial linear progress where all non-Muslims were seen as inherently inferior or belated but by which some communities, unlike various caliphates and centres of Islam, seemed unable, in the writers’ views, to consolidate power around a court, judiciary, bureaucracy, literati and a professional class.

Those religions that did seem to show some aspect of organisational abilities were regarded in a very different light, and so for many Arabic writers the legendary ‘wisdom’ of the ancient civilisations of India and China was not some intrinsic inscrutable ‘racial’ quality but could be proved foremost by, for example, an efficient (if oligarchic) rule of law. See, for example, al-Idrissi on the King of Kings in China (italics mine):

It is mentioned that in China there are three hundred towns, all prosperous, with a number of kings but all of whom serve the Baghbugh who is called the king of kings…and he is of good conduct, fair with his subjects, noble in spirit, capable in his dominion, right in his views, resolute in his actions, chivalrous in his desires, gentle in his ruling, generous in his giving, sharp in matters near and far, prescient of consequences, and aware of his subjects’ concerns which reach him without delay or intermediary. One indication of this is that in his palace he has arranged a council of fair merit, solid construction and elegant prospect. In this council the King sits on a chair of gold surrounded by his ministers…[W]hen a complainant approaches with his letter of complaint, the king receives it directly, looks at it then pushes it to his ministers and passes adequate judgment as suits his doctrine and the law without delay, long-windedness or ministerial interventions and connections. In addition to this he shows piety, enforces the law, is conservative and devout and charitable to the weak. His religion is the worship of al-badud, of which, between it and the religions of India, there is only slight deviation. The people of India and China do not deny the existence of the Creator, and judge Him in his wisdom and eternal creation; they do not believe in His prophets or Holy books, and in all cases never part from justice and fairness. [My translation] (97-98)¹⁵⁰
At times, too, being Muslim, however devout, was not enough to save you from the disgrace of being unorganised. Ibn Jubayr, for example, makes fun of the members of the buffoon-like, nomadic al-sarw Bedouins from Yemen who identified as Muslims but showed no vestige of organised society, and whose ‘primitivist’ devotion to God was therefore as comic as it was touching (110-13). At other times, even all-out chaotic communities of no particular religion might act more virtuously than those so-called Muslims back home. Khusraw implicitly criticises Muslim raiders’ acquisition of slaves in the deserts of Nubia, south of Egypt. The tribes of al-bajja, Khusraw states, have no religion or creed; they are a peaceful people who live by shepherding and ‘are not harmful, for they neither raid nor steal’, ‘yet the Muslims and others steal the children of these tribes and carry them off to sell in Islamic cities’ [my italics] (134). Note: steal, not a less negative word such as ‘appropriate’, ‘acquire’, or even ‘raid’.

At yet other times even those who lived in a state of utter chaos could provide a ‘lesson to those who would learn’. Ibn Fadlān gives a subtle moral in his report on the “Ghuz” tribes of ‘Turks’ by the river Volga, a nomadic peoples who live ‘like stray donkeys, showing no allegiance to either god or reason’ [my italics] (91), and who could agree on nothing by consensus, since as soon as they reached an agreement, along would come their lowest and vilest member and start the discussion all over again. Slovenly and filthy, they never touched water if they could help it, and even their women went around completely naked. Yet one day as Ibn Fadlan and companions visit a man and avert their faces in horror from the glaring ‘pudenda and genitalia’ of his naked wife, the man laughs sarcastically and tells them through their interpreter: ‘Although she reveals it in your presence and you see it, she preserves it and it cannot be accessed, which is better for her than to cover it but make it accessible’. ‘Indeed’, Ibn Fadlan adds, ‘they know no adultery’ (91-92). In short, in the wondrous wide world the creations of God and men could always teach something to those who gazed upon them, however disparate or even contradictory the viewer assumed these creations were, and at more empathetic moments, they might offer a specific critique of one’s own community and code of conduct –a counter-belief.

In a movement of double-mirrors Ghosh then moves from the co-existence of diverse religious beliefs in pre-modern times to the relations between religious groups in the same regions today. He juxtaposes political Islamic fundamentalism in Egypt with political Hindu fundamentalism in India, critiquing both, and drawing out ironic instances where their histories have overlapped and merged. Ghosh narrates how in India, the ‘spirit’ of an ancient Muslim trader has been placed unknowingly within the Sanskritic Hindu pantheon of gods by political Hindu groups with anti-Muslim agendas, even as such groups were severely condemning all ‘non-Hindu’ practices (264). Meanwhile in Egypt, the ancient Sidi Abu-Hasira shrine, that of a Sufi mystic once revered by Muslims and Jews alike, generates confusing, contradictory and violent reactions. Although the Abu Hasira festival and shrine visiting had long been a popular village fete which all the vicious condemnation by more ‘canonical’ religious authorities could not stop, the ‘straw’ that broke the camel’s back was Israel’s bombing of Gaza in 2011. Large protests ensued against allowing the Abu Hasira festival to continue and its international Jewish pilgrims to visit. In view of the breakdown of law and order that had followed the ousting of President Mubarak a few months before, the authorities seemed to find no way to be able to sustain the rigid security preparations needed for the international visitors, and the shrine was closed to visitors until further notice.

If in modern Arabic culture traces of knowledge of the ‘Hinduki thing’ seem far and in between, what seems even more remote in modern times (strangely enough for a region which has been rather prolific religiously) is an understanding of the cultural ‘fusion’ that often creates religious practice. Yet as Ghosh implies, this too, was not always the case. By articulating some of what he calls “inarticulate counter beliefs”, as he travels among shared histories and shared ancestors, Ghosh cleverly locates the diverse doctrinal ‘cultures’ (orthodox Muslim and Sanskritic Hindu) and their ‘counter-cultures’(Sufi, agnostic, Bhuta, etc). He emphasises the blurred categories of doctrinal belief and practice within the one culture itself (such as the magical formulae and treatises found among the orthodox Jews of the Geniza (263)).¹⁵¹ Ghosh also emphasises the blurred boundaries between one culture and its counter-culture in India and Egypt, depicting the interdependent relation between ‘high’ and ‘low’ religious cultures, one ostensibly propagating the (religious) canon, and the other practising the marginal or popular. In India he shows the gap between the “Himalayan gaze of canonical Hindu practice” and the practices it dismissed as “mere devil worship and superstition” [my italics] (264). In Egypt he shows how local villagers regard the Abu Hasira festival as a simple village fete, and how prevalent religious authorities view it as the dangerous “superstition” of the simple-minded (329-42). This too was a distance that many of the early Arabic travellers discerned and mused over.

Al-Idrissi, for example, describes the Multan statue on the borders of Sind and Hind (now in Pakistan) which is set in a market town whose majority of inhabitants are Muslims. The statue is highly revered and frequently visited for blessing by the people of India (no religion specified), whose charitable piety has managed to pay for its protection and upkeep. No one actually worships the statue (al-Idrissi is very particular to note) except its immediate community of guards and slaves who hurry to hide it whenever a hostile king sends forces to destroy it. Finding nothing left, the forces always withdraw. Al-Idrissi narrates that the statue’s guard-worshippers then spread the news that the statue’s presence has blessed their town, and has ‘saved’ the flourishing market from imminent destruction, by which manner the guard-worshippers manage to increase the statue’s power and draw even more (paying) visitors (175-77). Al-Idrissi smoothly presents here the difference between finding comfort in some venerated or holy site, and actually joining in the practices of its immediate worshippers. He seamlessly moves from stressing that the inhabitants do not practise idolatry (forbidden and despised in the canonical doctrines of any of his audiences, Western and Eastern), to describing instead something more everyday and certainly familiar to audiences on both sides of the Mediterranean: how a contested site can remain highly venerated and sustained by groups with different belief-rituals. Without pausing to make judgements or point out contradictions, al-Idrissi’s nonchalance does not just mark his attempted objectivity (otherwise he need not have taken pains to eliminate the possibility of idolatry for his readers) but something deeper: an understanding that cultural-religious practices are often hybrid and interwoven, local and derivative.¹⁵²

Originally related to codified religious texts, the definition what should or should not be canonised obviously became influenced by those who were in charge of pronouncing on the topic: the learned who would then guide or instruct others on what to do or read (Schoeler 68-84; see also Al-Azmeh). Examining, questioning or expanding the canonical in literature has often meant exploring the distance between ‘high’ and ‘low’, ‘local’ and ‘foreign’ cultures. In the Arabic-speaking world starting in the ninth century, the ‘learned’ were of two broad classes: the men of religion (‘ulama) who specialised in religious knowledge and undoubtedly had the upper hand in interpreting it, and the men of the chancery (kuttāb), ‘state secretaries’ who were usually of non-Arabian descent. While the members of the first class ostensibly devoted themselves to exegesis, private and commercial law and the like, the second class’s literary output included translations and adaptations of books from Middle Persian and gave Arabic literature its first prose masterpieces (Schoeler 56-63; see also Ashtiany et al ). The production of these erudite writers would ultimately encourage travelogues, aimed at other literary readers who might appreciate them, but also at a second group of literates, those who were most interested in financial security and social mobility: the ‘common reader’ or the ‘sub-elite’. From the subaltern and Other (linguistic and religious) presences that these travel books refer to, their circulation among certain readers also points to another resistant, alternate ‘community’ of the ‘everyday’: the emerging, pre-modern ‘middle’ class living in the urban centres of the caliphates.

Circulating Networks: Travellers’ Texts and the Traders’ Grapevine

Amitav Ghosh depicts the merchant Ben Yiju as an avid letter-writer, calligrapher, scholar and poet (19; 158-9), who, it appears, took so much care in choosing his paper and ink that his letters often list paper as part of his shipments, and that the quality of the letter-paper still shows today. The figure of Ben Yiju starts a series of questions on the wide range of educational opportunities and writerly needs available for professionals working in trade, and constructs a very different, non-elite readership base from the commonly perceived circles of the Islamic court and professional scholars (‘ulāma). At the end of the day there may have been no ostensible reason why merchants or traders, generally being substantial men of business,¹⁵³ needed to learn how to read and write, particularly if they could buy slaves or hire letter-writers in the market to do it for them, as was the case of one of the writers discussed here, Yāqūt al-Hamawi.¹⁵⁴ One way is to consider that men of letters might already come from well-off backgrounds, and might think of investing in trade themselves (such as Abraham Maimonides of Egypt, whom Ghosh alludes to).¹⁵⁵ Other men of letters would eventually become traders to further finance their travels and private book collections either as a long-term career move (Touati 81-83; Hanna 2007 9) or on the road (Nassār 123; El Moueddin 75). A wider understanding of literacy and writerly culture, however, essentially needs to be considered.

Among the elite scholars of the golden age were those firmly entrenched within an aural-oral Islamic tradition of education who could ‘publish’ books in scholarly circles without being able to write, and ‘blind’ scholars who could memorise and recite but not read and write, but from whom students could learn by way of listening and memorising. Schoeler argues, however, that the specificities of the transmission of Islamic scholarship even in the first four centuries of Islam (ca. 600-1000) cannot be conceived of through the dichotomy oral/written. Tracing the rise of literature in the Islamic world from the seventh century to the eleventh, and from the aural to the read, Gregor Schoeler explores the tenuous relation between oral and written in the way books were ‘published’ (that is, whether they were collected orally and written down, ‘published’ ‘orally’ by teachers to students, or published as a written book for readers); the audience for which they were intended (as lecture notes meant as aides-memoires for students, books commissioned for the court or a certain circle, and books meant for public readership); and whether they were literature as such (literary or artistic prose bearing the imprint of its authors’ personalities). Moving through various disciplines, Schoeler traces the move from oral/aural publication of books and transmission of knowledge to an established system of written/read education, and the parallel expansion of the readership class, from the religious scholars to the Caliph and the court, the secretaries of the state, the elite learned class, and the common reader. Schoeler concludes that the turn to ‘read/written’ literacy had already taken hold by the ninth century, and would continue to carry the day, even if the borders between oral/aural and written/read transmission and publication remained fluid.

Now, the kind of ‘college of law’ (madrasa) which would come to dominate specialised academic education from the eleventh century onwards in major Arabic centres would gradually produce an ostensibly cohesive class of highly erudite scholars. Based as these colleges were, however, on “a system of transmitting knowledge that was informal, personal and oral, and in the absence of any formal institutional system of control, the 'ulama' [specialised scholars] remained an inherently open and permeable body, and included not only professional teachers, but a host of educated or semi-educated individuals active on the margins of intellectual life” (Berkey 54; Mottahedeh 135-50). As Mottahedeh puts it on the scholar class of the Buyid period in Iraq/Iran:

The ulema, therefore, are one of the most important and yet least restrictive categories of self-definition in Islamic society…Its unrestrictive nature is shown by the number of other categories with which it overlaps. Clerks are almost never soldiers, soldiers almost never clerks. Tujjar [Merchants] are almost never soldiers, and only occasionally become clerks. But soldiers, clerks, merchants, and members of almost any category we know about became ulema. (142-43)
The public locales of the lessons also made them less of an exclusive event. ‘Lessons’ and salons could be attended by a whole range of people, since they were held in mosques and private homes, but also libraries, bookshops and public spaces such as markets (Toorawa Ibn Abi Tayfur 13; 55-58; 124). From Baghdad to Qayrawan and over different times, even amateur-scholars could acquire an ‘education’ on the road, attending lectures as they travelled.¹⁵⁶

The ‘great gulf’ then, often assumed between the scholarly world of writing and oral culture more properly included gradations such as those who were read to but were not able to read, those who could read but could not or could barely write, and those who could do only a little of both. Nelly Hanna also stresses a need to widen the understanding of elementary literacy in the Islamic world, (focusing on the period from 1300-1800 but starting her analysis a little earlier in time), where the students could be sent to the local mosque, the local clerical ‘school’ (kuttab/maktab), or the home of a local sheikh to learn how to read and recite the Holy book. A certain amount of teaching was also undertaken within the (usually strongly-connected) Sufi brotherhoods and, for Jews and Christians respectively, within synagogues, churches and professional scribal circles, and later on, Jewish or Coptic schools (maktab).¹⁵⁷ The results of such eclectic educational sources were necessarily variable, and while some of these pupils ended up as scholars in colleges (whose training and system of admission itself was not standardised), others probably finished with only a certain level of literacy (Hanna “Literacy” 181-82). Thus, any basic schooling received by students could result in various forms of literacy, which then develop according to the student’s life experiences.¹⁵⁸

Hanna argues that a more nuanced idea of ‘literacy’ could be served by taking into consideration motivating factors such as religion, commercial conditions, and the legal culture. The distance between the great unschooled and the specialised scholars appears to have been peopled by groups who used different amounts of reading and writing (modulated and organised around modes of orality and aurality) which would then be used in different practical ways –such as, for example, to help run a business.¹⁵⁹ If college graduates did not find suitable employment, they might turn to commerce (Hanna “Literacy” 182). Moreover, the ‘sub-elite’, including middle-type bureaucrats, lower religious officials, and “the tradesman or craftsman”, while perhaps unable to participate in the academic religious circles, might carry out “certain transactions in writing” (Hanna In Praise of Books 182), making use of the written word to “protect…business interests”.¹⁶⁰

Examining the social structure of one of the most intellectually prosperous communities in Arabic letters in the Buyid-Abbasid era (10^th-11^th centuries), Roy Mottahedeh sheds light on the classification and network of social groups, and the different ties of social bonds as they appeared in the texts of the time. Mottahedeh delves into pervasive class categories such as ‘distinguished people’/‘the public’ (khawās/‘awām), ‘eminent people’/‘commoners’ (a‘yan/‘awam), and others, pointing out how these divisions formed clusters of overlapping networks rather than circumscribed social levels. Expounding on this concept, Toorawa uses the term “sub-elite” to describe groups who were not members of the ruling class, who did not have posts in government, and yet were not ‘commoners’. Such a group was a strong participant in a common writerly culture. Adopting Toorawa’s term, Schoeler holds that it is a group that might include but would not be limited to merchants, lawyers, aspiring littérateurs, the wealthy, and foreign and visiting scholars, in short, the literate, or would-be literate bourgeoisie and the intellectuals (Schoeler 104; Toorawa 2005 33). Toorawa adds to this the “emerging bourgeoisie” in the expanding literacy and literary landscape that had started to appear noticeably from the ninth century such as “small business folk and civil servants” (33) including ‘landlords and landowners, merchants and entrepreneurs, judges and jurists, physicians, poets and littérateurs, teachers and autodidacts’ (Ibn Abi Tayfur 1-2), as well as those of literary-related professions that were not necessarily affiliated to the court or the generosity of a patron, such as ‘teachers, tutors, copyists, authors, storytellers, booksellers, editors, publishers or any combination of these’ (Ibn Abi Tayfur 123).¹⁶¹

Through their intricate, overlapping and sometimes conflicting spheres of interests, the location of these mediaeval traveller sub-elites to the ruler or Sultan (like the position of civil society to the modern state today) might construct an image of a spatio-temporal and largely homogenous ‘Islamic world’. On the other hand, it is also among this class of writers and readers that resistance to a homogenised ‘abode of Islam’ could be found. Two manifestations of this resistance come immediately to mind: the loyalties expressed by travellers to their local communities which seemed to supersede trans-local Islamic allegiances (Mouadden “Ambivalence”); and more interestingly, a shared secular world of a common reader interested in the descriptive expositions, cultural transactions, and the rich, usually subversive narratives of wonders and folktales all offered by travel literature.

Key travel texts (‘scientific’ or not) seem to have been popular judging by how commonly quoted they are in subsequent texts, and were not necessarily authored by specialised scholars and college graduates (although they may have been copied, edited and expanded by them).¹⁶² Such texts were prose writings targeting the learned and the elite (for patronage), but they are also written in an easy formal Arabic, suitable for oral repetition and much easier to understand, and much less ornamental and high-blown than even the (oral) poetry of the time. If the average reader/listener of the vastly popular oral epics (the maqamas and siras) could understand and memorise them, they could certainly understand the travel writings.¹⁶³ This widens the readership potential considerably, and it also gives us a new reason for writing: the trade grapevine, its direct ‘bourgeois’ readership, and its unarticulated (even sub-bourgeois) ‘aural-ship’ retinue of slaves, agents, and small-time and would-be investors, although the percentage of the latter group cannot be determined to any specificity.¹⁶⁴

Often the travel texts themselves give indications of how people could access books and how the books could serve as consumables, currency and commodity while travelling. Ibn Jubayr, for example, writes that ‘the shaqādīf [camel seat] contraption allows you and a companion to travel on a camel, and in which, safely ensconced from the heat, one could sit restfully, and eat and drink, play chess, or read what one desired ‘of the Quran or a book’ [my italics] (42).¹⁶⁵ If, as the travel writers often claim, they were writing for the edification, instruction or guidance of other travellers, such texts or parts of them may have been read ‘on the road’, particularly since some of these travel accounts offered valuable ‘travel guides’. The accounts often included, after all, practical information on prices and transportation routes, suggested itineraries to follow and souvenirs to buy, and some even contained shamelessly blatant touristic propaganda (Nassār 17), with cities like Cairo, Damascus and Jerusalem getting a fair share of good press over the centuries.

For those whose travelling fortunes were less well-planned and padded Naseri Khusraw, wandering poet-philosopher and chancery clerk,¹⁶⁶ explains in some detail how such books could be used as currency when travels were hard.¹⁶⁷ Reaching Falj, some 180 parsangs away from Mecca, he describes it as a strife-torn place in the middle of the desert, consisting of ‘fourteen forts ruled by thieves, terrorists and ignorant people’, and inhabited by people who, despite their obvious misery and poverty, chose to spend their days in continuing warfare and bloodshed. Khusraw describes how he is stranded there for four months, since he had absolutely nothing of worldly value on him except for “two baskets of books”, and these, he exclaims, among a people who were “hungry, naked and ignorant, who kept their shields and swords on even as they went to pray!” (156-57). If hardly a pleasant state for any traveller, it seems doubly so for this particular Persian, who, having spent some nine months among Arabians, and like many other urbanite travellers, did not particularly hold desert dwellers in high regard (164). He manages, however, to decorate part of a local mosque with some calligraphy and some poetry in pretty colours of ‘scarlet and azure’ in exchange for 100 of their locally-grown (and valuable) dates, and on these he largely manages to get by until a trading caravan finally arrives from Yemen. Negotiating a ride with the Arabian caravaneer in promise for thirty dinars on reaching Basra, Khusraw sets his brother and all his worldly possessions –his two baskets of books– on a camel, himself accompanying on foot (157). Once he reaches Basra he sells his books easily enough, although for much less than the thirty dinars he owes the caravaneer.¹⁶⁸

Finally, there is the apocryphal story of a tenth-century Persian grand-vizier cited by Edmund Burke III:
Abdul Kassem, so it is claimed, never traveled without his library of 117,000 volumes, borne by a caravan of four hundred camels trained to walk in alphabetical order. This arrangement, maintained at some cost, permitted Abdul Kassem to continue his researches even on the march, by sending runners among the camels to select whatever volumes he might need. (181)
This is not to claim that most people living in the region over four centuries were scholarly, although there is strong evidence that there existed a public bookish culture in Arabic’s golden age for quite some time, but it is to suggest more precisely that books (and people reading books) were a frequent sight on the travel roads, with books often being considered, as Mr Wemmick of Great Expectations would say, “portable property”, for they were relatively cheap, socially emblematic (Burke 178), and could serve as hard currency.¹⁶⁹ The same caravans that brought the writers brought the pilgrims, merchants and wandering professionals,¹⁷⁰ and the books, the labour and the spices.

Moreover, the networks of traders, soldiers, slaves, and the erudite chancery clerks and religious scholars, courtly nobles and sultans (who themselves ranged from the illiterate to the erudite) were not singularly isolated by ‘class’. Travel texts hint at zones of contact where the professional interests and literary influences of scribes, soldiers, chancery clerks, passengers, pilgrims and traders may have mingled. On reaching the first major port on his travels, an irate Ibn Jubayr recounts what would prove to be one of the first of his many ire-raising experiences with port clerks and inspectors. As soon as the ship lands in Alexandria, inspectors arrive on behalf of the Sultan and note down the details of the Muslim passengers, their merchandise and cash, and then tax them for the ‘zakat’ levy (whether or not the passengers are able or legally required to pay it). Ibn Jubayr’s companion is then asked to step down, and is taken around to ‘the Sultan, then the high judge, then the clerks of the chancery, then some of the Sultan’s retinue’ to inform them about ‘any news from Morocco and the merchandise of the ship’, all of the questioners asking for certain information and diligently noting down the answers. Muslim passengers are then asked to unload their cargo (with help from carriers for that purpose) and submit to further inspection which predictably results in much crowding of people and theft of merchandise, causing Ibn Jubayr to angrily and naively exclaim that if the noble Saladin knew about the chancery clerks’ malice and corruption, he would have put a stop to it at once (13).

In addition to the many ears, eyes, tongues and pens at work in Ibn Jubayr’s populous picture, copyists or scribes were needed who would copy out those books intended for publication. While authors needed to ‘authorise’ copies, this was done in public sessions in which the copyist read the copy aloud in the presence of the author who then certified it as accurate. With this system, referred to as ‘check reading’, an author might produce a dozen or more copies from a single reading, and within two generations of readings, more than one hundred copies of a single book (Burke 179). It has often been remarked that the system of check reading in combination with the use of paper increased the number of works in circulation significantly as opposed to the practice of solitarily copying books on (more expensive) parchment, but what has not often been remarked is that check reading also increased the contact zones of the various people involved in the process, and therefore introduces another group of ‘readers’ –copyists, booksellers, editors, slaves, autodidacts, etc.– who would have therefore ‘read’ the books or accessed some of their prime information, without otherwise having been able to buy or borrow them.

The relation between travellers, paper production and trade seems integral to the readers and writers, or systems of production and circulation of these travel texts. If writers invested in trade, it may have helped that they were in prime positions to know of the latest intelligence of the markets: either fresh from the ports and noted in the chancery, through letters that might be dictated to them, or through scribes or agents who may be used as business and language intermediaries. The travel texts which directly and indirectly circulated this information offered a wealth of information on trade and mail routes –but also markets, which the travellers described as secured or vulnerable, managed or corrupted by officers, monopolised by certain groups, or famous for a certain commodity. The texts provided information on the business environment, whether the market towns were well-watered, bitter-watered or dry, and how the locals dealt with newcomers and strangers. Equally importantly, the texts supplied ‘research’ on customers’ needs, describing people’s habits in clothing and food, their interests in natural remedies or cosmetics, and the local commodities, services and labour, whether scarce or abundant, rare or surplus. So even if the travellers themselves were neither primarily traders, nor book producers, nor investors, nor wealthy enough to buy books, there was still a prime incentive for them to note down such information in their writings simply because the works may then attract a wider audience. In many different ways then, travelogues and travel writing sat at intersections of market forces –even in the case of travel primarily intended for pilgrimage. As Abderrahmane El Moueddin describes the voyage of Muslim pilgrims from Morocco during the period 1300-1800:

The pilgrimage….was not only a religious enterprise, but, because of its length (15-18 months in normal travel, but quite possibly longer…), the pilgrims also observed and experienced common practices....[I]n most…stages of the journey, Moroccan pilgrims converted their merchandise or slaves into cash, and purchased the different commodities that they needed for the journey, such as food and animals for transportation. For this reason, many rihla texts are in the form of market guides, advising future pilgrims about the best way to carry on advantageous trade on the way to the Hijaz …These guides, incidentally show how business and pilgrimage were so intimately connected that it is hard to determine which one inspired the other. (75)

Since any travel took, even at the shortest distance, months, and more usually, a year or more, and there would have been limited caravan space to pack food and supplies for a year on the road, merchandise, which kept longer, could be taken along to be exchanged for currency or by barter. What merchandise to pack? Depending on the destination, the information-packed travel texts would suggest a reply.

It needs no strong stretch of the imagination to trace this travelling living textual grapevine in myriad directions: in addition to the groups of copyists who produced the books, those who read them might transfer the knowledge to private letters (written by individuals or dictated to scribes) which would be received by individuals (reading themselves, or read by personal clerks), news of which could then easily transfer to whole communities of traders and merchants, who of course, as Ghosh shows, ran a tight network. By focusing on the correspondence of the Jewish merchants, Ghosh touches upon one circle or sub-circle of what may have been a major cycle-run of news: an active traders’ grapevine that spread “from Spain to India” (Antique Land 155).¹⁷¹ At least two Egyptian sayings in use today long after the ancient trade routes have withered or died remain suggestive of this relation between travellers and the news they spread: ‘Arab travellers know the way to water’; and ‘If a woman gives birth in Mecca, the pilgrims will bring the news’.¹⁷²

There must also be a reason that travel writers often examined people and places in much of the language of the marketplace; sometimes they were traders themselves, but as often they may have been writing to an audience which, to various degrees, was vastly interested in trade and used to its language.¹⁷³ The real patrons of letters were after all, the ‘city-states’, or the variously flourishing nodal towns such as Rayy, Aleppo, Cairo, Tunis, Fez, Tripoli, and Cordoba. Every major centre of scholarship, whose inhabitants would range from elite men of letters to people with some degree or skill of literacy, was affiliated to or powered by a major market or markets –towns which were also major travelling stops on the travel routes, and in which even pilgrims (who it is often assumed had a single overarching destination) could stop to ‘visit libraries, buy books, attend classes or give lectures’ (El Moueddin 75). As such, brisk trade always comes in for a good share of praise. Even Ibn Jubayr, the otherwise most plaintive, priggish and disgruntled of travellers, who finds little praiseworthy, waxes poetic when he reaches well-watered bustling market-towns whose commerce has been secured by wise and just rulers (whose wisdom and justice in turn is explained not a little by their ability to secure these markets), and consistently evokes God’s wrath on raiders and greedy custom officials who disrupt the trade and travel routes.

Thus, while raiding was a familiar and generally accepted way of life in a time of long and weary desert paths and dangerous seas, it was still as welcome to settlers as the plague, (which travelled along similar routes), and severe condemnation creeps into the writing of that most objective of geographers al-Idrissi as he describes a community of Christian Arabs on the island of Qutruba in the Indian Ocean: ‘a traitorous people, the most malicious of sea enemies one could meet who attack the ships coming and going between Bahrain and Basra via Oman’. While their island is rich with pearl fisheries, the islanders’ constant theft of goods and persecution of merchants has stopped any business from going their way (64-65). In contrast, only a few days travel away lay the prosperous islands of “al-rānij”. Next to their natural resources, the people of these islands drew merchants their way by their brisk and fair trade and welcome treatment of strangers, to the extent that during the revolts of China, Chinese merchants in the Indian Ocean derouted their ships through these islands (61-62).

Besides using the language of the trade routes, many travellers at times described areas and people as if they were leafing through merchandise in the market. The central space accorded to barter and negotiation in the lives of these peoples is implicit in the nonchalant way goods and barter always surface in the texts. Ibn Jubayr is careful to list not just the kinds of goods sold and bought but often how much they cost, becoming so awed at one point at the sight of the caravans heaped with pepper that he exclaims that one would have thought that pepper was dirt-cheap (43; also quoted in Antique Land 175). Some of his analogies, like those of other travellers, display an everyday familiarity with commodities and their origins; he describes a black stone in al-Hussein mosque in Cairo, for example, as so dark that it reflected one’s image as clearly as a “newly-cut Indian mirror” (20). Meanwhile Naseri Khusraw in Hebron writes that the prayer mats near the shrine sent by the Sultan of Egypt allegedly cost thirty gold Moroccan dinars, making him exclaim that ‘had the mats been Rumi (Byzantine) carpets they should not have cost so much’, although truly he had never seen their like anywhere in the world (85).

Ghosh’s assimilation or refraction of this writing trait so many centuries later in his own text is made evident in the way he cites the cost of certain merchandise and Ben Yiju’s shopping. In describing the network of Jewish traders from Sicily to Mangalore through Ifriqya, Fustat, Syria and Aden, Ghosh highlights a vast, intricately-forged network of daily, personal economic exchanges taking place across multiple borders and in spite of the terrible natural and human-made odds. By highlighting Ben Yiju’s choice of abodes, as a savvy trader himself, and the process of and reasons for his migration, Ghosh also suggests some of the ways the ‘unity’ between the usually hostile and frequently warring centres within ‘the abode of Islam’ and beyond it to ‘the abode of war’ could be maintained by individuals and groups.

This mixture of high-brow and low-brow narrators and audiences and the mix between the oral and written brings us back to Ghosh’s sub-title: “history in the guise of a traveller’s tale”. Since the basic aesthetic criteria of classical belles-lettres in Arabic, and possibly the way to attract patronage and readers, was to present material that would enlighten, instruct and entertain,¹⁷⁴ most travel writers, whether reporting their own observations, explaining a natural phenomenon, or repeating reports from hearsay would present it in the form of an anecdote or ‘tale’. Used as proof or explanation, partly no doubt served by the need to authenticate or authorise one’s text by noting what the eye saw and what the ear heard (or autopsia and audition: Touati 9), anecdotes could range from those explaining the natural origins of amber and how it was extracted to explaining the reason behind a certain place’s name. Sometimes entire anecdotes, fantastic or mundane, would be lifted (and less frequently cited) from previous scholars’ works, appearing through texts even centuries apart like so many belated echoes in a cave. “The very same stories –of islands in the Indian Ocean inhabited by naked or dog-faced or headless people– punctuated the generally more credible geographies and travel accounts produced by Muslim geographers in the ninth century and even later” (Abu Lughod 160).

The same catchy line of verse about kings and capital cities in al-Mas‘udi (125) for example, appears verbatim centuries later (along with its accompanying prose commentary), uncited, in al-Hamawi (48). ‘Anecdote’ could be presented in large chunks of direct speech, such as in Ibn Fadlan’s text; more commonly, it was given as indirect speech in the formula ‘I heard from so-and-so that...’, usually attributed to unspecified spokesmen such as ‘the merchants’, ‘the pilgrims’, the ‘locals’, a ‘storyteller’, or a sage. All these conversations, whether expressed in direct or indirect speech, meant to signal that the writer had accomplished meticulous ‘field work’, and was intended to lend authority to the account. The brief absolving phrase ‘God knows’, a tag all of these writers use to various degrees, often indicates the writer’s polite disbelief, seemingly at a tug-of-war with his accepted responsibility to tell the news as he saw or heard it. It seemed to express a feeling, as Ghosh puts it elsewhere, that the “true corollary of a genuine sense of wonder is not fancifulness but, on the contrary, a certain meticulousness” (Foreword ix). Or, with the same ‘God knows’ tag, the anecdote could indicate a healthy measure of self-doubt (and precaution, just in case the writer is proved wrong by later publications): “a recognition”, Ghosh explains, “that what is common sense for him need not be so for the rest of the world” (Foreword ix). Above all, hearsay frequently showed a ready openness to widening the view of the world by travel, and offered a vibrancy, depth and colour to the narratives which would have been greatly lost if left out.¹⁷⁵

Hence, Ghosh’s ‘traveller’s tale’ is narrated in an endless refraction of smaller anecdotes recurring and being reconstructed in parallel mirrors across centuries and across borders. Ghosh tells the stories, for example, of the Sidi Abu Kanaka shrine in Egypt (138-40) and the Bhuta shrine in Mangalore (266), through which both respective governments wanted to build a road, but which, when the day came for the tractors to work, the tractors were rooted to the spot and could not move, thus forcing the governments to change their plans. On hearing the Indian version in Mangalore, Ghosh is asked by his taxi driver if he had heard any story like that before. Ghosh thinks briefly and replies, “Yes, I heard a very similar story once. In Egypt” (266). The brief words speak volumes, for comparing travel texts from the mediaeval world Ghosh has excavated brings up precisely that: echoes and echoes of stories from diverse languages, oral and written traditions, across centuries. Ghosh himself describes the moment of déjà-vu that comes to him in his work several times, for example, as he delves into the mediaeval Judeo-Arabic texts and hears the contemporary rural dialect of Shaykh Musa speaking to him across time (105). There is such dense intertextuality within the Arabic texts that déjà-vu can occur again and again to such a degree that an attempt to isolate say, Persian elements from Arabic as HAR Gibb writes¹⁷⁶ or to trace who took what from whom and why, can often be a pointless or impossible endeavour. Obviously the writers depended on each others’ works, lifting and expanding at will in the best practices of free borrowing.¹⁷⁷ Drawing on the intertextual skills of trade of the Eastern writers, the déjà-vu of Ghosh’s stories emphasises cultural intersections, parallels and similarities.

One of the travel texts, for example, that sustains an engaging autobiographical and anecdotal tone throughout is Khusraw’s Safarnameh. A much-quoted anecdote of Khusraw’s tells of when he and his travel companion try to enter a public bath in Basra (164-65). Arriving at a bathhouse after long and arduous travel, Khusraw and his partner look so disreputable that the bathing attendant turns them away. After buying new clothes, changing, and refreshing themselves, the travellers return to the bathing house. Recognising them, the stupefied attendant lets them in and takes it upon himself to tell the rest of the clientele of his previous behaviour, apologising to the newcomers profusely and causing much laughter in the bathhouse. Compare this to one of Guha’s¹⁷⁸ popular tales which still circulates at least in Arabic today. After a long and arduous journey, Guha arrives at the house of a notable vizier where he has been invited to dinner. So dishevelled from the trip does he look that the vizier takes him for a vagrant and turns him away. After buying new clothes and cleaning up, Guha returns to the house where the vizier meets him warmly and offers him the best of the dining table. Only at this point does the tale diverge from Khusraw’s: Guha proceeds to ladle soup into his pockets and stuff food in his turban, eventually explaining to the astounded host that since his clothes were the real beneficiaries of the vizier’s largesse, he might as well feed them.

Whatever else it did or was meant to do, prose travel writing trod past genres almost by default, and provided reading material for a large number of people among the learned and semi-learned classes, also morphing into and from popular oral tales. It is in this grey area that a large corpus of travel writing seems to be placed, neither belonging to the highest rung on the cultural ladder nor the lowest, neither being strictly restricted to professions nor to educational background or training, and it is perhaps this ‘middling’ quality that has made it so hard to classify. Yet these same qualities make it today such fresh and profitable material for analysis, and possibly supports travel writing’s relation to and continued popularity alongside, and within, the novel. Travel writing’s diversity and divergences also resists the supposed homogeneity of ‘the abode of Islam’, which in turn feeds essentialist and exclusionist claims of predatory identities today. The value of this Arabic non-Islamic belletrist prose as it circulated among readers lies not in its potentials for constructing an image of a mono-vocal ethno-religious worldview, but, as world literature, in its potential to construct a world of secular diversity.

Future Routes Back to the Present:

As the conditions of travel changed, so too did its literary manifestations. As Hulme et al put it:

As travel itself has changed, physically and in terms of perception, so too has travel writing altered, reflecting the shifting aesthetic and cultural fashions of the day as well as the power inequalities that lie between East and West, the history of empire, and the gendered aspects of home and abroad. (3-4)

For most Arabic scholars who have written on the topic, the rihla-voyage at its most literary seems to be considered as one cohesive barely-changing link over centuries, even as its prose forms change drastically from the diverse mediaeval travel accounts to the modern Arabic novel; and so scholarship that deals with travel accounts often finds little reason to draw the epochal line that Hulme et al, for example, draw at 1500. While the first texts associated with the novel were associated with tales of ship-wreck and wanderers, the first texts associated with the Arabic novel follow the same pattern. Most famously, Abu-l Alaa al-Ma‘arri’s (b. Syria 973-d. Syria 1058) The Epistle of Forgiveness (Eng. trans. 2013) narrates an imaginary or rather mystical voyage to heaven and hell in the form of an epistle, and Ibn Tufayl’s (b. Andalusia 1105-d. Marrakech 1185) The Self-Taught Philosopher (Hayy Ibn Yaqdhan)¹⁷⁹ has been seen as an inspiration for, among others, Robinson Crusoe, and a prime example of how the Hellenistic-Orient was ‘refracted’ in the Renaissance and through the Enlightenment (see Attar; Barud; Brotton).

By considering the specific significance of the rihla-voyage in Arabic, various scholars have suggested the literary rihla account can be divided into phases, along with the changing physical and perceptive terms of travel, as Hulme suggests, but according to more specific directions, paralleling the change of centres and peripheries, and the view of the Other, from explorative/wondrous to emulative/awed. Nassār’s Adab al-rihla [Travel Literature], for example, refers to a visible ‘change of destination’ for travellers in the ‘late period’ (starting the sixteenth century) to Istanbul, and which, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries changed again, this time to Europe and then the US (126). The so-called period of decline (1300-1800), rather than a five-century lull between the classical golden age and the East-West encounter, appears to be a period rich in travel literature, and as such, central to the rise of the Arabic novel, for it then sustains the continuity over a longer duration between pre-modern empire and the rihla-voyage on one hand, and nation-formation and the modern novel on another.

In the late nineteenth century the rise of the Arabic novel is located in the spread of modernity, with Napoleon’s 1798 campaign launching a new era of East-West relations, so much is known –but the Arabic novel is also strongly related to prose travel accounts. In the spirit of building a modern Egyptian state (and gain some sort of autonomy from the Ottoman Empire) in the 1820s, and in order to create a strong professional class, Mohammed Ali of Egypt would sponsor the first ‘student missions’ to Europe. They would start what would prove to be the modern reformulations of the ‘journey to seek knowledge’ (rihlat talab al-‘ilm) which had been so entrenched in the centres of the Arabic golden age, this time exemplified by Rifa‘ah al-Tahtāwi’s student-travel account to Paris (An Imam in Paris 1834). Like its pre-modern precedents had done with various town-centres, recounting travel officially sows the first seeds of both the modern Egyptian state, and the modern Arabic novel, and so once again the rihla-voyage would often prove ‘both flint and spark’.

Chouaib Halifi (2006) argues that the travel account can be considered an ever-changing and dynamic textual and discursive practice of self-identity, whose writers, textual forms and audiences have necessarily reflected this flux (48). Halifi considers that its written forms in Arabic can be separated into at least two ‘ages’, the first ranging from about the ninth to a little before the seventeenth century, and which despite its variety, posited such familiar textual ‘types’ as the pilgrimage, visitational, ambassadorial, cultural and touristic travel account. In the second phase, from the late eighteenth until the first half of the twentieth century, “travel and travel accounts emerged showing contrasting factors [to previous texts] and travel particularities obsessed with the attempt to understand an ‘Other’ and assimilate this Other’s mechanisms of progress. This preoccupation indicated changes in the perception of both Self and Other, which would pave the way, along with other expressive forms, principally the maqama, to the rise of the [Arabic] novel” (Halifi 49).¹⁸⁰

A contemporary of Rifa‘ah al-Tahtāwi’s, but originally from Lebanon/Syria, the life of Ahmed Faris al-Shidyāq (ca.1804 Lebanon-1887 Istanbul) fictionalised in his picaresque/ maqama-like autobiography gives a prime example of the God of Incentive at work through travel, trade and telling tales¹⁸¹ and provides grist to the mill of Halifi’s thesis. Since fools can learn too, and offer an often subversive moral to their readers, it is a picaresque hero that marks one of the most serious, and until recently, seriously neglected, comic novels in Arabic, al-Shidyāq’s al-Sāq ‘ala al-Sāq (Leg Over Leg 1855). An Abbasid man in modern times, al-Shidyāq’s erudition and long travelling produced a comic tour de force that was part autobiography, part picaresque novel and part satire.¹⁸² Savvier and worldlier than al-Tahtāwi, al-Shidyāq gives a more insightful gaze onto the ‘world scene’, from the ‘crumbling’ centres of Damascus and Cairo to the ‘threatened’ one of Istanbul, from the glittering capitals (and packed libraries) of London and Paris to the provincial clerics and parishes of the mountains of Lebanon. Combined with the more famous account of al-Tahtāwi’s An Imam in Paris, the two works signal both an end and a beginning: the end of the picaresque ideal of societal assimilation through education by follies and foibles, and the beginning of the new ideas of Bildung or education within the nation-state. The link between the classical forms of travel accounts in Arabic, the rhyming ornate picaresque novel and satirical poetry and prose, as well as key European philosophies and the new form of the ‘novel’ makes it as possible to speak in Arabic of a ‘long Arabic tenth century (AD)’ as it is to speak of a long European nineteenth. Together both can be, and are, placed in respective ‘national’ traditions, or, in the terms of World Literature, within a single global dialogue of ‘elliptical refraction’.

Writing about the Orientalist explorers of the eighteenth century in Egypt, Ghosh refers to a “new breed of traveller” (80). The new Arabic-speaking ‘breed of travellers’ of the eighteenth century would be those who would write their voyages into Anglo-European historical chronology, leaving their ‘antique lands’ for superior civilisations. In the fast-changing political scene of the twentieth century, these would be replaced by even ‘newer’ travellers whose journeys would eventually become referred to as ‘the voyage in’, perhaps exemplified by Tayyib Salih’s justly famous Season of Migration to the North (1966). As indicated by the allusion in the title to the bi-annual mediaeval trips to Yemen and Hijaz known as the ‘winter’ and ‘summer’ journeys, this ‘newer’ breed of traveller would have assimilated something more complex than the ‘old’ European version of modernity: resistance and diaspora. Meanwhile, as Ghosh’s account makes clear, the migrant workers of today –labourers, clerks, shopkeepers, drivers, imams– continue the great subaltern mobility and the unwritten travels of the previous centuries: slaves, illiterate traders, soldiers, and the rest.

That a writer of Arabic, a language “itself an intersection and integration of so many cultures” (Ghazoul “Comparative Literature” 115), should be essentially comparative in practice is exemplified by the travelogue in Arabic heritage. The integration and mingling of cultures that travel/travel literature may effect and that can be almost set as a tradition within Arabic letters appears too in Al-Bagdadi’s categorisation of the ‘globality’ of Arabic language and letters since its emergence into three phases: “oikumenical globalisation” (ranging from late antiquity to the end of the Abbasid period:), “expansive globalisation” (of the Imperialist age or late eighteenth to the twentieth century), and “dispersal globalisation” (at present). The first refers to the expansion of Arabic from a tribal language into a wide-ranging lingua franca that was then vitalised in its reformulation through the many languages and cultures of the peoples who used it. The second phase is where the advent of modernity entailed the definitive polarisation of East/West and the rise of ‘national’ literatures in Arabic. Finally, the third phase, enmeshed in ‘postmodern cosmopolitanism’, is marked by the change of the pattern of ‘travelling to’ such centres as Paris and London and settling in or ‘writing from’ these centres (Al Bagdadi “Registers of Arabic”). Al-Bagdadi’s categories implicitly take into account the travel imperatives and tendencies of Arabic’s many writers, and what this mobility and border-crossing in turn reflect of a ‘world history’, that is, people who have a “shared history” although perhaps not the “same history” (Epple).

By questioning the incentives of groups –political, scholarly or both– to ignore, dismiss or silence the diverse voices embedded in history, and by highlighting instead ‘the “small voice of history”, Ghosh stresses that no culture is homogenous; that no ‘national’ culture exists in an isolated, hermetically-sealed space, and that multiple (often unarticulated) encounters refurbish and regenerate local and national cultures. By stretching the boundaries of the national –historical, literary, and epistemological– Ghosh also opens a window onto the huge scope of highly-circulated works beyond the canonical (which then, in comparison, appears a ‘marginal’ bulk of what we read, what we know, and what we teach other people to read and know). To call attention to forgotten or dismissed shared history/ies of travel, exchange and open borders is to ideally posit the opportunity for counter-cultures to flourish. If questioning all kinds of national boundaries gives impetus for a consistent, endless questioning of norms, a pulsing curiosity about people and peoples, an openness to cultural assimilation, the sense, in Ghosh’s words, of “wonder”, and “an acknowledgment of the limits of [our] knowingness”, then perhaps his ‘history in the guise of a traveller’s tale’ has done exactly what it set out to do: remind us “of the spirit in which we undertake our most instructive and pleasurable of journeys” (Foreword xii).