Journeys to the Other Shore

In this unusually elegant book, Roxanne Euben engages comparative political theory, an enterprise she has shaped decisively--one might well argue that she has conceived it in its present form. Here, she wears her erudition lightly, but it is very much present. She moves easily between languages and literatures, with a profound sense of historical context. She is at home in the Arabic language as few Western scholars are. There is little to say beyond praise for this work and its author. -- Anne Norton, University of Pennsylvania, author of "Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire" This is a major book. It transcends the imagined great divide between East and West by examining the role of travel in shaping one's imagination of societies-both one's own and those of others. By giving equal weight to the sense of rootedness and difference in European and Muslim travel accounts, Roxanne Euben shows the fluid points of convergence and divergence in European and Muslim concepts of others. To paraphrase Claude Levi-Strauss, Euben's book is good to think with. -- Dale F. Eickelman, Dartmouth College

The contemporary world is defined by dizzying flows of people and ideas. But while Western travel is associated with a pioneering spirit of discovery, the dominant image of Muslim mobility is the jihadi who travels not to learn but to destroy. This book challenges these stereotypes.The contemporary world is increasingly defined by dizzying flows of people and ideas. But while Western travel is associated with a pioneering spirit of discovery, the dominant image of Muslim mobility is the jihadi who travels not to learn but to destroy. Journeys to the Other Shore challenges these stereotypes by charting the common ways in which Muslim and Western travelers negotiate the dislocation of travel to unfamiliar and strange worlds. In Roxanne Euben's groundbreaking excursion across cultures, geography, history, genre, and genders, travel signifies not only a physical movement across lands and cultures, but also an imaginative journey in which wonder about those who live differently makes it possible to see the world differently. In the book we meet not only Herodotus but also Ibn Battuta, the fourteenth-century Moroccan traveler. Tocqueville's journeys are set against a five-year sojourn in nineteenth-century Paris by the Egyptian writer and translator Rifa'a Rafi' al-Tahtawi, and Montesquieu's novel Persian Letters meets with the memoir of an East African princess, Sayyida Salme. This extraordinary book shows that curiosity about the unknown, the quest to understand foreign cultures, critical distance from one's own world, and the desire to remake the foreign into the familiar are not the monopoly of any single civilization or epoch. Euben demonstrates that the fluidity of identities, cultures, and borders associated with our postcolonial, globalized world has a long history--one shaped not only by Western power but also by an Islamic ethos of travel in search of knowledge.