Islam and Travel in the Middle Ages

• Published in: Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies Vol. 74; no. 3; pp. 478 - 479
• Main Author: Toorawa, Shawkat M.
• Format: Book Review Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Cambridge Cambridge University Press 01.01.2011
• Subjects: Bibliographic literature; Islam; Middle Ages; Scholars; THE NEAR AND MIDDLE EAST; Travel; United States > US
• ISBN: 9780226808772; 0226808777
• ISSN: 0041-977X; 1474-0699
• DOI: 10.1017/S0041977X11000425

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.) I would have titled this translation, Islam and the Notion of Travel in the Middle Ages: The History and Anthropology of a Scholarly Praxis - closer to the French original (2000) and a better reflection of its argument. There are astute insights: contrasting a "paradigm of hearingâ[euro] and autopsia (chs 2, 4 and 5); noting that for traditionists the voyage was essential to ward off forgetfulness (p. 25); analysing al-Jaḥiz on tabayyun ("lucid understandingâ[euro], p. 109); realizing that "residents of the frontier saw themselves as vigorous defendants of Islamâ[euro] (p. 220). Because much of the book describes modes and modalities of scholarly activity and aspiration it can profitably be read as an introduction to eighth-tenth-century Islamic culture generally. [...]they ["men of lettersâ[euro]] ended up saturating it with Islamism [sic]â[euro] (p. 3) is notionally captured better in the later "work collectively on the enormous enterprise of changing their geopolitical space into a dogmatic spaceâ[euro] (p. 259).