Travels and Travail

Roxanne Euben's Journeys to the Other Shore is one of those books that could have been thoroughly engaging and informative had it not been infected by the dread virus theory (in a literary context, a self-inflicted state of mind that no longer admits lucid definition). Nevertheless it is by no means an unimportant book. Professor Euben is acutely aware of, concerned about, and knowledgeable about some of the world's most essential and complex problems. She analyzes and examines these problems in the light of travels and travelers in general, and from the perspectives of three pairs of travelers in particular, each pair made up of a Muslim and a westerner. Throughout the book, which spans twenty-five centuries, travel is understood primarily as a quest for knowledge, a quest limited to no particular time, place, culture, race, religion, or gender. Euben challenges the simplistic view that "Muslims gather factual information about the unfamiliar for purely instrumental purposes," reserving their curiosity "for the fantastic," whereas "the pursuit of knowledge about others for its own sake—knowledge which is . . . scientific and ennobling—is a distinctively European phenomenon." Were one obliged to choose the predominant theme from among a conglomeration, it might be that travel can be blinding as well as broadening.

The first specific works Euben deals with in detail are Herodotus's Histories (fifth century bce) and the Rihla of Ibn Battuta, a fourteenth-century Moroccan who established the genre of travel writing known as rihla, a pious work concerned with holy pilgrimage and foreign travel. Herodotus traveled throughout the world of the eastern Mediterranean and was among the first to lay claim to the values of autopsy, seeing something for oneself, with one's own eyes. He recorded for his fellow Greeks, Athenians in particular, his impressions of the Egyptians, the Scythians, the Persians, the Assyrians—none of whom measured up to the Greeks' standards, and some of whom fell far short. Euben draws a clear parallel between Herodotus's view of non-Greeks and Ibn Battuta's even more extreme view of the foreigners he encountered in his far more extensive travels: some seventy thousand miles over a period of thirty years. Battuta, a Sunni Muslim, was especially intolerant of Shi'ite Muslims, Christians, and Jews—except on those occasions when they received him with impressive ceremony and generous gifts. He did not, however, make invidious distinctions on the basis of race or skin color, though he spent little effort on understanding unfamiliar African cultures and customs. Like other Muslim travelers Euben has studied, Battuta became most vehemently hypocritical with regard to women: "Delighted to benefit from women's sexual services in private, [he] heaps disdain on those people, places, and cultures whose women exhibit what he regards as immodesty, ambition, or inappropriate levels of public autonomy and control."

Unlike Herodotus and Ibn Battuta, Euben's second pair of travelers were contemporaries. In 1826 a twenty-four-year-old Egyptian man embarked for Marseilles as part of a student mission to Paris. Five years later a twenty-five-year-old French aristocrat boarded an American ship bound for New York, so that he could study the American penal system. Their names: Rifa'a Rafi' al-Tahtawi and Alexis de Tocqueville. The former wrote a rihla titled The Extraction of Gold from a Distillation of Paris, and the latter wrote Democracy in America, which has been called "at once the best book ever written on democracy and the best book ever written on America." Both were intent on gaining knowledge that could be used for the improvement of their own countries. Even at the start Tocqueville's interests went well beyond prisons and incarceration, and although al-Tahtawi's ostensible motive, religion, continued to concern him, he noted many other facets of life in Paris. He regretted that the French were either infidels or Christians, one as bad as the other; and like Ibn Battuta he deplored what he saw as both...