Islam and Travel in the Middle Ages
- Contents
- Review Quotes

Preface to the English-Language Edition (2010)
Acknowledgments (2000)
Introduction
Chapter 1: Invitation to the Voyage
The ‘ilm, an Onomastic Emblem
A Catastrophic Theory of Knowledge
The Genealogical Structure of Knowledge
Chapter 2: The School of the Desert
Linguists and Bedouins
The Stay in the Desert
A Geography of Pure Language
A Theory of the Stay in the Desert
Chapter 3: The Price of Travel
Financing a Voyage
Paying a Personal Price
Terminus
Chapter 4: Autopsy of a Gaze
The Eye of the Popeyed Man
A Geographer in His Study
The Experience of the Voyage
A Clinical Look at Muslim Verismo
Muqaddasi, Strabo, and Greek Science
Chapter 5: Attaining God
The Theory of the Errant Life
Topographical Writing
Sufism as a Crossing of the Desert
The Voyage to Syria
Entering into the Desert
Society and Its Obverse
Chapter 6: Going to the Borderlands
The Ulemas and Jihad
An Ideology of Combat
Jihad and Hagiography
Chapter 7: Writing the Voyage
Narrating an Absence
The Extraordinary in the Voyage
The Travel Letter
An Art of Travel
A Return to the Travel Narrative
Conclusion: The Journey to the End of the Same
Chronological List of Principal Travel Accounts
Glossary
Bibliography
Index“This is an elegant work of exploration and synthesis, linking Greek analysis of the sensorium to Muslim debates concerning the priority of seeing over hearing. The range of original sources from Islamic civilization is stunning, including medieval litterateurs from al-Jāhiz to al-Bīrūnī to Ibn Khallikān. Travel as both experience and metaphor, practice and trope, is illumined here by Touati in cogent vignettes that engage—and advance—current debates about knowledge, its acquisition, its soundness, and its permeable boundaries. No other book like it exists in the library of scholarship on Islam and the Muslim world.”
“Islam and Travel in the Middle Ages considers travel from an unorthodox and engaging perspective—not as a question of commerce, transportation, or engineering, but as conceptual category, intellectual quest, and epistemological value. By thoughtful engagement with Arabic texts of various genres, including but by no means limited to travelogues, Touati shows how knowledge was acquired, valued, packaged, and disseminated, as well as the categories by which it was conceived and defined. The publication of this work in French revealed a noticeable gap in our synthetic understanding of the voyage as both a mode of knowledge and a means for the production of knowledge in medieval Islamicate societies; it has now been enhanced in this painstaking English translation.”
Geography: Cultural and Historical Geography
History: Middle Eastern History
Literature and Literary Criticism: Classical Languages
Religion: Islam
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