Journeys to the Other Shore: Muslim and Western Travelers in Search of Knowledge.

AuthorGreppin, John A.C.

Journeys to the Other Shore: Muslim and Western Travelers in Search of Knowledge. By ROXANNE L. EUBEN. PRINCETON: PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2006. Pp. 313. $29.95.

Roxanne Euben has seized onto a particularly interesting idea, not only writing about two famous Arab travelers, but comparing them with Western writers of similar capacity. She discusses the most famous of all Arab travelers, Ibn Battuta, who got himself, by foot, camel, and boat as far as India and later to the port of Zaytun (Ts'uan-chou) in China during the years 1325-53, setting out the year after Marco Polo died. Euben compares him with Herodotus of Halicarnassus, the noted fifth-century historian of the Persian wars who was known for his sojourns to Egypt, Mesopotamia, and on into Persia where he observed the increasing greatness of that empire. Herodotus was the first serious Greek traveler/historian whose writings remain. There could have been earlier wanderers, and from Homer's time we have hints of such people, though their motivation for travel was usually mercantile and they were quite unlike Herodotus who sought information about the foreign lands surrounding his Aegean world, at the dawn of Greek literacy.

Ibn Battuta had many similarities to Herodotus. He was a free wanderer, clearly a man of significant intelligence, and with a probing intellect. Born in 1304, he was a product of the Andalusian school of classical Islam, when the sciences, math, and medicine flourished but where earlier, philosophical studies had declined because they might encourage analysis of Muhammad's word. Ibn Battuta was a world-class moocher. Apparently well born and well educated, he left his birthplace in Tangiers, in the Maghreb, and traveled at first to other cities of North Africa requesting an audience with the local prince, sultan, shaykh, or whoever was in charge. The ruler, finding him interesting and a break from the humdrum of local life, and following the rules of Arab hospitality, would take him in. If the prince treated him well, providing him with good food, a concubine, luxurious quarters, and personal servants, Ibn Battuta would write well of him. As he traveled farther, and his fame spread over the years, he would become more and more demanding, and even complain about the quality of his concubines or lodgings, or the attention afforded him. In his twenty-eight years of travel, he took increasingly arrogant advantage of his hosts, and this reputation also began to...

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