Two Arabic Travel Books.

• Author: Antrim, Zayde
• Position: Accounts of China and India and Mission to the Volga; Library of Arabic Literatur - Book review

Two Arabic Travel Books: Accounts of China and India and Mission to the Volga. By ABU ZAYD AL-SIRAFI, edited and translated by TIM MACKINTOSH-SMITH; by IBN FADLAN, edited and translated by JAMES E. MONTGOMERY. Library of Arabic Literature. New York: NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2014. Pp. x +312. $40

The Library of Arabic Literature (LAL) series of critical editions and side-by-side Arabic-English translations is one of the most exciting new developments in the fields of Arabic, Islamic, and Middle East studies to come onto the university press scene in many years. It offers an innovative model of publishing, design, and collaboration and is rapidly transforming the way scholars think about critical editions, the work of translation, and the corpus of texts that we use in our research and teaching. Among its first dozen instalments, Two Arabic Travel Books is emblematic of the spirit that animates the entire series--one of adventure, exchange, and generosity (for more on the series, see T. Zadeh, "Upon Reading the Library of Arabic Literature," Journal of Arabic Literature 47 [2016]: 307-35).

The decision to join these two travelogues in a single volume is itself an example of the innovative approach of the series. Reading the two travelogues together--a reenactment of the experience of reading the parallel Arabic and English texts--makes a stronger impression than would either alone. The parallels and echoes between the two effectively evoke a vast but interconnected world that stimulated ambitions and appetites among Muslims of the late ninth and early tenth centuries. There are many indicators that long-distance travel was a way of life for the peoples under the loosening canopy of the Abbasid caliphate in this period. But to read Accounts of China and India and Mission to the Volga is to be convinced of this. Our interlocutors in these works, both named and unnamed, are most commonsensical about travel. They traveled to satisfy curiosity, to fulfill obligations, and, maybe, to get rich. They traveled with a set of cultural values that led them at times to judgment but more often to simple wonder at the array of humanity on God's earth. They traveled to write about it, or to correct what others had written, and thus to authorize themselves in a context in which knowledge of the world was its own currency. What is unusual is not the fact that they traveled or the fact that they wrote about it, but the fact that their accounts have survived.

It is important to remember, though, that the realm to which the Abbasid caliph laid claim at the turn of the tenth century was itself vast and comprised great diversity. One did not need to travel far from the capital city of Baghdad to encounter different languages, novel...