Travel narratives, as Mikhail Bakhtin once noted, have a dialogic quality. Putting the unfamiliar into conversation with the familiar, they have the capacity to deepen our understanding of each. Travelers themselves have a third voice in this exchange, at times standing in each culture but never becoming located completely in either. At their best, then, travel narratives reflect multiple positions, connect multiple traditions, and speak to multiple audiences. They transgress the boundaries that most people take as given or fixed, and in the resulting blur of borders, they open new conceptual and imaginative spaces.
In those ways, Roxanne Euben's book exemplifies the highest virtues of the travel-narrative form. For hers is not only an investigation into the intellectual linkages between travel and knowledge but also an example of the ways in which those linkages operate; she both discusses and practices theorizing through comparison. Each of the three central chapters couples a text regarded as canonical to Western political thought with a text from the Arabic literary genre of rihla (books that recount travels, particularly those undertaken in the pursuit of knowledge). Within and around these striking comparisons, Euben develops a series of arguments that speak across many of the conventional boundaries—or, rather, conceits—of contemporary academic and political life.
The strongest and most arresting of these comparative analyses is in the book's fourth chapter, which sets Rifa‘a Rafi‘ al-Tahtawi next to Alexis de Tocqueville. At first it seems that al-Tahtawi, a young man appointed imam for an Egyptian student mission to Paris in 1826, shares little with Tocqueville. Their works differ in “background, genre, discipline, and reception,” acknowledges Euben. But they share a stake in claiming the authority of pedagogical theoria, she contends, the notion that one may travel to faraway places “in search of political wisdom to bring home” (p. 91).
From there, Euben employs al-Tahtawi and Tocqueville in a project of mutual enrichment. It becomes clear that together, they both reflect a world slowly transforming “by an increasing awareness of regions and peoples separated by vast oceans and thousands of miles” (p. 97). Both men, as such, are concerned not merely with changes across space but also with changes across time. They share ambivalences about what they view, being at once skeptical and appreciative of the possibilities that a changing world might offer—though they do not ever express skepticism about their own mode of seeing.
In the book's fifth chapter, Euben extends her own view to include questions of gender in the travel genre. Here the comparison is between Montesquieu's Persian Letters and Sayyida Salme's Memoirs, and the claim is that both texts confound “the coding of travel and travel writing as heroic, masculine, Western, and scientific” (pp. 16–17). Moreover, both challenge the notion that only certain genres, like philosophical treatises, “count” as political theory, whereas other genres, like novels and memoirs, do not.
These are compelling claims, and Euben's defense of them tends toward the masterful. But while she devotes an extensive portion of this chapter to Salme's exilic experiences of nostalgia, dislocation, and permanent homesickness, she relegates to a footnote the fact that Montesquieu's character Usbek also suffers the pains of exile. (Early in the Letters, Usbek confides to a friend that the “real reason” for his journey is self-preservative; surrounded by political enemies, he told the king that he wanted to instruct himself in Western knowledge as a pretext for getting out of town.) In Euben's telling, Usbek is a man who sets off on a “heroic adventure, an ennobling quest” whose ultimate despair is occasioned primarily by his wives' revolt (p. 146). This contrasts with the book's picture of Salme as haunted by her “life of permanent fragmentation and dislocation” (p. 159). If, though, we read Usbek and Salme as victims of the same exilic blade, they may complicate more than associations of travel and gender. For they suggest, in line with Euben's broader analysis, that one cannot separate a world in which long-distance travel is possible from a world in which exile—both forced and self-imposed—is frequent. Sometimes it is hard to tell the difference between a seeker and a fleer, if there is a distinct difference between the two in the first place.
Both of these chapters—and a prior juxtaposition of Herodotus with the fourteenth-century Maghribi traveler Ibn Battuta—fall between a sweeping analysis of present-day scholarly and political concerns. Euben begins both her first and final chapters by speaking about globalization, and reminds us that this process has a long history and is “not merely the product of the spread of Western cultural and economic power throughout the globe” (p. 175). In that light, current debates about cosmopolitanism seem dangerously ahistoric and provincial, emphasizing as they do dominant Western ideals while ignoring the disenfranchisements and power inequalities that are an inextricable part of the package. This observation overlaps with another of Euben's insights into the narrowness of contemporary political understandings, which take a view of Islam as both a singular and insular entity or which suppose an easy dichotomy of “Islam versus the West” (p. 5).
Strikingly, Euben does not fall into the trap of limiting these critiques to “ordinary” citizens or political practitioners. She connects them to the failings of political theorists who, too confident in their own mode of vision—its increasing specializations, its canons, its favored forms—neglect to see its limitations. They are thus kin to Tocqueville and al-Tahtawi, quick to see the privileges of a traveler's position but quicker to ignore its weaknesses and exclusions. To pull all of these strands together is to arrive at an astonishing place: If political theory rests on comparison, and if comparison depends upon translation, and translation has necessary imperfections, then theory, like the travel narrative, is “transformative if inevitably flawed” (p. 15).
In this book, Euben offers the rare pleasure of seeing a political theorist practice as she preaches. By blurring so many familiar edges and thus opening so many new possibilities for thought, she takes us on what can only be called an enlightening journey.
