Friday, May 18, 2007

Learning from Historic Travels in Islamic Lands

The Claremont Institute has an interesting piece available for reading online titled Encountering Islam.

The piece is written by Algis Valiunas, is a semi critique of Edward Said’s writing, and it provides a concise overview of lessons learned in Muslim lands by some of the more well known travelers of that part of the world.  Works written by men such as Chateaubriand, Edward Lane, Gustave Flaubert, Richard F. Burton, Charles Doughty, T.E. Lawrence, Alexis de Tocqueville, John Lloyd Stephens, Mark Twain, and Robert Byron.  Lessons we can still learn from.

The piece is long, just over 6900 words, so it will take a bit of your time to read, but it is well worth your time.  An excerpt from towards the end of Valiunas’ piece.

Someone who reads only Edward Said—and he is a sainted authority among leftist academics today—may come away convinced that his argument is true. But to read in the travel literature he disparages is to see how wrong he is. The travelers’ tales do not originate in malevolent prejudice or issue in gross distortion; rather they are drawn from carefully observed reality. A great variety of writers see many different things; but more importantly, they see some of the same things over and over again, not because of the Orientalists’ engrained turn of mind, but because those things are striking and significant and true. The travel literature overwhelmingly shows Islam recoiling from the Western touch, perhaps in part out of legitimate fear that it might be transformed into an alien shape with all the West’s deformities, and to a great degree out of blind hatred inculcated over centuries of prejudice and ignorance. In any case, the Orientalists’ writings testify to the deep roots of the modern Islamist fighting creed, in which Islamic purity must be preserved from Western, liberal, modernizing pollution.

Posted by John Venlet on 05/18 at 05:44 AM
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