Category Archives: Travel

A Candid[e] View of an Honest Turk

Books You Should Read, Literature, Orientalism, Travel

[One of the great moral tales of the 18th century is Voltaire’s (1759) Candide, a book well worth reading and rereading from time to time. Here is an excerpt from the end of the book, but it is not Orientalism in the Saidian sense of negative portrayal; indeed it is the honest Turk which stands in contrast to tyrants of all stripes.]

During this conversation, news was spread abroad that two viziers of the bench and the mufti had just been strangled at Constantinople, and several of their friends impaled. This catastrophe made a great noise for some hours. Pangloss, Candide, and Martin, as they were returning to the little farm, met with a good-looking old man, who was taking the air at his door, under an alcove formed of the boughs of orange trees. Pangloss, who was as inquisitive as he was disputative, asked him what was the name of the mufti who was lately strangled.

“I cannot tell,” answered the good old man; “I never knew the name of any mufti, or vizier breathing. I am entirely ignorant of the event you speak of; I presume that in general such as are concerned in public affairs sometimes come to a miserable end; and that they deserve it: but I never inquire what is doing at Constantinople; I am contented with sending thither the produce of my garden, which I cultivate with my own hands.” Continue reading A Candid[e] View of an Honest Turk →

Bury Me Not on the Lonesome Yemeni Plain

Travel, Yemen

There are not as many travel accounts by Western authors visiting the Middle East as sand particles in the great Arabian desert, but the number is considerable just the same. One of the younger visitors, arriving in the British held port of Aden in 1896, at the age of 22 was G. Wyman Bury, whose intrigues and failed attempt to navigate the so-called “Empty Quarter” left him a broken man and brought him to an early death at age 46. It did not start out that way. Spending a year in Morocco, the young English lad described himself there as a “callous youth just out of his teens dropping in haphazard on a real tribe accompanied by a mission-taught Moor and a large liver-coloured pointer who had more sense than his master.” Continue reading Bury Me Not on the Lonesome Yemeni Plain →

Mocha, Port of Coffee

Food and Drink, Tihama, Travel, Yemen

[Joseph Osgood was a Black American sailor who visited the Yemeni port of Aden about a dozen years before the start of the American Civil War. He offers a rich, descriptive account, including information on the coffee cargo that may have brought his ship to this Red Sea port in the first place. The following is his rendition of a popular origin tale for the popular brew.]

Any communicative Arab will tell the following story about the early history of Mocha, with more or less modification.

A little over two centuries ago, there dwelt near the beach, enclosed by two sandspits forming the harbor, a worthy fisherman, whose learning, wisdom, and pious observance of all the tenets of the Moslem faith, had collected around his humble hut the dwellings of a band of devoted pupils to be instructed in the religion of their great Arabian legislator and prophet. One day a ship from India, and bound to Jiddah, was driven by adverse winds into the cove, and, while there detained, the crew visited the settlement near the beach, and were entertained by the holy Sheik, who regaled them with coffee, a beverage till then unknown to his guests. The Sheik, learning that the captain was ill on board his vessel, extolled the sanative virtues of coffee, and sent some as a present to the captain, by the returning crew. The prescribed medicine was taken, the captain recovered his health, visited the shore, made confidence with the people, bartered his cargo for coffee and sailed for home, where the worth of the rare and newly discovered product was quickly acknowledged, and successive voyages soon established a lucrative commerce, and thus founded and gave a world wide repute to the city of Mocha and many of the neighboring inland towns. Continue reading Mocha, Port of Coffee →

A Taylor Made Bath in Damascus

Architecture, Orientalism, Syria, Travel

The American man of letters Bayard Taylor (1825-1878) was one of many travelers to the Near East of his time. His tour in 1853 resulted in a travel account above the common lot of Holy Land roller overs. Of particular interest is his frank account of a Turkish bath in Damascus.

“The Bath is the ‘peculiar institution’ of the East. Coffee has become colonized in France and America; the Pipe is a cosmopolite, and his blue, joyous breath congeals under the Arctic Circle, or melts languidly into the soft airs of the Polynesian Isles; but the Bath, that sensuous elysium which cradled the dreams of Plato, and the visions of Zoroaster, and the solemn meditations of Mahomet, is only to be found under an Oriental sky. The naked natives of the Torrid Zone are amphibious; they do not bathe, they live in the water. The European and Anglo-American wash themselves and think they have bathed; they shudder under cold showers and perform laborious antics with coarse towels. As for the Hydropathist, the Genius of the Bath, whose dwelling is in Damascus, would be convulsed with scornful laughter, could he behold that aqueous Diogenes sitting in his tub, or stretched out in his wet wrappings, like a sodden mummy, in a catacomb of blankets and feather beds. As the rose in the East has a rarer perfume than in other lands, so does the Bath bestow a superior purification and impart a more profound enjoyment… Continue reading A Taylor Made Bath in Damascus →

In and Out of Aden

Aden, Archaeology and Antiquities, Books You Should Read, Islamic Economics, Islamic Texts, Rasulids, Travel, Yemen

[The following is an excerpt from a recently published historical analysis of the Yemeni port of Aden in the 13th and 14th centuries by Roxani Margariti (Emory University), who reconstructs port life vividly through archival records in the Cairo Genizeh, relevant Arabic texts and archaeological research. This is a fascinating look at one of the most important medieval ports in the Red Sea/Indian Ocean trading network that ultimately linked Europe with the Far East before Portuguese galleons changed the complex equation of global trade.]

by Roxani Eleni Margariti

In the current era of giant container ships, GPS, and e-commerce, a single vessel can carry forty-eight hundred trailer-sized containers of merchandize from Bremen, Germany, to Elizabeth, New Jersey, in a single voyage. The exact position of a ship is knowable at the push of a button and the blink of any eye, and one can place an order one minute and have confirmation of its receipt in the next. It is therefore difficult to grasp the medieval dimensions of dimensions and time. A respectably sized medieval Arab ship held the equivalent of about two trailer-sized containers. Continue reading In and Out of Aden →

“when I asked him what a Moslem was”

Books You Should Read, Egypt, Humor and Satire, Travel

According to all three major monotheisms even God needed time to take a rest and so the sabbath was created. With the spate of mosque bombings, torture of prisoners and outright mayhem dominating the news about the Middle East these days, it might help to sit back and read what the American humorist Mark Twain wrote about his Missouri-born creation Tom Sawyer set loose in the Holy Land more than a century ago. Continue reading “when I asked him what a Moslem was” →

A Sailor and His Camel Ride

Animals, camels, Travel, Yemen


[Illustration: Arabian Camel from George Shaw, Zoology (1801)]

[Joseph Osgood was a Black American sailor who visited the Yemeni port of Mocha about a dozen years before the start of the American Civil War. He offers a rich, descriptive account of his visit to the Yemeni coast, including a sailor’s view of the ship of the desert.]

No wheel carriages are used here, the most general mode of transportation being by camels, for which the males along are serviceable. The flesh of the camel forms a staple article of food, the head and neck being excepted, because one of the race unwittingly rendered these parts unholy by obtrusively poking his head and neck into Mahomet’s tomb. Wellsted says that a camel is welcomed at its birth, by the Arab, with “another child is born unto us.” Continue reading A Sailor and His Camel Ride →