Category Archives: Travel

A Wolff in Shepherd’s Clothing, #3

Bible and Holy Land, Books You Should Read, Ethics, Islam and Christianity, Kurds, Lithographs, Orientalism, Travel, Turkey


Dervish,; photograph by Sevryugin Anton (1830 – 1933), the official photographer of the Imperial Court of Iran

In the early 19th century there was a florescence of Protestant missionary interest in saving Muslim, Jewish and other kinds of Christian souls in the Middle East. This thread continues excerpts from one of the earliest accounts from the 19th century, that of Joseph Wolff (1795-1862), a convert from Judaism to Christianity. In 1837 he published a diary of his travels. Like a number of Christians visiting the Muslim world, Wolff is more impressed by Muslim sobriety and devotion in their ritual than he is by the Christians he sees:

There is also an intriguing encounter between the Christian missionary and a Kurdish Muslim dervish:

Chalk one up for the Kurdish dervish over the atheists of Europe.

A Wolff in Shepherd’s Clothing, #2

Aden, Bible and Holy Land, Books You Should Read, Islam and Christianity, Orientalism, Travel, Yemen, Zaydi

In the early 19th century there was a florescence of Protestant missionary interest in saving Muslim, Jewish and other kinds of Christian souls in the Middle East. This thread continues excerpts from one of the earliest accounts from the 19th century, that of Joseph Wolff (1795-1862), a convert from Judaism to Christianity. In 1837 he published a diary of his travels. Here are the passages related to a brief stop in several of Yemen’s ports:

to be continued…

A Wolff in Shepherd’s Clothing, #1

Bible and Holy Land, Books You Should Read, Orientalism, Travel

In the early 19th century there was a florescence of Protestant missionary interest in saving Muslim, Jewish and other kinds of Christian souls in the Middle East. One of the earliest accounts from the 19th century is that of Joseph Wolff (1795-1862), a convert from Judaism to Christianity. His missionary travels began in 1821 and he also went in search of the “lost tribes” of Israel. In 1837 he published a diary of his travels. This is a fascinating book to read, once one gets by the evangelistic fervor. He was considered by fellow missionaries to be somewhat of an “eccentric,” as he acknowledges in the frontispiece to his travels.

Here is how he begins his book… Continue reading A Wolff in Shepherd’s Clothing, #1 →

Medieval Muslim Women’s Travel

Gender and Sexuality, Islamic History, Travel


Two woman observing a conversation, Baghdad, Maqamat al-Hariri, Late Eleventh to early Twelfth Centuries, Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris. MS arabe 3929 fol 134, Maqamat 40, detail

Medieval Muslim Women’s Travel: Defying Distance and Dangerby Marina Tolmacheva, World History Connected

Women’s rights in Muslim societies became an especially sensitive subject of intercultural discussion in the twenty-first century. The recent Arab awakening has made understanding Islam, explaining Muslim sacred law to non-Muslims, and interpreting the internal dynamics of Islamic countries an increasingly urgent concern for educators. This paper focuses on historical evidence of Muslim women’s spatial mobility since the rise of Islam and until the early modern period, that is from the seventh until the sixteenth centuries. The Muslim accounts of travel and literature about travel created during this long period were written by men, mostly in Arabic. Muslim women did not leave behind records of their own travel, and it is only in the early modern period that some records were created by women, only a very few of which have been discovered. This means that we must rely on men’s accounts of women’s travel or draw on general descriptions of travel conditions that are applicable to women’s travel as well as men’s. Another limitation derives from the Islamic requirements of privacy and Muslim conventions of propriety: it was generally not considered good manners to discuss womenfolk or specific ladies, so medieval, and even early modern, Muslim books rarely describe living women unless it is to praise them. Historical chronicles may glorify queens, discuss important marriages made by princesses, or praise pious or learned Muslim women, but some travel books—for example, “The Book of Travels” (Safar-Nama) by the Persian traveler Nasir-i Khusraw (1004–1088)—do not speak of women at all. Some of the eyewitness evidence below explicitly related to women’s travel is drawn from the author who set the pattern of the travel account focused on pilgrimage to Mecca, Ibn Jubayr (1145–1217) and from “The Travels” (Rihla) of by Ibn Battuta (1304–1368?), who repeatedly married and divorced during his travels and sought advantage from association with prominent women met on his journeys. No such reservation was practiced in the Christian writing tradition, so occasionally observations of Muslim women on the journey may be found in the records left by European pilgrims, merchants or captives in the Near East, especially in works published after 1500. Continue reading Medieval Muslim Women’s Travel →

Return to Lebanon

Ethics, Lebanon, Poetry, Travel


Rivoli Square, Beirut, Lebanon, ca. 1960

First Impressions of Lebanon in June 2013

By George Nicolas El-Hage, Ph.D., Professor of Arabic and Comparative Literature

In 2002, I published my book, The Return of the Hero and the Resurrection of the City. In this poetry book about Lebanon, I borrowed the tragic image of Virgil’s Aeneas who had left his city of Troy in ashes burning behind him as he carried his father on his shoulder and held his son’s hand and marched forward to the new world where he was destined to build Rome and establish a new world order. My saga of self-imposed exile mirrors that of Aeneas’s in many ways with one major difference: I wanted to come back to my destroyed city, to Beirut, to my Troy, in spite of the temptations of my sweet exile abroad. The burning question was: When? How long will the war last and when will peace reign again? Was I really waiting for Godot?

To have experienced life in pre-war Lebanon in the sixties and early seventies, when Lebanon was the jewel of the Mediterranean, was a time that is unforgettable. Every moment remained deeply engraved in my memory during the 37 years that I spent in the United States. I kept insisting on staying away while Lebanon kept persisting in its suicidal lifestyle torn between nationalism , Arabism, Palestinianism, Islamism, Lebanization, Westernization, globalization and many other “isms” that went on bleeding it to death and dislocating its citizens and scattering them across the globe.

Thirty-seven years later it dawned on me, what am I waiting for? Am I waiting for Lebanon to become a powerful, strong country with a stable central government? Am I waiting for all of its numerous political parties to unify under one leadership or for all of its religious factions to denounce their allegiances and pray under one dome? Am I waiting for the rest of the world and for the friendly and neighboring countries, superpowers and faraway countries to denounce their claim on Lebanon and leave it alone, independent, free and self-governed? No, my friend, this shall not come to pass. After all, when was Lebanon ever in charge of its own destiny and master of its internal affairs or its foreign policy? Continue reading Return to Lebanon →

Passing Aden in 1860

Aden, Islamophobia, Orientalism, Travel, Yemen


U.S. Powhatan, which made four trips to Japan from 1857-1860

In the mid-19th century a number of American ships sailed to and from Japan. One of these was the U.S. frigate Hartford. An account of the voyage is given by H. P. Blanchard in his A Visit to Japan in 1860, which is online at archive.org. He made a brief stop at Aden, but unfortunately reflected the ethnocentric fear of his day that falling into the hands of any of the “wild” Arabs would be instant death. It appears that most of his time was spent entertaining the ladies and listening to the military band.

Continue reading Passing Aden in 1860 →