from The Empire and Central Europe
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 October 2025
This chapter will demonstrate the breadth of travellers and travel-writing both from ‘Arabia’ and to ‘Arabia’ across the eighth to the fifteenth centuries. It begins with a definition of ‘Arabia’ and a short, succinct overview of medieval Arabic travel and travel-writing with a view to showcase the vitality of movement including but not limited to pilgrimage. The chapter will hone in on two forms of travel-writing in particular: the earliest genre of geographic literature often titled Kitab al-masalik wa’l – mamalik (‘Book of Routes and Realms’) composed in the early Islamic period and associated with the Balkhi school of geographers and the rihla, a genre developed from the twelfth century onwards by Muslim travellers from the Islamic West (Al-Andalus and North Africa) as a record of their pilgrim travels ‘to Arabia’. From here, we turn to the rihla, focusing on the Valencian ‘father’ of the genre, Ibn Jubayr who journeyed east between 1183-85. Across these examples, we will encounter different types of and reasons for travel, but all expressed in literary form. It concludes by bringing into the fold the voices of Muslim women pilgrims.
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