A German saying goes, Reisen bildet (Travels educate), and Bildung here does not just refer to “education” but also to the “formation” of an individual's personality. Roxanne Euben evokes the same notion when she writes that some journeys, though not all, “produce enlightenment” (p. 13). There is the kind of knowledge that is produced by listening to other people—other teachers, for instance—reading books not available at home, looking at different arrangements, and seeing unfamiliar natural phenomena as well as artwork. This is what the Arabic concept of ṭalab al-ʿilm refers to, gathering knowledge that is not available at home. There is a second kind of knowledge—or better, awareness—produced by traveling, which is the result of a comparison between arrangements that travelers witness abroad with those that they are familiar with at home. The different perspective produced by traveling often leads to written documents, travelogues, or descriptions of other countries. For Euben, traveling to other countries is an endeavor of “theory,” which she defines as “the systematic investigation and attainment of knowledge” (p. 22). Once the literature produced by travelers touches on the political arrangements of the foreign country, it inevitably creates political theory, both about the foreign polis as well as one's own polis.

Adopting this interpretative point of view, Euben focuses on six authors—three from the Western tradition (Herodotus, de Tocqueville, and Montesquieu) and three from the Islamic one (Ibn Battuta, Rifaʿa Rafiʿ al-Tahtawi, and Sayyida Salma aka Emily Ruete) and compares them with one another similar to the way Plutarch in his Parallel Lives compared the achievements of a Greek historical figure with a Roman one. Similar to Plutarch, Euben implicitly wants to establish an equivalency of value between two cultures, here the West and there the Islamic world. The West's self-perception is that since the Renaissance, when it began to tirelessly explore and “discover” foreign countries, it has become politically superior to other societies partly as a result of the curiosity to explore and the willingness to compare and progress. Meanwhile, other non-Western cultures remain imprisoned in their worldviews, unable to develop the same dynamic relationship between exploration and political theory (p. 30). Euben points to Bernard Lewis’ The Muslim Discovery of Europe (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982) as the most influential of this kind of self-perception, and she wants to shatter the view that Western societies since the Renaissance were the only ones in which a sophistication and a curiosity to study and appreciate the cultures of alien and even hostile societies evolved (p. 32).

Euben is a political theorist who in her earlier work did something similar, namely, trying to show that there is a certain correspondence in the political thinking of Sayyid Qutb and Hannah Arendt, who both expressed in their writings a very personal disillusionment with modernity. In that earlier work and in the book under review, Euben suggests an equivalence of value between Western and Muslim political theory, although such a suggestion is nowhere clearly spelled out. Euben tries to show that the political theory expressed in some works of Muslim literature measures up with the most thorough political thinking in the West. This point raises the same conceptual problem as in Plutarch's Parallel Lives: Does the comparison between two individual contributions to two different cultures truly lead to insight about these cultures? Or, in this case, does it not mislead us by leveling cultural differences in an apologetic attempt to debunk the idea of the West's singularity?

For Euben, “theory is inherently comparative, and comparisons entail acts of translation that simultaneously make sense and distort the unfamiliar” (p. 88). This is true for the travelers Euben analyzes, who compare their homelands with other lands, as well as for Euben's work itself. Comparing Muslim travelers with those from the West first of all requires translating the Muslim experience to a Western audience. That does not always succeed, as in the case of Ibn Battuta (1304–69 or 1377), for instance, who devotes a significant part of his efforts to mapping the unseen (al-ghāʾi b) in the places he visits. The “wondrous deeds” (karamāt) of holy men (awliyāʾ) are faithfully reported just as are their divinations. Ibn Battuta also includes the miracles (muʿjizāt) and marvels (ʿajāʾib) that characterize certain places. By the time of Ibn Battuta, there was a lively religious discourse in Islam about the karamāt, muʿjizāt, and ʿajāʾib, and the role they play in establishing taṣdiq (holding true or truthful) about certain religious claims. These marvels and miracles stand at the center of Ibn Batutta's understanding of true religion, which is why false religions, such as Christianity or even Shiʿism, can only produce false taṣdiq, that is, false belief in events, miracles, and marvels that never took place. Euben is puzzled why Ibn Batutta accuses the Christians of outright lying when they say the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem is Jesus’ grave (p. 77). Yet, the verb yakdhibūna need not mean that he considered them lying, rather that he considered their claims wrong. That Ibn Battuta did not go deeply into the matter is evidenced by the fact that no Christian said or says that the Holy Sepulcher is Jesus’ grave. Jesus has no grave. Ibn Battuta was, as Euben remarks, simply not interested in what were for him false religions. This raises the question of whether he can be considered a good match in this comparison with Herodotus (5th century b.c.), a traveler who consciously targeted enemy cultures and foreign religions. The case of Ibn Battuta provokes another question that Euben does not address: why did he devote years of his life traveling to Africa, India, the Maldives, and Sumatra, while—with the exception of Constantinople—he never traveled to Europe, the continent that was only a day's journey from his home town in Tangier? Compared with Herodotus, who ventured into Persia and Egypt, Ibn Battuta never crossed over to the “other shore.”

Euben's comparison of de Tocqueville (1805–59) with Rifaʿa Rafiʿ al-Tahtawi (1801–73), however, proves much more successful, as both are contemporaries and understood well that the countries they traveled to (the United States and France) represented what the future would hold for their homelands. Euben's chapter on these two is astute and a pleasure to read. Yet here, as in other chapters, the analysis of the Western side of the comparison tends to be deeper and more insightful, largely because Euben knows more about the France of de Tocqueville than about the Egypt of al-Tahtawi.

Euben's pairing of Montesquieu's Persian Letters with Sayyida Salma's writings is again not particular convincing. Montesquieu (1689–1755) never traveled to the Orient, and his book—despite offering a comparison—contrasts 18th-century France with Montesquieu's fantasies about Persia. Though understanding the Orientalist nature of Montesquieu's writing (p. 152), Euben all too often treats his fiction as a true travelogue of its main character, Usbek. In the case of Sayyida Salma's Memoirs and her Letters, in contrast, Euben succeeds in presenting this literature as political theory. Salma (1844–1924) was born into the ruling Arab family of Zanzibar, fell in love with a German merchant, and in 1866 fled her birthplace. She turned her longing to go back together with her inner alienation from Germany into remarkable comparative literature. In the chapter on Salma, Euben works closely with primary texts and reveals that Salma, while not being free from racism, opposed a predominantly racist and imperialist German discourse about Africans and Muslims, particularly Muslim women. Yet here, as in the other chapters, Euben does not always devote enough attention to details and misspells Salma's adopted name throughout as Emily Reute (it is Ruete).

Given that among the six authors analyzed in this book only Ibn Battuta was not affected by Western political thinking, while the writing careers of the five others, including the other two Muslims, were formed within the context of Western political literature, Euben's claim that travel writing as political literature was not limited to the Western tradition is not particularly well substantiated. Sayyida Salma wrote all of her works for a German audience, and even in countering German imperialism, she is part of a Western discourse about traveling. Al-Tahtawi's works are heavily influenced by his experience with French politics and political theory and the many books he translated from French into Arabic. As for Ibn Battuta, I remarked earlier that he had only a limited interest in the world outside the dār al-Islām, understood in both its territorial meaning and its spiritual one. Here, it might have been more interesting to look at someone like Evliya Celebi (1611–84), who traveled to Vienna two decades before the Turkish siege in 1683, or Ahmad ibn Qasim al-Hajari Afuqay, a Morisco from Spain who became a Moroccan diplomat and who visited France and Holland from 1611 to 1613 and wrote a riḥla, of which a summary, entitled Kitab Nasir al-Din ʿala al-Qawm al-Kafirin, is extant. Reading Euben's book—particularly the first two programmatic chapters—still offers remarkable insights and reflections on traveling and on writing about it, and it should be recommended especially to students and scholars interested in the literary productions of al-Tahtawi and Sayyida Salma.