Arabic travel writing, to 1916

Until the early twentieth century, travel was a way of life for Muslims, due to the absence of political borders, the open markets, and the commonality of language (not withstanding dialectical differences) across much of the Muslim world. As Ignati Iulianovich Karchkovski (1987) has shown in his magisterial Tārīkh al-adab al-jughrāfī al-‘Arabī (History of Arabic Geographical Writings, first translated 1963), the Arabic library is rich in travel writing about regions from Morocco to Iraq and from al-Andalus to Sind and Hind (modern-day Pakistan and India). Since the 1990s, dozens of accounts have been edited and published in Abu Dhabi in the ongoing Ruwwād al-Mashriq al-‘Arabī (Pioneers from the Arab East) and Irtiyād al-āfāq (Explorers of the Horizons) series. As Muḥammad Aḥmad al-Suwaydī, general editor of the latter, writes in the series Foreword, ‘travelogues constitute one of the oldest genres in the Arabic literary legacy’.