Islam Gender:Travel Lits

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

This course revolves around a selection of travel literature texts from late 19th to the present that are written by both Arabs and Westerners. The general aim of the course is to contrast and compare both travel writings. The idea is not to study travel literature as a literary genre, but rather to examine it as a corpus where notions such as otherness, religion, and clash of civilizations are more dominant than dialogue and similarities. Travel writers from both sides endeavor to decipher differences rather than similarities. They perceive the other through the lenses of religion. Islam is at the center of both writings in as much as Westerners tend to interpret the behaviors of Arabs and the structure of their society through their limited knowledge of the religion. Similarly, Arab writers, whenever they travel to the West, focus in turn on how Islam is ‘different’ from Western creeds. The course will seek to understand why these two literatures are focused so intensely on religion, which leads both sides to statements of intolerance and racism. Both sides also highlight the issues of gender in their portrayals of society. Women in the public space are scrutinized from both sides and often linked to the way society is organized and to religion. The class will attempt to find patterns that could lead to dialogue rather than clash, to universalism rather than parochialism, and to permanence rather than transience. The course is interdisciplinary in scope in as much as it resorts to comparative literature, history, the sacred, theories on space and place, and gender issues among others.