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Abstract
What served to intensify my yearning for travel in quest of knowledge of every region was the statement of God Almighty in the Qur'an: ‘Say: Journey throughout the world.’ [Qur'an, Surah 29, v. 20]. Desire and command were thus united, and I found myself abroad, traveling the world. One life turned into many, and the days extended to become epochs. When I absented myself from a country for a month and then returned, I realized the extent of the space in-between, so replete was it with the things that I had witnessed. The world is an abode for human beings; not to be aware of that is a sign of weakness, as is skulking in a small segment of its space. Man should make it all his abode and residence; its people should be his. If he remains aloof from them, it is as though he is insulting his own relatives:
Earth and space are a book; So peruse it and take note!
It is through such perusals that people with both talent and aspiration have opened up nature's treasure-trove and unearthed priceless relics of the past. Existence is an uncomplex weave crafted by travel; life itself is a smooth page on which risk draws its designs. Mankind is just like a valuable coin: it gains value through transaction, whereas loss and alienation will result from hoarding and concealing it.
Ibrāhīm al-Muwayli[hdot]īnd, Mirror on the World
Notes
1. Julia Bray, ‘Starting Out in New Worlds: Under Whose Empire? High tradition and subaltern tradition in Ottoman Syria. 16th and 19th/20th centuries’, Tropes du Voyage: Le Voyage dans la littérature arabe. I. Départs, Actes du Colloque international qui s'est tenu à l'Università Ca’ Foscari de Venise (13–15 Décembre 2007), éd. Antonella Ghersetti, Annali di Ca’ Foscari XLVIII, 3 Serie orientale, 40 (2009), 199–220.
2. Ibid., 199.
3. The proceedings are published in Tropes du Voyage: Le Voyage, éd. Ghersetti.
4. The proceedings are published in Aboubakr Charïbi, ed. Tropes du Voyage: Les Rencontres (Paris: L'Harmattan, 2010).
5. The proceedings will be published in Frédéric Bauden, ed., Tropics of Travel: Travel in Arabic Writings. IV. Homes (Leuven: Peeters, 2013 forthcoming).
6. Bray, ‘Starting Out in New Worlds’, 199.