“Much learning supports Touati’s book, which gives us a richer sense of the driving forces behind travel in the Islamic Middle Ages than we have had before.”

Francis Robinson | Times Literary Supplement

“This is an elegant work of exploration and synthesis, linking Greek analysis of the sensorium to Muslim debates concerning the priority of seeing over hearing. The range of original sources from Islamic civilization is stunning, including medieval litterateurs from al-Jāhiz to al-Bīrūnī to Ibn Khallikān. Travel as both experience and metaphor, practice and trope, is illumined here by Touati in cogent vignettes that engage—and advance—current debates about knowledge, its acquisition, its soundness, and its permeable boundaries. No other book like it exists in the library of scholarship on Islam and the Muslim world.”

Bruce B. Lawrence, Duke University

“Many of us appreciate the unique importance of travel and exile for Islamic literature and thought. In English, however, we have had nothing to rival Touati’s Islam and Travel in the Middle Ages, with its subtle, original argument, its elegant style, and its wide and profound coverage of original sources. Touati brings together a rich variety of topics and themes, with an underlying epistemological distinction—between ‘audition’ and ‘eyewitnessing’—that informed the experience of Muslim travelers and their literary output. We are fortunate to have this fluent, precise English translation.”

Michael Bonner, University of Michigan

“Islam and Travel in the Middle Ages considers travel from an unorthodox and engaging perspective—not as a question of commerce, transportation, or engineering, but as conceptual category, intellectual quest, and epistemological value. By thoughtful engagement with Arabic texts of various genres, including but by no means limited to travelogues, Touati shows how knowledge was acquired, valued, packaged, and disseminated, as well as the categories by which it was conceived and defined. The publication of this work in French revealed a noticeable gap in our synthetic understanding of the voyage as both a mode of knowledge and a means for the production of knowledge in medieval Islamicate societies; it has now been enhanced in this painstaking English translation.”

Franklin D. Lewis, University of Chicago

“Elegantly written, superbly documented, and imaginative in scope and analysis, this erudite and interesting book is the definitive account of how travel in Islam was knowledge, practice, combat, image, and absence.”

Brannon Wheeler, United States Naval Academy