Ian Netton – författare

The area of Middle Eastern geography and travel has attracted large numbers of scholars over the last fifty years. This new collection from Routledge features key articles from the field to create a major and continuing resource for scholars and students alike.The first volume concentrates on the Islamic geographers who mapped and made navigable the routes followed by later travellers. While travel, and in particular the rihla (or ‘travel to Mecca’) did not depend for its impetus on formal geography, both were highlighted in the travellers’ diaries and travelogues which helped to make known and illuminate the boundaries of an expanding empire. Links between geography and the pilgrim routes to Mecca and Medina are particularly significant. Because of their huge significance in illuminating the medieval world of Islam, a very large number if articles deal with the travels of Ibn Jubayr (1145–1217) (Volume II) and Ibn Battuta (1304–368/9 or 1377) (Volume III), while Volume IV covers the post-medieval and early modern period.

The publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism in 1978 marks the inception of orientalism as a discourse. Since then, Orientalism has remained highly polemical and has become a widely employed epistemological tool. Three decades on, this volume sets out to survey, analyse and revisit the state of the Orientalist debate, both past and present.The leitmotiv of this book is its emphasis on an intimate connection between art, land and voyage. Orientalist art of all kinds frequently derives from a consideration of the land which is encountered on a voyage or pilgrimage, a relationship which, until now, has received little attention.Through adopting a thematic and prosopographical approach, and attempting to locate the fundamentals of the debate in the historical and cultural contexts in which they arose, this book brings together a diversity of opinions, analyses and arguments.