rom the earliest travels for conquest, trade and pilgrimage to today’s dominant trend of travelling for leisure, travel writing has produced mythological texts, guides to travel routes, topographies of new worlds and ethno-geographic literature.

Three Centuries of Travel Writing by Muslim Women, edited by Siobhan Lambert-Hurley, Daniel Majchrowicz and Sunil Sharma, is an anthology of travel accounts of 45 Muslim women, written in ten languages covering the period from the 17th Century to mid-20th Century. This collection of travel writings provides a detailed historical and cultural context for each travel account.

These travels were undertaken for various reasons, including but not limited to religious pilgrimage, politics, the pursuit of education and pleasure. Altering the perception about Muslim women and travelling, these women from dominant Muslim countries travelled to far-off areas and shared stories of their travels with the world. Some of these travel accounts have been translated into English from Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Chagatai Turkish, Urdu, Punjabi, Bangla, Indonesian and German.

More than half of the travellers included in the anthology cover the period from the 1850s to the 1930s. This was the time of the rise of European imperialism and revolutionised transportation and communication, also called the age of “steam and print”. Mobility had been a big hurdle earlier, and it was only after the James Watt steam engine that travelling accelerated. These new engines propelled ships and trains, making regional and inter-continental travel possible and cheaper. Many women did not face a lot of restrictions while travelling, especially if they were imperial-subject travellers with a British/ colonial passport. That facilitated specific journeys around the empire.

The notion that men have traditionally dominated the historic travelogue doesn’t seem well-founded, as the accounts mentioned in this book successfully portray that travel writings by women share a parallel, if not better, narrative quality.

The notion that men have traditionally dominated the historic travelogue doesn’t seem well-founded, as the accounts mentioned in this book successfully portray that travel writings by women share a parallel, if not better, narrative quality.

In traditional Muslim households of the Punjab during the colonial period, where women had never travelled, Hajj often became the only reason for travel. Hajj pilgrimage to Makkahhad state support during the rule of the Mughal emperor Akbar. In 1931, Nur Begum from Kandhwala near Abohar (East Punjab) went to perform Hajj and penned the earliest Punjabi language travelogue in verse narrating her journey by train and on camels. Nur Begum (Nur means light) was the pen name of Ghulam Fatima. Her poetic travelogue, Mazahir-i Nur: Safarnamah-ay Nurbara-i-Hajj o ziyarat-i Huzur (Manifestations of Celestial Light: Nur’s Travel Account of the Hajj and Pilgrimage to the Exalted One), was published in 1933. Nur Begum was from a rural background and travelled with limited financial resources. At the time of her pilgrimage, she was married but had no children. The travelogue is divided into two sections: a travel narrative and a separate guide to performing Hajj rites. The narrative section comprises around fifteen hundred lines.

[I will write books and compose poetry for as long as I live;

No matter how much they gossip and reproach me, I will never regret it.

I have no offspring in this world, but I do have this divine calling;

People are remembered by their children, but my legacy shall be this!

May I be remembered, through my writing, until the Day of Judgement, And on that day, may God shield me from every hardship]

– Nur Begum, Manifestations of Celestial Light

Most of the travels these women undertook were their first and only instances of travelling, heavily dependent on the men of their families. Not all women travelled alone; men from their families accompanied some of them.

Sughra Sabzvari (aka SK Sughra and Begum Rezwi) gained prominence as an author when she wrote an account of her journey from eastern India to Iran, entitled Safarnamah-i-Iran (Travelogue of Iran). It was published serial-wise in 1935 in the Urdu journal Ismat. She was married to Taher Rezwi, a literary scholar. In 1934, they were invited by the government of Iran to attend celebrations marking the thousandth anniversary of the birth of the Persian poet, Ferdowsi.

Travel writing is generally perceived as colonial writing; a representative form can be seen as a white male traveller as a prototype. Even today, the travel category remains heavily gendered, layered and closely linked with the European history of exploration, exploitation, upper-class recreation and colonial expansion. Anthropologist James Clifford writes, “I struggle, never quite successfully, to free the related term ‘travel’ from a history of European, literary, male, bourgeois,
scientific, heroic, recreat-ional, meanings and practices.”

This anthology will interest scholars and general readers wanting to know more about travel writing, gender, Muslim women, Islamic studies, colonial history and global history. It is also a good resource for many undergraduate and graduate courses.

Many travel accounts included in the book are abridged. The complete texts can be accessed at the website, Accessing Muslim Lives.

Three Centuries of Travel Writing by Muslim Women

Edited by: Siobhan Lambert-Hurley, Daniel Majchrowicz and Sunil Sharma

Publisher: Indiana University Press, 2022

Pages: Paperback, 532

The reviewer tweets @Ammad_Alee