Siobhan Lambert-Hurley et al., "Three Centuries of Travel Writing by Muslim Women" (Indiana UP, 2022)

Siobhan Lambert-Hurley, Daniel Majchrowicz, and Sunil Sharma's edited anthology Three Centuries of Travel Writing by Muslim Women (Indiana University Press 2022) is a collection of travel writings from the late 19th century to the early and mid-20th century. It captures the fascinating lives of diverse Muslim women as they travelled for religious pilgrimage, political reasons, education, and for leisure. This anthology not only recovers the voices of women from a broad range of languages, Urdu, Punjabi, Turkish, and Persian but also provides the historical and cultural contexts necessary to understand the full significance of what these women were trying to convey of their experiences in their context. Such fascinating travel excerpts include those of Mirza Khalil and the Nur Begum’s pilgrimage to hajj or those of the Egyptian Huda Shaarawi or Amina Said’s travel related to their thinking of feminism, the Indonesian communist Suharti Suwarto’s visit to the Soviet Union or the Indian nurse Mehr al-Nisa navigating new life in Ohio, to name just a few of the 45 examples documented here. The historical experiences of Muslim women offers a fascinating and understudied point of insight into the role of imperial, colonial, and global history. 

The original texts gathered are accessible via the accompanying website for you to check out and explore. This anthology will be of interest to anyone working on travel, colonial history, Muslim women, and comparative literature, Islamic Studies. It will also be an excellent resource in many courses that cover a range of topics be it religious piety, feminism, travel, travel writing, and much more.

Shobhana Xavier is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Queen’s University. More details about her research and scholarship may be found here and here. She may be reached at shobhana.xavier@queensu.ca. You can follow her on Twitter via @shobhanaxavier.

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