Kom: Časopis za Religijske Nauke (Jan 2020)
Travel journals in Islam and their contribution to the development of social thought
Abstract
Travel journals are primarily a literary genre in which the writer expresses his impressions about the geographical and other characteristics of the region through which he travels, along with demographic, cultural, religious, cognitive and ethical characteristics of the people he encounters during his travels. This literary genre has an extraordinary potential to reveal the cognitive frameworks of the collective thought of a nation that is directly or indirectly manifested through various folk customs and traditions. Travel journals are beneficial in two ways when it comes to social thought. First, an author who visits new regions and meets a people that he has not had the opportunity to talk to before, informs his readers about the customs, beliefs, fears and hopes of that people. Demographic descriptions and analyses of all interesting, and sometimes strange, events that he witnessed, are a testimony to his modern readers about the existence of different views of the world, not so far away from them. Moreover, it will provide later readers with authentic information about how people once thought and how a community functioned. Secondly, an author who writes about his impressions after encountering a new tradition inadvertently makes his own judgment about it. In that way, he implicitly and indirectly points to the collective consciousness that he brings through his subjective judgments from the region which he belongs to, from his homeland. This aspect is most noticeable with later readers, because they can observe from a certain distance both the people to whom the author belongs to and the people about whom the author reports. If the author is affected by a certain phenomenon, it means that the collective consciousness of his people would not approve of such an action, and if he supported a tradition, it meant that his people would also agree with it. In this paper, we will try to offer a brief insight into the history of travel journals in Islam, and to present sociological potentials of some of the main travel journals prepared by Muslim authors during their arduous and difficult journeys.
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