Suraiya Faroqhi and Randi Deguilhem, eds. Crafts and Craftsmen of the Middle East: Fashioning the Individual in the Muslim Mediterranean . London: I.B. Tauris, 2005. 380 pages, figures, tables, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. Cloth US$69.50 ISBN 1-86064-700-6

Abstract

Letters; the historical voice of the exile, Savyida Salme; and the marginalized women's voices in Ibn Battuta's narrative. The first point in Euben's core argument becomes self-evident from these juxtapositions, although previous studies that neglected the deep-rooted traditions of Islamic travel have presumed Muslims only began traveling in any significant way during the eighteenth century as they turned to the West. The second point involves the tendency of travelers to rely on binary oppositions, alternately undermining and reinforcing them as they experience the unfamiliar. This dynamic applies transculturally and transhistorically in Muslim and non-Muslim men's representations of women as indices of a culture's moral level. Such misrepresentations continue into our own day with Muslim travelers to the West such as Sayyid Qutb, whom Euben mentions, and orientalist travelers to the Islamic world. The third point, that travel does not necessarily remove prejudices but can just as easily reinforce them, applies to all the travelers whom Euben adduces. However, this point is most pertinent, because perhaps most counterintuitive, for the Arab (formerly) Muslim woman traveler. Salme, who experienced confinement, exile, conversion, discrimination, and penury, undermines essentialist notions that women are somehow more empathetic or that non-Europeans are invariably antiimperialist. Even as she deplores prejudices against women in the Islamic world and the West, experiences racial discrimination in Europe, and falls into poverty, she voices racial bigotry and imperialist ambitions regarding sub-Saharan Africans and condescending attitudes towards those not born into aristocracy. All the narratives Euben analyzes display these contradictions; her examination, rather than elision, of this dissonance should guide us not only when critiquing colonialism and neocolonialism, but also when theorizing as postcolonial critics. The final chapter addresses such imperatives by assessing the "new cosmopolitanism" (175). As Euben reiterates, globalization is not new, although the scope of it may be. We therefore have much to learn from prc-modern travel narratives within and between the West and the Islamic world, as well as from more recent accounts. Bernadette Andrea University of Texas at San Antonio