A Pilgrimage to Nejd


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Literature of Travel and Exploration: A to F


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Containing more than 600 entries, this valuable resource presents all aspects of travel writing. There are entries on places and routes (Afghanistan, Black Sea, Egypt, Gobi Desert, Hawaii, Himalayas, Italy, Northwest Passage, Samarkand, Silk Route, Timbuktu), writers (Isabella Bird, Ibn Battuta, Bruce Chatwin, Gustave Flaubert, Mary Kingsley, Walter Ralegh, Wilfrid Thesiger), methods of transport and types of journey (balloon, camel, grand tour, hunting and big game expeditions, pilgrimage, space travel and exploration), genres (buccaneer narratives, guidebooks, New World chronicles, postcards), companies and societies (East India Company, Royal Geographical Society, Society of Dilettanti), and issues and themes (censorship, exile, orientalism, and tourism). For a full list of entries and contributors, a generous selection of sample entries, and more, visit the Literature of Travel and Exploration: An Encyclopedia website.




The Accidental Tourist, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, and the British Invasion of Egypt in 1882


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This fascinating account highlights the extent the world's major powers will go to as they seek to insure their own interests and agendas, despite the wishes of those whose countries they invade and occupy. The Accidental Tourist profiles Wilfrid Scawen Blunt's involvement in the so-called Arabi Revolt in 1882. It addresses Blunt's tireless efforts on behalf of the Egyptian Nationalists to mediate the differences between Britain and Egypt and prevent a British invasion of Egypt. It highlights what amounted to a government cover-up of the actions of certain governmental officials to precipitate the invasion by falsifying intelligence information and manipulating the press. It also takes to task the scholarly tradition of maligning Blunt and questioning the accuracy of his version of the events of 1882. Blunt was branded a traitor in the House of Commons. This book was written to set the record straight. It is ideal reading for those interested in the field of Middle Eastern, Imperial or Colonial history and will provide readers with a better understanding of the real story of imperialism that went on at the time and is still going on in the Middle East today.




حج الى ربوع نجد، مهد قبائل العرب 1878-1879 م


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"الرّحّالة البريطانية الليدي آن بلنت سيّدة مثقّفة ورحّالة جريئة صادقة أضافت إلى أدب الرّحلات الغربية في الشرق نصوص رحلتين فريدتين إلى الجزيرة الفُراتية وشمالي جزيرة العرب، فكانت من أوائل الرّائدات لسلسلة من الرّحّالات النساء زُرن مشرقنا العربي وكتبن عنه. بعدما نشرنا كتاب آن "عشائر بدو الفُرات"، يسرّنا أن نردفه بهذا الكتاب حول رحلتها الثانية والأخيرة برفقة زوجها ولفريد، فيه تروي بقالب شائق ولغة سلسلة ممتعة كيف عقدا العزم على القيام برحلة أخطر وأبعد إلى نجد "مهد قبائل العرب"، لما سمعاه عنها من أبناء العشائر في الجزيرة الفُراتية، لكونها منبع أصولهم وموئل عزّهم، كانت الفكرة تنطوي على مخاطرة كبيرة ومغامرة رائعة استثارت إهتمام الزّوجين، فما لبثا في شتاء عام 1878 أن واعدا ""خويهما"" البدوي التّدمُري محمد العبد الله العرُوق، ليقود القافلة من دمشق إلى شمالي جزيرة العرب، مروراً بحوران واللّجاة والحماد ووادي السرحان والجوف وصحراء النفود، حتى مدينة حائل معقل الأمير محمد بن عبد الله آل رشيد، فكانا رابع الرّحّالين الغربيين الذين زاروا حائل آنذاك، من بعد بالغريف عام 1862 وغوارماني عام 1864 وداوتي عام 1877."




A Female Poetics of Empire


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Many well-known male writers produced fictions about colonial spaces and discussed the advantages of realism over romance, and vice versa, in the ‘art of fiction’ debate of the 1880s; but how did female writers contribute to colonial fiction? This volume links fictional, non-fictional and pictorial representations of a colonial otherness with the late nineteenth-century artistic concerns about representational conventions and possibilities. The author explores these texts and images through the postcolonial framework of ‘exoticism’, arguing that the epistemological dilemma of a ‘self’ encountering an ‘other’ results in the interrelated predicament to find poetic modalities – mimetic, realistic and documentary on the one hand; romantic, fantastic and picturesque on the other – that befit an ‘exotic’ representation. Thus women writers did not only participate in the making of colonial fictions but also in the late nineteenth-century artistic debate about the nature of fiction. This book maps the epistemological concerns of exoticism and of difference – self and other, home and away, familiarity and strangeness – onto the representational modes of realism and romance. The author focuses exclusively on female novelists, travel writers and painters of the turn-of-the-century exotic, and especially on neglected authors of academically under-researched genres such as the bestselling novel and the travelogue.







The Gospel in North Africa


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The Gospel in North Africa


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Middle East Tapestry


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Middle East Tapestry represents the final installment of my thirty-plus years living and working in the Arab and Muslim worlds. The previous works, Masr and At the Margins, covered outlying areas of the region, including Egypt, South Asia, and West Africa. This book marks a return to the central lands of Islam in the Arabian Peninsula, including Saudi Arabia and Yemen, with lengthy excursions into lands to the north, chiefly Jordan and the West Bank. The title, Middle East Tapestry, was chosen after careful consideration of several alternatives. The term "Middle East" simply seemed the best descriptor of the area inhabited by the world's nearly four hundred million Arab Muslims and makes up in familiarity what it may lack in definitional precision and nuance. The word "tapestry"--technically, an elaborate piece of textile work with pictures woven into the warp and weft--was also carefully chosen. It more generally describes "an intricate combination of things or sequence of events, not necessarily related," that seemed to answer to the complexity of the area I am describing: "a tapestry of cultures, races, and customs." Indeed, there is hardly a thing in the history of the area that is not intricate or complex.




Western Arabia and The Red Sea


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First published in 2006. Produced during the Second World War for the use of commanding officers, this work is a complete guide to the lands of Western Arabia. Sections on geology, geography, the coasts, climate, vegetation, history, administration, people, public health, agriculture, economy, ports and towns offer readers a unique military perspective on this important region. Supplemented with hundreds of maps, photographs and figures, this book will be of great use to anyone with an interest in Arabia.