ABSTRACT

Like most world literatures, the Islamic world generated many different types of travel writing. While the trope of the Islamic pilgrimage (ḥajj) is well known, the impact of the imagery and concept of travel on poetic production from the Islamic world, particularly in Persian, has not merited the same scrutiny. Countering this tradition of neglect, this chapter introduces one of the most important and yet least-studied Persian travel narratives to an interdisciplinary readership: the Gift from the Two Iraqs (Tuhfat al-ʿIraqayn), composed in the middle of the twelfth century by the Persian poet Khāqānī Shirwānī. I examine this work's contribution to world literature and global poetics by documenting its deployment of key tropes from a longer tradition of thinking about mobility within Persian and Islamic poetics. Of particular interest is Khāqānī's method of transforming the riḥla, a discourse known for celebrating migration as a pious act, into a means of critiquing sovereign power.

Keywords: travel, riḥla, journey, Persian poetry, medieval Islam, sovereignty, poetic Critique

“BECA USE TRAVEL BROUGHT them, through suffering, into learning as a way of life,” writes Houari Touati in his recent intellectual history of travel in the medieval Islamic world, “Muslims saw [travel] as a figure for metamorphosis, coupled with the experience of pain.” The medieval Islamic understanding of travel as a stage of selftransformation, a horizon of new experience, and a harbinger of a new epistemology has many parallels in world history. The conceptual and practical centrality of travel to the historical formation of Islamic law and related Islamic disciplines, however, conferred on it a unique, and arguably unparalleled, importance in the world of Islam. Known in Arabic as riḥla (from the same root that generated “camel saddle”), soon after its institutionalization within Islamic culture, this journey subsequently also came to signify a literary genre.

The riḥla genre (which I refer to here also as the travel narrative) has been richly studied by many generations of Arabist scholarship, particularly with reference to its contribution to the consolidation of Islamic thought and doctrine. This chapter considers how this tradition relates to classical Persian texts that made travel into a metaphor. I show, not only how Persian literature drew on core Islamic traditions, but also how this poetry transformed Islam from within.