Para fortalecer el crecimiento de Galicia, considera que:

It is noteworthy that Westerners’ oldest destination of travel, seasonal migration, and colonisation should have received its name only in recent times. The term ‘Middle East’ is a neologism, invented in 1902 by US naval historian Alfred Thayer Mahan to designate the sea and land stretching between a farther East – India – and a nearer one, extending towards the westernmost territories of Asia and the eastern Mediterranean. The centre of Mahan’s idiosyncratic map was the Persian Gulf – anticipating later US inter- est in the area. The new epithet was immediately taken up by The Times, put into circulation by officialdom, and gradually extended to include the mass of land under Ottoman rule – stretching from the Black Sea to equatorial Africa and from India to the heart of the Mediterranean.1

‘Middle East’ did not supplant the considerably older term ‘Orient’, but was used interchangeably with it, replicating images of the West’s ‘other’ which characterised European discourses on the East. Both terms embody the ambiguous position of this area in these discourses and reflect an ethno- centric and hierarchical view of the world with the West at its centre and as its standard but, at the same time, indicating the relational positions of Europe and the Middle East and of the latter and the Far East. Raymond Schwab cap- tures this relationality in his classical distinction between the Indian Orient discovered by European Orientalists in the eighteenth century and that older Orient, part of the ‘European room’, the locus of Graeco-Roman and Judeo- Christian civilisations which had shaped Europe itself.2 _{Thus its midway}

position and very proximity to Europe, as well as the longevity of religious, cultural, and political exchanges with the West, defined the Middle East as a border zone. It was of the West, yet outside it, familiar, yet alien. It was the birthplace of Christianity and the two other revealed religions – Judaism and Islam – accorded by Westerners with the powers of pernicious apostasies. And it particularly threatened Christian Europe because Islam, which in the eighth century emerged as the area’s dominant religion, evolved as the basis of a succession of organised and militarised state systems. From the second

half of the fifteenth century until the late seventeenth century the Ottoman Empire literally encroached on Europe’s borders, claiming a supremacy in the Mediterranean, and challenging the very existence of a fragile and di- vided Christian West. The Ottoman challenge was not merely military. As Albert Hourani has pointed out, Westerners deemed the Muslim East so pernicious precisely because it presented an alternative culture dangerously close to home.3 _{Hence, on the one hand, the attraction to that culture and}

its site and, on the other, a repulsion perpetuated in the cultural stereo- types which remained such a staple of travel writing even after the reversal of power relationships. Historians usually date this reversal from the naval battle of Lepanto in 1572, which arguably eliminated the Ottoman Empire as a Mediterranean power. Thereafter, Europe’s relatively peaceful coexistence with this empire was intermittently broken in Ottoman forays into central Europe’s hinterland (culminating in the siege of Vienna in 1683). Yet for Europeans the sense of the Ottoman peril was real enough. Later, and until the outbreak of the First World War, the power of the vast supra-national em- pire was increasingly contested within the Middle East and in its European territories. The gradual disintegration of the Ottoman Empire notwithstand- ing, its domains still presented the power of a highly organised polity with a complex societal system – both relating to a unifying and powerful Islam. Though a British Middle-Eastern policy seeking influence in the area may be traced back to the Mediterranean campaign against post-revolutionary Napoleonic France, before the First World War this policy remained consis- tently Ottomanist and supported the territorial integrity of the weakening empire. With the exception of Cyprus and Egypt, occupied in 1878 and 1882 respectively, military occupation and direct intervention evolved only dur- ing the Great War and in relation to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Characteristically, intrusion took on multiple indirect forms: finance impe- rialism based on investments, intense missionary activity, and last, but most relevant here, the enormous collective effort known as ‘Orientalism’, defined and addressed throughout this chapter, of which travel writing was such a quintessential part.

One of the truisms of the scholarship on travel to, and travel writing on, the Middle East is that both were indices to Western and especially British political and military superiority. British curiosity about the Orient and dis- tinct Anglo-American travel cultures are taken as the ultimate sign of an asymmetry of power between Britain and the Middle East; and the Western traveller’s eye is identified as an ‘imperial eye’, performing a colonial act of appropriation.4 _{There never has developed, it is argued, a comparable}

Middle-Eastern interest in Britain. However, neither the British experience of travel nor the diverse representations of this experience were homogeneous.

They may not be understood solely as configurations of an insidious and all- powerful imperialism, nor simply as manifestations of a systematic discourse of power and knowledge. Elaborated by Edward Said in his epochal 1978 book, the term ‘Orientalism’ has become the single most influential paradigm in studies of travel writing and indeed of colonial cross-cultural exchanges. Although this paradigm is now habitually applied to exchanges between the West and non-Western cultures generally, it was within the Middle-Eastern context that Said developed it. Briefly, he defines ‘Orientalism’ as an aca- demic tradition, a style and, most importantly, a way of ‘making sense’ of the Middle East that draws on a binary epistemology and an imaginary geog- raphy that divides the world into two unequal and hierarchically positioned parts: the West and the East, the Occident and the Orient, Christianity and Islam, rationalism and its absence, progress and stagnation.5 _{‘Orientalism’}

denotes a discourse of power that is always and inescapably systematic, repetitive, and unchanging. It perpetuates stereotypes of the Middle East and Middle-Eastern people that, Said and others have argued, hardly changed over a millennium. These include the image of the oriental despot, the corrupt prophet Muhammad, the religiously fanatic Muslim, the lascivious oriental female, and the somewhat different image of the noble Arab nomad studied in this chapter. Real orientals are denied humanity, history, and the author- ity to speak about and represent themselves, an authority which Orientalist travel writing reserves for occidentals.6

Over recent years students of British travel writing have contested the Saidian paradigm and modified it considerably. Ali Behdad, Charles Issawi, Billie Melman, and Lisa Lowe among others have pointed out that trav- ellers’ representations were not homogeneous but were inflected by gender, class, and nationality. They have also indicated changes over time: early ex- plorers were quite different from ‘belated travellers’ (Behdad’s expression). Most importantly, some of the critics have doubted the utility of the binary model as the key to our understanding of British or other exchanges with the Middle East. They have also argued that the definition of the association between travel writing, the Orientalist traveller’s authority, the politics of colonialism, and colonial institutions needs to be rethought.7_{This chapter}

outlines the development of this kind of heterogeneous and diverse body of work. To highlight this diversity and the coexistence of distinct travel cultures and traditions of writing, it begins with a brief survey of two dom- inant models which were first formulated and conventionalised within the discourse on the Middle East, the pilgrimage and the domestic ethnography focused on Muslim everyday life. The field then narrows to discuss travel ex- perience and its representations in writings on ‘Arabia’, the term used in the twentieth century to designate the Arabian peninsula. It is to this particular

site that the term ‘belated travel’ is most easily applicable. Arabia emerged late as a destination of exploration, but quickly became both an object of political and economic interests and an iconic place. Its protracted and in- complete discovery spanned the century between the 1850s and 1950s, thus covering the late phase of imperialism. From about the 1950s, decolonisa- tion, Britain’s decline as a world power and empire, and, later, globalisation seem to have reversed Anglo-American relationships with the oil-supplying states of the peninsula. While these combined changes have impinged upon British Arabian travel writing, here too some features of older forms and strategies of representation have persisted.

Sacred and domestic geographies: an overview

From the fourth century and for well over a millennium, the pilgrimage was the dominant mode of travel through the Middle East and the most avail- able paradigm for travel writing. Significantly, this mode survived longest and retained its central place in the British discourse on the Orient even after the Reformation and secularisation. Religious travel to the sites of the stages of Christ’s life and suffering had an extraordinary revival during the nineteenth century. Moreover, the pilgrimage survived not only as a practice but also as a central organising metaphor of travel, drawn on and utilised by travellers, notably travellers in Arabia. Initially, pilgrimage had presented the very reverse of travel and had been perceived and represented as ‘anti- travel’. In Christian dogma and culture, curiositas, that is curiosity about the world, is a sin, related to the Original Sin and the Transgression, hence identified with humanity’s Fall. Yet even the earliest, fourth-century pilgrims to Palestine were not immune to ethnographic curiosity.8_{In addition to the}

tension between the pilgrim’s spiritual experience and his or her curiosity, Christian pilgrimage to the Holy Land retained another, between the praxis of a this-worldly experience and the notion of a wholly spiritual and allegori- cal journey. The peregrinatio por christo became an allegory of the Christian life and was increasingly regarded not as an actual voyage but as an experi- ence which Christian men and women could undergo everywhere: Jerusalem the Heavenly could be reached without travelling.9_{That allegorical interpre-}

tation and the notion of the voyage to the Holy Land persisted long after the decline of the pilgrimage movement in the West is best exemplified in constitutive texts such as John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678).

The revival of the actual practice of pilgrimage during the first half of the nineteenth century coincides with the rise of British interest in the Middle East and was facilitated by the transport revolution, including the introduc- tion of steamships in the Mediterranean and of carriages and, later, railways

to connect Ottoman coastal cities and ports. Towards the end of the century Jerusalem was connected to Damascus and the latter to the Muslim holy cities of Mecca and Medinah by the Hijazi railway. Organised pilgrimages, inaugurated by Thomas Cook in 1869 and catering for British and American clienteles, considerably popularised and commercialised the spiritual jour- ney, making it accessible to the middle classes. A Cook’s pilgrim’s package averaged 31 shillings a day inclusive of accommodation, a dragoman or trans- lator, a military escort, and imported British food. The tourists, disdainfully referred to by those travelling individually as ‘Cookites’, could choose be- tween a shorter route – including sacred places in Syria and the Lebanon and Palestine, and a longer one which also included Transjordan.10

Changes in the technology and infrastructure of travel do not account for the revival and predominance, recorded by a number of contemporary sources, of the pilgrimage, nor for the radical change in its form. This change has to do with the shift in the status of the journey to Palestine in evangelical faith and discourse, a discourse so vital to the making of the British and US middle classes. Evangelical reading of the Scriptures was literal rather than allegorical: hence evangelical travel in the Middle East was a practice meant to corroborate God’s revealed text. Literal biblism easily led to a millenari- anism which elevated the text, and especially the prophesies on a universal regeneration and the Second Coming, to literally realisable truths. Thus evan- gelicals perceive the Middle East as the actual locus of sacred events in the past, as well as of prophesied occurrences, and ‘read’ the terrain, Palestine’s flora and fauna and its inhabitants, as illustrations to ‘the book’.11_Exactly

such an illustrative approach is the most salient feature of key texts such as Edward Robinson, Biblical Researches in Palestine (1838), William Maclure Thompson, The Land and the Bible (1859), and Henry Tristram Baker, A

Natural History of the Bible and Flora and Fauna of Palestine (1867 and

1884), the last a survey of western Palestine sponsored by the London-based Palestine Exploration Fund. Robinson, a product of the Theological Semi- nary in New York and the century’s most influential biblical geographer and archaeologist, argued that all tradition and knowledge respecting Middle- Eastern places was ‘of no value except so far as it is supported by circum- stances known to us from the Scriptures’. Equipped with a 100-foot tape to measure the walls of Jerusalem, Bibles, early pilgrims’ accounts, and a com- pass, he toured the Sinai peninsula and Palestine in the 1830s and 1840s, soliciting data and place names from local peasants, whose Arabic (which he did not quite understand) he believed to have preserved biblical nomen- clature. His Researches, a seemingly unedited log, records Robinson’s every move to the exact hour. What most characterises his biblical science is a de-historicisation of the places he seeks to authenticate and the subsequent

collapse of place into text. Take for example his report on the Arab village of Dura, in the district of Hebron, which his party entered on 6 June 1838, at four o’clock in the afternoon and left at four-forty, after ‘a delay of forty minutes’. In this span, Robinson condenses a report on the place, noting that it has ‘no traces of antiquity’ and skimping over its present, then iden- tifies it with the biblical Adoraim. The countryside, which he starts touring at precisely six-forty that same afternoon, interests him for the flocks and crops of wheat it abounds with, attended by ‘reapers and gleaners’.12_Con-

temporary Arab agricultural methods are but an illustration to a supposedly biblical one, referred from a text in the Psalms, which Robinson reads liter- ally. Such de-historicisation is emblematic of myriad texts which construct a timeless and changeless Middle East, outside secular history. As Frances Power Cobbe, evangelical turned agnostic, a reformer and well-known fem- inist, notes in 1862: travellers were ‘Walking where they [the patriarchs and early Christians] walked, living in the same kind of houses, with the same kind of flowers and trees and animals around us, the same food and wine’.13

Writers trace connections between scriptural occurrences and contemporary ones, with each of the sets seen as equally concrete. The modern Arab who, being a Muslim, had no place in evangelical cosmogony, but also the modern Middle-Eastern Jew, are described as scriptural types, unchanged from the times of the Patriarchs, or that of Christ. A storm like the one experienced by the missionary to Syria, Augusta Mentor Mott on Lake Galilee, is the very same as the one that rocked the Saviour’s boat on that lake.14_{The in-}

terchangeability of past and present and of text and land made it possible for travellers to locate themselves in Christian eschatology as active agents and at the same time strengthened their sense of identity as ‘true Christians’. As proponents of the biblical sciences of scriptural archaeology, topography, and even natural sciences, these travellers also utilised the pilgrimage as a weapon against positivism, modern biblical criticism and, from the 1860s, Darwinism. Significantly, a considerable number of topographical Holy Land surveys and ethnographies were sponsored by evangelical bodies in Britain.15

Alongside the modernised pilgrimage, there evolved another distinct field of interest and writing which may be conveniently described as an ethnogra- phy of modern everyday life. Whereas the evangelical travelogue and the description or survey of antiquities (mainly Egyptian ones) largely ignored Muslim culture and society, the ethnography focused on Muslim customs and manners. Here again, the experience of travel was textual even as trav- ellers claimed, and in many cases drew on, actual experience and some- times participant observation.16 _{Travellers’ reports responded to and en-}

renditions of impressions acquired on the spot. The single most influential such text is the ensemble of Arabic tales transmitted orally and collectively known as Alf Laila wa- laila (Thousand and One Nights) first transcribed by Antoine Galland as Mille et Une Nuits between 1704–14, thus becom- ing a Western oriental text over a century before ever appearing in Arabic. Galland’s version was followed by editions for every taste and audience, from the traveller and Orientalist Edward William Lane’s savagely bowd- lerised family edition (1838–41) to the lucrative edition for collectors of erotica by Richard Burton (1882–4). Additionally, travellers had access to a plethora of translations from Turkish and Persian, as well as to pseudo- oriental tales fabricated in Britain and France, such as William Beckford’s

Vathek (1795). Significantly, these largely Western works of fiction drawing

on collective fantasy and considerable prejudice regarding Muslim practices acquired the status of ethnographic sources on the contemporary Middle East.

Already during the early Augustan Enlightenment, Orientalist authority was effectively contested, especially with regard to subjects like private life, sexuality, and the segregation of women and polygamy: subjects about which Western travellers knew very little, as Muslim law and custom practically excluded males from the segregated Middle-Eastern house. Domestic ethnog- raphy thus evolved largely as a female genre, initially aristocratic, then from the early nineteenth century distinctly middle class. The genre’s earliest and most influential exemplar is Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s so-called Turkish

Embassy Letters, compiled during her journey to Istanbul in 1717–18 as the

wife of Edward Wortley, Ambassador Extraordinary to the Sublime Porte (Sultan Ahmet III). Written to fifty-two female and male correspondents, widely circulated during Lady Montagu’s lifetime, and published posthu- mously in 1763, the Letters became a blueprint for the travel writing which integrated movement across open spaces with detailed accounts of domes- tic and largely feminine spaces. This formula was emulated by travellers throughout the Middle East as well as India and South America.17_Montagu’s

entire project of addressing cultural difference between Christianity and Islam, Britain and the Ottoman Empire, revolves around presentations of Muslim women’s veiling and the system of segregation within the Ottoman

Haremlik or women’s and children’s separate quarter. She famously argues

that:

’Tis very easy to see they have more Liberty than we have, no woman of