Storytelling, Seafaring, and Travel Writing: The Arabian Gulf and the Indian Ocean - Hardcover

by Nuha Alshaar (Volume Editor), Beate Ulrike La Sala (Volume Editor), David Wilmsen (Volume Editor)

Storytelling, Seafaring, and Travel Writing advances research on Islamic travel writing, with a particular concentration on the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean. Ranging from the late antiquity to the present, this collection explores how storytelling, travelogues, and seafaring narratives have contributed to cultural discourses and intellectual traditions. By examining Arab seafaring and travel from new angles and through cross-cultural and interdisciplinary lenses, these essays challenge conventional interpretation. Essential for scholars and researchers in Islamic studies, philosophy, literary analysis, and cultural history, it illustrates how real and imagined narratives have profoundly influenced cross-cultural exchanges and the construction of moral and cultural paradigms over time.

Author Biography

Nuha Alshaar (PhD. University of Cambridge), is currently the Director of the Centre for Arabic Studies and Islamic Civilizations (CASIC), AUS. She has taught Arabic and Islamic Studies at the American University of Sharjah, the Institute of Ismaili Studies, and the University of Lisbon. She published Ethics in Islam: Friendship in the Political Thought of al-Tawḥīdī and His Contemporaries (2015); co-authored On God and the World: An Arabic Critical Edition and English Translation of Epistles 49-51 (OUP, 2019). She edited Muslim Sicily (EUP, 2024) and the Qur'an and Adab (OUP, 2017).

Beate Ulrike La Sala, Ph.D. in Philosophy (Freie Universität Berlin), is currently a research data consultant at Goethe Universität Frankfurt. Her research focuses on the shared intellectual traditions of classical Arabic, Hebrew, and Latin philosophy.

David Wilmsen, Ph.D. Arabic language and linguistics, University of Michigan, has spent more than thirty years in the Arabophone world, teaching Arabic language, Arabic linguistics, and Arab culture topics. He now lives in Amman, Jordan, pursuing research and writing about Arabic.