8 - “Always Conceal . . . thy Tenets, thy Treasure, and thy Travelling”: Irony and Ambiguity in Ilija Trojanow’s Travel Narratives about the Middle East

Summary

IN 2003 ILIJA TROJANOW participated together with a group of Indian Muslims in the hajj, the sacred Muslim pilgrimage to the Saudi-Arabian cities Mecca and Medina. Following this experience, he first published a travelogue of his pilgrimage under the title Zu den heiligen Quellen des Islam: Als Pilger nach Mekka und Medina (2004; Mumbai to Mecca, 2007) and later relied on his first-hand impressions to create a fictional account of Muslim cultures in the historical novel Der Weltensammler (2006; The Collector of Worlds, 2008). The two narratives are different in nature: one is a nonfictional, journalistic essay, the other, a fictional retelling of the life of the nineteenth-century British explorer Sir Richard Francis Burton. Despite the stylistic differences, the narratives have in common that they both focus on male European travelers who wish to fully participate in the Muslim culture at their destinations. Transcultural interactions have come to define the author as much as his protagonist, and many critics assign to Trojanow the same label he chose for the fictional Burton, “Weltensammler.” However, the fact that these two narratives deal prominently with a religious culture that restricts participation rights according to faith and ritual initiation raises questions about the legitimacy of such interactions. I will show how the reception of Trojanow's travelogue reveals the problematic nature of his depictions of Islam and then demonstrate that Der Weltensammler offers a response to these critiques by describing a nuanced and multifaceted religious experience. In referring to Nelson Goodman's concept of “worldmaking,” I argue that the novel introduces a model of intercultural equality and a notion of travel that is based as much on spatial as on cognitive mobility. While the novel presents a much stronger notion of transculturalism than the travelogue, both models remain caught up in male European privilege.

At the heart of the critical reception of Trojanow's hajj lies the question of faith. The author raised more than a few eyebrows by traveling to the sacred cities during the time of the year when Mecca and Medina are strictly off-limits to non-Muslims.