n recent times, there has been a growing interest in the literary production of Muslim women writers across the centuries, which has challenged the marginalisation of Muslim women’s writings in colonial and Orientalist narratives. However, Three Centuries of Travel Writing by Muslim Women, co-edited by Siobhan Lambert-Hurley, Daniel Majchrowicz and Sunil Sharma, breaks new ground, opening out a terra incognita, with its focus on that little-known genre, Muslim women’s travel writing which in turn challenges today’s widespread perceptions that in the past Muslim women had limited mobility. The book consists of writings (including translations) by forty-five Muslim women from lands ranging from Britain, Persia and Turkey to Egypt, Indonesia and South Asia. It spans the late Seventeenth Century to the mid-Twentieth.

The incisive Introduction by Lambert-Hurley and Majchrowicz points out that these accounts reveal “a bounty of newly discovered writing on social interactions between women across cultural and linguistic boundaries.” This is given further context by a historical account of Muslim travel narratives, including the impact of the colonial encounter, the printing press and new modes of travel, in the late Nineteenth Century, which led to a proliferation of travel writings by Muslim men and women. By this time “travel writing, including by women, had already become a major genre in Europe” and “was the quintessential genre of colonial literature.” Significantly, Malek Henim (1814-73), the first Muslim woman to produce a travel account in colonial times, was of both European and Ottoman descent and engaged with European accounts of Muslim life. However Three Centuries of Muslim Women’s Writing has a much wider scope. It goes back to the Mughal princess Jahanara and moves forward in time to Halide Edib, Atiya Fyzee, Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, Shaista Suhrawardy Ikramullah, Zaib-un-Nissa Hamidullah, Shams Pahlavi and Suharti Suwarto, among others.

Interestingly, instead of the word “travelogue” which, in the English language, is largely linked to a published (largely European male-dominated) genre, the co-editors have used the term “travel writing” as they have included texts “excerpted from autobiographical writings… which were not intended as standalone travel accounts.” Several “are private diary entries or letters that were never intended to be published.” Others are articles published in women’s magazines such as Tehrik-i-Niswan and Ismat. Several contributors belong to different generations of the same family, too: two women rulers of Bhopal and a young princess; several members of the emancipated Tyabji clan; also a literary mother, Qaisara Begum and her academic daughter Muhammadi Begum. There are also writings by women “from more ‘modest’ backgrounds” too such as Dilshad from Central Asia, Nur Begum from India and Suharti Suharto from Indonesia. All these writings provide personal insights into each author and also engage with public matters such as war and international/ national politics, feminism and women’s empowerment. The book recreates Palestine before Israel; Turkey before and after Ataturk, Arab lands under Ottoman rule, South Asia before and after Partition.

Three Centuries of Muslim Women’s Writing is divided into four parts with each section following a chronological order and a chapter each for every author including biographical details and extracts from travel accounts. Part I: Travel as Pilgrimage begins with the 17th Century, The Widow of Mirza Khalil; her name is unknown, but hers is the “first known hajj narrative by a woman” and describes her journey by caravan from Esfahan to Madina and Makkah; the Irani princesses Mehrmah Khanom and Sakineh Soltan Khanom tell of pilgrimages to Najaf, Kufa and Karbala; the English convert, Lady Evelyn Zainab Cobbold celebrates Arab culture and her Muslim identity in her 1934 book Pilgrimage to Mecca; the Hajj accounts of two women rulers of Bhopal, Nawab Sikander Jahan and Nawab Sultan Jahan in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries respectively, provide interesting insights into their lives and times. The other sub-continentals to write on pilgrimages include Begum Sarbuland Jang, Rahil Begum Shervaniyah, Qaisari Begum and Begum Hasrat Mohani. The educationalist Nur Begum, who wrote in verse, belonged to a Punjabi village; “hers is among the earliest travel accounts in Punjabi.”

There has been a growing interest in the literary production of Muslim women writers across the centuries, which has challenged the marginalisation of Muslim women’s writings in colonial and Orientalist narratives.

In Part I, the pilgrimage narratives were often written for personal circulation. However, the travel accounts in Part II: Travel as Emancipation and Politics were aimed at “the widest possible audience.” This includes the writing by the Ottoman, Melek Hanim, Zeyneb Hanoum and Selma Ekrem, who moved to the West in their quest for freedom and confronted different customs and prejudices of gender and/ or race.

Melek Hanim captures the differences between Turkey and Greece; Zeynab Hanoum witnesses suffragettes heckled at a London meeting; Selma Ekrem’s travels to New York include her amazement at travelling in the subway. The growing impact of the women’s movement across the world runs through this section. The famous Halide Edib, a Turkish revolutionary and nationalist, tells of her 1935 journey across India from Delhi, Lucknow, Lahore and Benares. The Egyptian feminist, writer and journalist Amina Said has a resolution passed supporting the Palestinian cause at the 1945-46 All India Women’s Conference in Hyderabad, Sindh. The Indian-born activist Shareefah Hamid Ali, represents India at the UN’s Commission on the Status of Women in 1947, but her impressions include her very first aeroplane journey. The Indonesian feminist Suharti Suwarto is much impressed by a different world in 1954: Communist Moscow.

Part III: Travel as Education, includes the Irani feminist and journalist Sediqah Dowlatbadi, who studies at the Sorbonne from 1923-1927. In 1942, Herawati Diah becomes the first Indonesian woman to receive a university degree in the United States. There are many pioneering sub-continentals here too. In 1905, Atiya Fyzee joins a London teacher’s training college; in 1933, educationalist and writer Iqbalunissa Husain attends Leeds University and Muhammadi Begum receives a scholarship to Oxford; in 1953, the teenage Mahr Al Nissa trains as a nurse in Ohio while her husband studies urology there. In marked contrast, travel and travel writing itself is considered education for the purdah-observing pre-teenage princess Maimoona Sultan, accompanying her mother-in-law, Sultan Jehan Begum of Bhopal, to many lands. In 1924, the future writer and politician Inam Fatima Habibullah, discards purdah and journeys with her husband and little daughter, to visit her three Anglicised sons at a public school in England: in 1956, the eminent journalist Zaib-un-Nisa Hamidullah is sent on an exchange programme to a dazzling new world: America.

Part IV: Travel as Obligation and Pleasure, begins with the Mughal Princess Jahanara, whose travels with her royal father and brother to Lahore and Kashmir include her spiritual journey into the Sufi Qadiriya order. In 1816-17, the forced migration and imprisonment of the Central Asian, Dilshad – poet, historian and teacher, leads her to the Sufi Qalandriya order. Many royal women travellers were born rebels too, including Saiyyid Salamah bin Said, a princess of Zanzibar and Muscat who marries a German; and the much-travelled, modernising Shams Pahlavi, daughter of the Iranian monarch Reza Shah. The Indonesian Nyonia Aulia Salim discusses the women’s movements in Indonesia and America and meets Eleanor Roosevelt. The journeys of the many subcontinental writers represented here collectively range from Bhutan and Iran to Switzerland and Britain, often incorporating observations on the Muslim world, women’s lives abroad or feminist issues. These writers include the legendary writer, feminist and educationist Rokeya Sakhwat Hossain, the royal Nazli Begum of Janjira (sister of Atiya Fyzee); her enlightened Tyabji cousin, Saifya Jabir Ali; the Indo-Persian educationalist Sughra Subzvari; the writer and reformist Sughra Humayun Mirza; the famous Pakistani writer, scholar, politician and diplomat Shaista Suhrawardy Ikramullah, who captures Britain at the outbreak of World War II.

This is a truly fascinating book with an astonishingly wide span and replete with little-known information – and with incisive links through this travel project’s ongoing website, Accessing Muslim Lives.

The reviewer is a writer, critic and literary journalist