Travels through Arabia and Other Countries in the East

"This is the archetypal text of a European traveller who travels through the Arab and Islamic world. Carsten Niebuhr came from the borderlands between Germany and Denmark, and he’s in the service of the Danish crown. He’s part of a Danish exploratory expedition, one of many European expeditions in the 18th century. He comes from a European background with a history of sectarian conflict. Catholics and Protestants had just fought many, many decades of war. Denmark was quite Puritan. In a sense, he has a sectarian mindset from home. He’s aware that people of the same religion quarrel amongst themselves and he thinks that’s an important thing. “Most histories of Islam don’t focus on India” So when he travels across the Arabian peninsula, and then further east, he records meticulously what people say. This is the time when the Wahhabi movement was emerging on the Arabian peninsula. He encounters the Yazidi imams in Yemen, the Ibadis in Oman and Shia in the Gulf and Bahrain. He also goes to Iraq. He visits Karbala and the holy places in Iraq. Everywhere, he hears of people being afraid of the Wahhabis, and trying to mobilize their own resources to counter them. He’s a witness to these early modern, intra-Muslim conflicts that are bursting out. But he’s also a European traveller, an early example of colonial recognition of religious boundaries amongst Muslims. Again, this book is a very important primary source, though it has also been criticized very often. It shows how Europeans started looking at the Middle East and the wider Islamic world and saying, ‘There are all these sects and they don’t get along.’ Not for him, because he was a foreigner. We’re already in a period when the European powers dominate the seas. He’s one of these classic European travellers who can cross borders. But for others, yes, it would have been harder, and he witnesses that hardening. He’s both a witness to the hardening of sectarian identities, and one of the people who makes them deeper, in a sense, by writing about them."