Levantine and Arabian Travels:European and American Experiences (Part 1)*

Abstract

European and American travel experiences in the Levant and Arabia serve, in the last analysis, as a treatise on the psychology of human quest rather than mere records of individual itineraries. During the Crusades, this quest was prompted by the desire for  religious fulfillment augmented by the innate European craving for the mysterious and the exotic. The Renaissance evinced a consuming curiosity about Islam's holy cities in Arabia; a curiosity that had been fuelled by the Crusader wars against the Muslim enemy. European travel to Arabia, across the centuries up to the nineteenth, was a hazardous adventure into a mysterious and forbidden land; an adventure which whetted European craving for travel. By the nineteenth century, Levantine and Arabian travel had developed into a science in which experts - Egyptologists, and other archaeologists, Arabists, sociologists, and Biblical scholars practiced their respective fields of specialization. The early twentieth century saw the rise of a new type of travel writer; that of the archaeologist/political officer, whose activities, for the first time since the Middle Ages, were part and parcel of British imperial interests. Arabian travel, in the traditional sense, came to an end in the 1950's, with the completion of the exploration of the Empty Quarter. European and American travel experiences in the Levant and Arabia, as surveyed in this article, being a prototype of a treatise on quest psychology, serve, hopefully, to invite yet further research on the psychology of quest..