Constructing Oriental Interiors...

Proceedings of The East in The Eyes of The West International Conference of the Faculty of Arts, Kuwait University, Nov. 26-28, 2013. Presentation at conference 27/11/2013.  Released 04/12/2013 [under publication] by Kuwait University, Faculty of Arts. , 2014

Women travellers from Great Britain, France, Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, Austria and America explored, visited, worked and resided in regions of the East that were considered “proper and safe for dynamic men only” (Smith, 1887). The mammoth body of writings by women travellers of the 18th and 19th centuries, that claim to be eyewitness descriptions of the female microcosmos, provide a rich and detailed interpretation of the Orient, including a feminine version, a female gaze. European and American women identified with the so-called Other, expressed their solidarity and participated in Muslim women’s daily domestic life, customs, female social gatherings, religious celebrations and feasts. As a result, they accused male travellers- who had written about domestic manners in the East and the position of women in Islam of misinforming or misleading their readers, stressing that their accounts were based on second or third-hand information, their unrestrained imagination and exotic fantasies.

International Journal of Applied Linguistics and English Literature, 2017

One of crucial issues which Western travel writers in their journeys to the Orient specifically in the height of colonialism in the nineteenth has addressed is Oriental women. Entrapped and conditioned by their cultural baggage and operating on the basis of Orientalist discourse, they have mostly presented a reductive image of their Oriental female travelees as exotic, seductive, sensual, secluded, and suppressed, in lieu of entering into a cultural dialogue and painting their picture sympathetically and respectfully. To convey their lasciviousness, they have expatiated on Oriental harems and to display their oppression foregrounded their veil and ill-treatment by their allegedly insensitive and callus menfolks. In the same period in the context of the Great Game the politically oriented Western travel writers in particular the British ones set out on a voyage to Central Asia where they encountered ethnic Turkmen. Besides gathering intelligence, the travel writers devoted considerab...

Archiv orientální. Journal of African and Asian Studies Vol. 89, 2021

This article is based on a close reading of eighteen works describing journeys from Istanbul to the Eastern provinces of the Ottoman Empire and to Europe and the United States undertaken by Ottoman men and women in the last half century of the existence of the Ottoman Empire. It centers on the question of self-perception and selfunderstanding, asking how the author of the travelogue expresses his or her sense of affiliation and belonging when confronted with "Otherness." Situating travelogues at the intersection of geography, genre, gender, and textual (re)constructions of the traveling subject and his or her perception of "the foreign," the article compares the travels of women and men to the West and to the East. The analysis suggests that the differences in Ottoman travelers' views were not only based on gender but also on other factors such as social status or the time in which their travels took place. While in the West men's and women's allegiances more substantially differed, in the East there were strong similarities between the types of identification men and women foregrounded in their works. The article shows that whether they headed toward the West or the East, these men and women traveled primarily as Istanbulites.

2020

The expeditions of Western travellers to the East and their travel writings, although they are biased and non-objective, are important texts in the shaping of Orientalism. In this context, most travellers head towards to the Ottomans and write down their own observations. Unfortunately, most of the western travellers preferred to romanticize the east and the Ottoman Empire and to express their experiences and the mystical impressions they use a marginalizing language. In this article, prominent western travellers in the 17th and 18th centuries, Richard Knolles, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Richard Chandler and their writings and letters on Eastern culture, Ottoman and Turkish identity have been examined and interpreted comparatively. It is emphasized that there are as much differences as similar points about Ottoman and Turkish identity in the works of travellers discussed in this article.

The question of space and place's relevance has slowly been gaining momentum in historiography for several years now. To an increasing extent, historians, especially those in the field of urban history, are asking questions inspired by their colleagues in geography and philosophy departments. The volume currently under review is an interesting addition to this body of work; yet it is also very much situated in the academic debate on Orientalism and 'Islamic cities'. As the editors rightfully indicate, much of this discussion has unfortunately ignored the urban locality of these cities. The editors aim to scrutinize the idea of the Islamic city through the lens of European travel writing, employing the term as a heuristic device to analyse how the cities of the 'Muslim world' were represented by travellers from Europe and America. Though it is obvious that employing terms such as 'Islamic city' and 'Muslim world' is problematic, the authors convincingly argue that the categories are vital both to understanding the context of European travel writing on 'the Muslim World' and further problematizing the idea of Orientalism as a homogeneous project of representing 'the West's' most significant 'Other'. The volume covers a broad array of geographies-from North Africa to the Indian subcontinent-through the lenses of travellers from Europe and the United States between the eleventh and twentieth century.

Prose Studies, 2014

Al-Arabiyya, 2021

2008

Social prejudices are generally effective at the perception of an alien culture. It’s believed that the domestic culture is superior. According to the most of the orientalists there are two basic differences between the West and the East. The first one is that the East is the home of venery; the other aspect is the barbarism of the East. In travelbooks written by European sojourners the Ottoman country is represented like the countries in Elf Leile ve Leile. The major theme of many works and travelbooks written by Europeans about the East is the erotic image and queer sexuality of the East. According to European travellers, Eastern women are enticing, mysterious, and deceptive. They represent the woman as a “source of venery” and not as the number of a family. After a brief discussion about the historical and scholarly value of travelbooks, the orientalists’ views on the Eastern women especially the Turkish women are analyzed in this study.