Reversing the Colonial Gaze

"This is a book about travelers--a group of twelve travelers who roamed around the globe mostly in the Nineteenth but some a bit earlier and some a bit after that crucial century. Somewhere between the Apostolic twelve and the twelve Shi'i Imams, this book determined the course of its narrative. Some of these travelers have been individually or in pairs of two or three studied before-but in this collective gathering, and with the totality of their written prose (and not just the fragment that deals with Europe) have never been examined in this particular manner that I do here in this book. These travelers wrote their travelogues in Persian, my mother tongue, and I write this book about them in English, the colonial language we postcolonial subjects have inherited from our conquerors and made our own. When I am done writing this book and it is published, it can be read by people throughout the world, in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and then in immigrant communities around the planet-not because anyone one of them is British, but because they and their ancestors were the subjects of British imperialism. These travelers have been abused by generations of their readers who have reduced their travelogues only to the part where thy write about Europe. But Europe was only part of their travels-they began writing about their travels and experiences long before they reached Europe, and long after they had left Europe. These travelers began writing their account while they were still in Iran or in India and they roamed the globe writing about what they saw and what they did. In this book I have restored the dignity of their actual words, the totality of their travels and thoughts, the sense of their prose and purpose, before and beyond Europe. Against the grain of the manner in which they have been systematically abused, I have not privileged Europe as the sole destination of their purpose, for it was not-nor have I ignored the European fragment of their journeys. The result is the exposure of a full-bodied moral imagination that is in fact reversing the colonial gaze cast subsequently upon them and with them us, ignoring the truth that they were in fact remapping the colonial world"--