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Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the literature of Abbasid maritime explorations in the Indian Ocean. The polyphonic texts of voyages reveal not a politically innocent scholarship that can be exhausted within the discourse of "cultural-interaction," but rather, a politically situated body of knowledge.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines Abbasid maritime explorations in the Indian Ocean by deconstructing the knowledge produced about it from the vantage point of power and politics in the 9th-10th centuries. The literature of seafaring and geography not only maps the maritime geography of the Indian Ocean from the vantage point of the Abbasid center, but also constructs the images of the Other by supplying observational knowledge, stereotypes, and imaginaries—human and geographic. It makes the "unknown" a culturally familiar, rationally knowable, and economically exploitable space and thus creates new meaning for the reader that privileges Abbasid priorities, ambitions, and identities. The knowledge of the Other is constructed as much from available information at the Abbasid scholar's disposal, which they appropriated for their interest and use, as from their own observations. This polyphonic and intertextual literature is not a politically innocent scholarship that can simply be exhausted within the scholarly discourse of "cultural-interaction," but rather, a politically situated body of knowledge whose critique and deconstruction help in de-naturalizing and de-universalizing its meaning.