Journey to Europe

Summer 1912. Jurji Zaydan, born in Beirut and settled in Cairo, founder of the journal al-Hilal and novelist of Arab history, travels through France, England and Switzerland. He warns from the outset: no travel diary, no railway stations, no hotels. What he wants is to look at the civilization the East has been imitating for a century and to sort out what it should take from it and what it should leave.

From Marseille to Paris, he observes everything: government, schools, theaters, the advertising that covers the walls, fashions, tipping, the punctuality of the French and their pride in being free. In the Latin Quarter he meets the Egyptian students sent abroad on official missions, stops before Napoleon's tomb, and looks in the Louvre and the Bibliothèque nationale for traces of the East, down to Harun al-Rashid's gift to Charlemagne. At Versailles he comes upon the portrait of Emir Abd el-Kader.

Then London, Paris's rival: Parliament, the Tower, the British Museum, English pride and individualism, the English way of colonizing. Cambridge, Manchester and its Syrian merchants, Oxford, and finally Lake Geneva and Voltaire's house at Ferney.

Admiring without being dazzled, courteous without being complacent, Zaydan holds up to the Europe of before 1914 a mirror from the East. What do we see of ourselves when someone else looks at us?