Shifting the Telos of Travel and Intercultural Brokerage through Islamic Diplomacy: Ahmad ben Mohamed al-Kerdoudi's Embassy to Nineteenth-Century Spain

This article sheds light on the art of travel in the Islamic Maghreb, particularly with reference to diplomacy. While the traditional formation of travel came to be associated with an Islamic phenomenology, this paper argues that in the modern period the art of travel in the Islamic Maghreb underwent a paradigmatic shift in terms of its purposes and poetics. The first pertains to the expansion of its telos from an exclusively experiential religious horizon to the negotiation of various secular, particularly political undertakings.The second relates to the critical situatedness of travellers/diplomats as they navigated the ethical acuities of pursuing representational faithfulness while also doing their best not to hurt the sensibilities of the Moroccan Sultan or the interests of the state which they represented. Within the Moroccan ambassador Ahmad al-Kerdoudi's travelogue about nineteenth-century Spain, the enterprise of intercultural mediation reflects the porousness of the Mediterranean world not only in the spheres of theology and culture but also in that of diplomacy.