IX. VE X. YÜZYILDAKİ ARAP SEYYAHLARIN DİPNOTU: BEDEN
THE FOOTNOTE OF ARAB TRAVELERS IN THE 9TH AND 10TH CENTURIES: THE BODY

Summary/Abstract: Travel books have been used as a source in very few of the historical studies on the “body”. The first reason for it is in the Middle Ages that works travelogues began to be written in Europe. The second reason is the distrust of travelogues. This is because travelogues contain both fiction and reality. For this reason, researchers ignore fiction in most travelogue studies. They, only care about the truth. In fact, in the fictions in the travelogue are also real. Because they give information about their own time. But,a lot of researchers reject it. Contrary to the Eurocentric view, we can say that Eastern travelers mastered the subject of “body” at a very early date. The aim of this article is to understanding the “body perception” in the East in the 9th and 10th centuries, by making use of travel boks written by Arabic travelers, and to contribute to body history studies. Therefore, in our study; we used that the travel books, that written in the 9th and 10th centuries, of Arabic travellers and geographers. The authors of the travel writings we examined in this article are: Ya’kûbi, İbn Hurdazbih, Süleyman el-Tâcir, Ebû Zeyd el- Hasan b. Yezid el-Sirûfi and İbn Havkal. Also, in this article we have shown that the relationship between body and power (before the 18th century) had a complex structure of relationships also in the 9th and 10th centuries.

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