LE VOYAGEUR MUSULMAN MEDIEVAL ET LA FRONTIERE
MEDIEVAL MUSLIM TRAVELER AND THE FRONTIER

Summary/Abstract: The medieval Muslim lives with a very vivid consciousness of the border that separates the world not only from a geographic point of view. The Muslim traveler crosses multiple frontiers within the Islamic world, discovering different spaces whose features create climates with varying degrees of alterity. The journey, as part of the average medieval Muslim’s education, gives today's reader a measure of the identity fragmentation that the Islamic world experiences in the medieval period. Travelers like Ibn Ğubayr and Ibn Baṭṭūṭa are engaged in a creative dynamic of identity trough the relation between peripheries and center, inevitably marked by borders. The border appears to us in the travel stories as an insurmountable point, but also a window to other spaces. The frontier is also an opportunity for a homo islamicus, untiringly in search and move, such as Ibn Baṭṭūṭa.

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