‘Permission to go and see the ancient city’: women travellers’ encounters with Islam in the nineteenth century

This chapter analyses the travel accounts of four Victorian women, to assess the complexity of their responses to Islam, to Muslims, and to European colonial ideology. It is argued that these women offered British readers an alternative representation of Muslims to those dominant in popular culture of the time. Florentia Sale (1790-1853), Emily Eden (1797-1869), Lucie Duff Gordon (1863-1935) and Amelia B. Edwards (1831-92), in their travel accounts of Afghanistan, India and Egypt, included representations of Islam and the daily lives of Muslims in the countries through which they travelled. We evaluate the extent to which their own respective religious, ideological and social positions shaped the encounters about which they wrote. In doing so, the focus is on their responses to Muslim people and cultures in a bid to understand the contradictions and complexities of religious and racial prejudice, in a time of heightened imperial fervour in Britain.