Towards a Reconstruction of the Intellectual Past: ʿAlī Ibn Sālim al-Wardānī and His Al-Riḥlah al-Andalusīyah

Marek M. DZIEKAN

Abstract

The aim of the paper is a presentation and analysis of the account made by ʿAlī al- Wardānī’, a Tunisian official and writer, of his trip to Spain in 1887. While the nineteenth century Arab travel literature is quite rich and an object of extensive research, al-Wardānī’s journey was only briefly discussed in 1937 by Henri Pérès and has not been studied more deeply since that time. Al-Wardānī came from Tunisia and arrived in Istanbul together with Khayr al-Dīn, who highly appreciated his talents. During his service in Turkey, Sultan Abdülamid sent a group of intellectuals to study collections of Arabic manuscripts in Europe. Al-Wardānī found himself as a translator in a group led by Muḥammad Maḥmūd al-Shinqīṭī, which had the aim of examining, among other things, the Arab collections at El Escorial and in Andalusian libraries. The result of the expedition was a report prepared for the sultan by al-Shinqīṭī and a memoir of the journey written by al-Wardānī, the latter originally published in parts in various issues of the journal al-Ḥāḍirah from 1888 to 1890 and as a separate, fully edited book only in 1984.