When thinking of intrepid travelers from past centuries, we don’t usually put Muslim women at the top of the list. And yet, the stunning firsthand accounts in this collection completely upend preconceived notions of who was exploring the world.

Editors Siobhan Lambert-Hurley, Daniel Majchrowicz, and Sunil Sharma recover, translate, annotate, and provide historical and cultural context for the 17th- to 20th century writings of Muslim women travelers in ten different languages. Queens and captives, pilgrims and provocateurs, these women are diverse. Their connection to Islam is wide-ranging as well, from the devout to those who distanced themselves from religion. What unites these adventurers is a concern for other women they encounter, their willingness to record their experiences, and the constant thoughts they cast homeward even as they traveled a world that was not always prepared to welcome them.

Perfect for readers interested in gender, Islam, travel writing, and global history, Three Centuries of Travel Writing by Muslim Women provides invaluable insight into how these daring women experienced the world—in their own voices.

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SIOBHAN LAMBERT-HURLEY is Professor of Global History at the University of Sheffield. She is author of Elusive Lives: Gender, Autobiography, and the Self in Muslim South Asia; (with Sunil Sharma) Atiya’s Journeys: A Muslim Woman from Colonial Bombay to Edwardian Britain; and Muslim Women, Reform and Princely Patronage: Nawab Sultan Jahan Begam of Bhopal. She is editor (with Anshu Malhotra) of Speaking of the Self: Gender, Performance, and Autobiography in South Asia and of A Princess’s Pilgrimage: Nawab Sikandar Begum’s A Pilgrimage to Mecca.

DANIEL MAJCHROWICZ is Assistant Professor of South Asian Literature and Culture at Northwestern University. He is author of The World in Words: Travel Writing and the Global Imagination in Muslim South Asia and A Journey to Mecca and London: The Travels of an Indian Muslim Woman, 1909-1910.

SUNIL SHARMA is Professor of Persianate and Comparative Literature at Boston University. He is author of Mughal Arcadia: Persian Literature in an Indian Court; Amir Khusraw: The Poet of Sultans and Sufis; Persian Poetry at the Indian Frontier: Mas’ud Sa’d Salman of Lahore, and (with Siobhan Lambert-Hurley) Atiya’s Journeys: A Muslim Woman from Colonial Bombay to Edwardian Britain. He is editor (with Roberta Micallef) of On the Wonders of Land and Sea: Persianate Travel Writing.

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Many consider the autobiography to be a Western genre that represents the self as fully autonomous. The contributors to Speaking of the Self challenge this presumption by examining a wide range of women’s autobiographical writing from South Asia.

Expanding the definition of what kinds of writing can be considered autobiographical, the contributors analyze everything from poetry, songs, mystical experiences and diaries, to prose, fiction, architecture and religious treatises. The authors they study are just as diverse: a Mughal princess, an eighteenth-century courtesan from Hyderabad, a nineteenth-century Muslim prostitute in Punjab, a housewife in colonial Bengal, a Muslim Gandhian devotee of Krishna, several female Indian and Pakistani novelists and two male actors who worked as female impersonators.

The contributors find that in these autobiographies the authors construct their gendered selves in relational terms. Throughout, they show how autobiographical writing – in whatever form it takes – provides the means towards more fully understanding the historical, social and cultural milieu in which the author performs herself and creates her subjectivity.