The Centre for Arabic Geographical Literature — Irtiyad al-Afaq

When Nouri al-Jarrah speaks about the Centre for Arabic Geographical Literature, he tends to describe it not as an institution but as a rescue mission. The vast body of writing that Arab travellers produced over more than a thousand years — the diaries of pilgrims and merchants, the reports of envoys sent to distant courts, the astonished accounts of men who crossed deserts and oceans to see how other peoples lived — had never been gathered into a single library. Individual manuscripts survived in archives and private collections, some famous, most forgotten. What did not exist was a place that treated this scattered inheritance as one thing: a literature, with its own history, its own aesthetics, and its own claim on the modern Arab imagination. That is the gap the Centre was built to fill.

Established in the year 2000 and operating from two capitals at once — Abu Dhabi and London — the Centre took shape under the patronage of the Emirati poet Mohammad Ahmad Al-Suwaidi, with al-Jarrah serving as its Director General. From the beginning it carried a double character that reflected its founder-director: it was scholarly, insisting on rigorous editing of old texts, and it was creative, alert to travel writing as a living art rather than a museum piece. Al-Jarrah has often framed the whole enterprise around a single idea — that travel literature is fundamentally about the encounter between the self and the other, and that reviving it is a way of "reforming the relationship between the self and the other" at a moment when the Arab world badly needs exactly that.

Travel literature is the record of the moment one culture looks another in the face — and the Centre exists to keep that gaze alive.

A library that did not exist before

The Centre's most concrete achievement is a bookshelf. Over two decades it has published dozens of volumes — more than sixty by most counts — that together form, for the first time in Arabic culture, a standalone library of travel and geographical literature. Al-Suwaidi once imagined the "Irtiyad al-Afaq" series might one day reach a hundred books; the project has moved steadily toward that horizon. The volumes fall into several strands. There are old Arab journeys published in carefully verified critical editions, each accompanied by an introduction or a full scholarly study that sets the text in its time. There are contemporary travel narratives written by living Arab authors, proof that the genre did not die with the classical age. And there are translations — journeys made by foreign travellers and writers into the Arab world, rendered into Arabic so that Arab readers can see themselves through others' eyes.

More recently the Centre has turned part of its attention to the United Arab Emirates specifically, publishing travels and geographical studies devoted to the country in order to close an obvious gap in that field. The publishing itself runs through Dar Al-Suwaidi, in cooperation with the Arab Institute for Research and Publishing in Beirut, while translated works and diaries have appeared in partnership with Dar Al-Mutawassit in Milan. Earlier collaborations extended to the Cultural Foundation in Abu Dhabi and to Katara Cultural Village in Doha — the latter producing, among other things, a Turkish-language volume, Land of Mutual Acquaintance, edited and co-written by al-Jarrah, designed to introduce non-Arab readers to the tradition of Arabic travel writing.

The symposium and the wider mission

Around the publishing programme the Centre has built a living intellectual community. Its annual "Symposium of Arab and Muslim Travellers: Discovering the Self and the Other" gathers scholars, writers and researchers to keep the conversation about travel and encounter renewed each year. Read together, the library and the symposium express a single conviction that runs through all of al-Jarrah's cultural work: that the health of a culture can be measured by its willingness to look outward, to record what it sees, and to be changed by the looking. In an era he has described as marked by painful convulsions and cultural retreat across the Arab world, the Centre stands as a deliberately outward-facing, enlightenment-minded project.

Recognition

That standing was formally acknowledged in 2019, when the Centre won the Sheikh Zayed Book Award in the Publishing and Technology category, in the award's thirteenth edition. Accepting the recognition, al-Jarrah called it "a kind gesture toward a pioneering Arab project" — one that had launched in 2000 from two capitals, Abu Dhabi and London, and had worked for two decades to give Arabic travel literature, for the first time in its history, a distinguished home.