It nourishes the minds and imaginations of Westerners and thus prepares public opinion for the intellectual and military conquest of this East. Perhaps Napoleon's campaign against Egypt, with all its military and intellectual repercussions in our Arab culture, is a complete model for that. The Arab printing press entered Egypt as a trailer behind the French cannon cart to establish the colonial phenomenon with its military and intellectual aspects.
However, the Western phenomenon of reading and interpreting the Other was a motive and instigator for the educated Arab elites who found themselves facing Western images of their new societies, which provoked the civilized nerve in them, to find themselves, in turn, the motives and reasons to travel towards the other, in search and exploration. And it returns with it what it transmits, displays and says about its civilization, its way of life and its conditions, setting examples for the people, and for the first time in Arab societies, a sharp intellectual conflict is drawn to which the live forces in society are drawn between a supporter of the West loyal to it and enthusiastic about its ideas and formulations of the West, and between those who oppose him, and ready to fight him.
And if the literature of the Western journey has been able to stereotype the East and the Orientals, by drawing worldly images of them, by means of an imagination hungry for the magical, the erotic, and the miraculous, then the literature of the Arab journey to the West and the world, as will become clear through the texts of this series, focused primarily on tracing the features of the Renaissance. Scientific and industrial, urban development, and manifestations of modernity represented in the development in the way of living, construction, social and rights. Arab travelers turned to painting their eyes with images of the modern renaissance in those societies, often motivated by a passion for searching for the new, and by a deep, sweeping desire not only for exploration, out of curiosity of knowledge, but, basically, out of seeking knowledge, drawing inspiration from experiences, and trying to take With the data of modern development, and tracing the trail of the other to get out of the state of civilized paralysis to which the Arabs found themselves prey. One of the goals of this series of books on Arab travels to the world is to reveal the nature of awareness of the other that was formed through the journey, the ideas that leaked through the traveler’s lines, and the attentions that characterized their view of countries, people and ideas. Travel literature, on this level, constitutes a great wealth of knowledge, a storehouse of stories, phenomena and ideas, as well as an interesting narrative material that contains the funny, strange and surprising things that were picked up by wandering eyes and souls excited by what they see, and an awareness that understands and analyzes things and observes and reflects on phenomena.
Finally, it must be pointed out that this series, which may reach a hundred books, would establish, for the first time, an independent Arabic library composed of rich texts that reveal the Arab’s eagerness to explore horizons, and his willingness to adventure in order to gain knowledge coupled with pleasure, which is to this and that. It covers the globe in four corners of the earth and on its five continents, and gathers to seek knowledge of the other and its world, searching for the components of the civilized self of Arabs and Muslims through those trips undertaken by writers, thinkers, mystics, pilgrims, scholars, and other Arab travelers throughout their Arab and Islamic lands.