I grew up in the western suburbs of Sydney, in a working-class immigrant Muslim Pakistani household. Reading was my outlet to the wider world – and travel journalism especially gripped me. The idea of being a foreign correspondent, travelling the world and writing, felt like the epitome of power and freedom. But travel to distant climes (besides Pakistan) seemed unlikely, even fantastical. This bind intensified my longing for travel.
Instead, I read newspapers and travelogues. I devoured the work of Muhammad Asad, formerly Leopold Weiss, the intrepid European writer who converted to Islam and became a translator of the Qur’an and travelled by foot and camel through the Middle East and Pakistan as a foreign correspondent in the early 20th century. His swashbuckling adventures through epic desert storms thrilled me. Except Asad was male and white – two things I wasn’t.
Travel and adventure have traditionally been the preserve of the wealthy and privileged. White men got the adventure and the rest of us had to serve them – either as the underlings who worked for them or as supportive bystanders ironing their socks and taking care of home and hearth.
Sarah Malik. Source: Zahrah Habibullah
It’s a tenor mirrored in most western travel narratives. Muslim women were talked about and condescended to but we could never return the favour and cast our eyes on those who studied us.
Many stories in the Islamic tradition revolve around the idea of journey, and this journeying usually has a theme of spiritual awakening. The external journey acts as a mirror and precursor to the more important revolution within.
Hajar, the second wife of Ibrahim, experiences the miraculous while traversing the desert with her child, Isma’il, after being cast out of home. Khadija, the prophet Muhammad’s wife, oversaw a business enterprise whose agents travelled extensively on her behalf. There was also 8th-century Sufi mystic Rabia al-Adawiya who roamed freely during her life, preaching divine love. These are women who journeyed deep within themselves to live a fully realised life.
In my new book Safar: Muslim Women’s Stories of Travel and Transformation, I interview a dozen trailblazing women, including Zenith Irfan, one of the first women to motorbike through Pakistan’s mountainous borderlands at the age of 20. There’s Yassmin Abdel-Magied who worked on remote oil rigs in Western Australia at 21. I also spoke to Aisha Al-Adawiya, a social justice pioneer, who grew up as an African-American woman in segregated Alabama, moved to New York as a teenager and later converted to Islam after being moved by the words of Malcolm X. Women share their experiences of travelling with a disability, as a mother, as an Indigenous person and as a child of immigrants.
Safar: Muslim women's stories of travel and transformation. Source: Zahrah Habibullah/zbyzstudio photography
It is my hope that Muslim women and girls too can enjoy the self-actualisation and spiritual wonder that journeying can offer; whether abroad or in their own backyard. To travel is to enjoy the luxury and pleasure of living fully in the world. Many of the women interviewed did not grow up with this privilege. As the spectre of COVID kept us in our homes and the climate crisis places our natural landscapes increasingly at risk, it is even more urgent to appreciate, honour and take care of our world. This book hopes to offer a counter colonial approach to travel, with new storytellers offering respect to traditional owners, environments and cultures.
“Safar” is the Urdu and Arabic word for journey, and the book is filled with inspirational stories and practical tips on how to travel on a budget, how to navigate airport security, how to travel solo and how to embrace a “traveller’s mindset” wherever you are.
An illustration of the author, from ‘Safar: Muslim Women’s Stories of Travel and Transformation’ by Sarah Malik. Source: Amani Haydar
Many of the women I interview note the tension of how they have been both shaped by discrimination but also fortified by the privilege of their Western passport. I explore this and the difficulties of travelling without male or white privilege, and how the spectre of sexual violence is weaponised to curtail women’s freedom.
We are told that a woman’s place is at home, safe from a hostile world. But a world unused to women as free agents reinforces a cycle. If there’s no safe space made for women, we must forge it ourselves, sometimes at great risk.
The book explores how journeys can create revolutions within and without – reshaping our societies and reframing them to work for us.
Saying yes to travel is an act of saying yes to life. It is a way of taking up space, of saying: this world also belongs to me.
This is an edited extract from Safar: Muslim Women’s Stories of Travel and Transformation (Hardie Grant) by Sarah Malik, illustrated by Amani Haydar.
You might also like
Listen to our Sydney Writers' Festival panel, 'What If My Mum Reads This?'
