If the philosophers held travel to be a road to the knowledge of the world, the religions counted it a sacred thing.
And here is something which astonishes me every time I think of it: almost every one of the great religions of mankind has, at its heart, a journey made into a rite. Muslims go upon the Hajj and upon pilgrimage; Christians for centuries set out for Jerusalem and for shrines such as Santiago; Jews turned towards Jerusalem at their festivals; and Hindus and Buddhists travel to this day to sacred rivers and temples. It is as though man, in every culture, has understood that in order to draw near to meaning he must sometimes rise from where he sits and take to the road.
But in the tradition of the Abrahamic religions — in which Judaism, Christianity and Islam all share — travel holds a place deeper still: many of the prophets found their message and their destiny upon a journey.
The first journey of mankind, as these religions relate it, was the journey of Adam (AS): his descent from paradise to the earth, which became the beginning of human history. The earth, in this view, is a dwelling of passage and of trial, and man is a traveller who must be tested within it.
After him, Noah (AS) made a journey of another kind — not for discovery, but for deliverance and survival; his ark, in the heart of the storm, carried the lives of the faithful and of the animals to the shore of safety.
Then Abraham (PBUH), the father of three great religions, left the land of his fathers out of belief in the one God and set out in pursuit of His oneness; a journey which led to the building of the Kaaba and brought into being a point of unity and of worship for millions of human beings to this day.
And Joseph (AS), whose journey was the bitterest of them all — cast into the well by his brothers and sold as a slave — yet that same enforced journey, through its message of patience and of purity, brought him to the treasury of Egypt and to the saving of his household: an eternal lesson that even the road one did not choose can arrive at a great destination.
David (AS), prophet and king, was a shepherd in his youth and afterwards became a just ruler, giving right judgement among the people and consoling those who had been wronged. His son Solomon (AS) is the most remarkable traveller of these accounts: it is related in the Qur’an that the wind was at his command, and that a bird called the hoopoe, like a scout sent ahead, brought him word from the distant land of Sheba and set in motion the story of his meeting with its queen. It is as though Solomon were the very emblem of that ancient human longing: to cross great distances with the least possible suffering. And if you look closely, this book too is about precisely that longing.
The life of Moses (AS) was itself made up of three journeys: the chest which carried him safely upon the Nile in his infancy; his flight from Egypt to Midian; and his return bearing a mission, which delivered his people from the oppression of Pharaoh and led to their passing through the sea and to the receiving of the Law upon Mount Sinai.
Set against him, Jonah (AS) is the example of a journey that began the wrong way round; he fled from his charge, but in the darkness of the fish’s belly he came to himself, repented, and returned — as though to say that flight from responsibility is itself a journey, and that it finds a happy ending only in the return to the right road.
Jesus (AS) passed all the years of his mission upon the road; he went from village to village in Galilee and in Jerusalem, comforting the afflicted and calling people to love and to forgiveness. His life shows that sometimes the mission of a man is the road itself: the going out towards people, rather than the staying still and waiting for them to come.
And the Prophet of Islam (PBUH), whose migration from Mecca to Medina was so decisive a turning point that the Muslims took the beginning of their calendar from it; a journey which began in hardship and arrived at the founding of an organised community.
Among all these, Luqman the Wise holds a special place. He was not a prophet, but a man to whom God had granted “wisdom” — that deep understanding which a person learns from the experience of living and from the sight of the times. His counsels to his son — humility, gentleness of speech, and endurance in hardship — are of the very same substance as the knowledge a traveller gains upon the road: a knowledge cultivated not in books, but in the meeting with people and in the testing of life.
But the religions, alongside these outward journeys, speak also of a journey more inward: one in which the body is only a pretext, and the true destination is the soul.
The clearest living example of this is the Hajj. Every year nearly two million human beings from across the earth stand side by side in a single simple garment — king and beggar, black and white, easterner and westerner, of every tongue and nation, with no mark of difference upon them; a journey in which the outward destination is a pretext for an inward transformation, and a lesson in equality, in servanthood and in unity.
And among these journeys there is one which may be called “the journey from body to soul”: the journey to Karbala of Imam Husayn (AS), his household and his faithful companions.
By accepting martyrdom they taught humanity the lesson of rising against oppression, and showed every person of conscience the path of freedom, dignity and truth. Imam Husayn (AS) was not alone in this movement; after his martyrdom his household — above all his sister, Lady Zaynab (AS) — carried that message onward.
This journey did not end at Karbala. Enduring the hardships of captivity, the household were carried from city to city; but the courage and insight with which Lady Zaynab (AS) raised the voice of truth in the court of the oppressors kept the message of that rising alive for ever.
This event bears witness that the sword can wound the body, but cannot silence the voice of truth.
And it is a wonder that, fourteen centuries on, every year in the “caravan of Arba’een”, tens of millions of people from many different countries walk that same road together on foot. This great gathering reminds us of a truth: a human being is ready to take upon himself even the hardest of journeys for the sake of what he believes.
Now, if we set all these journeys side by side, a clear pattern appears. The journeys which came to a good end bore three marks: they began with submission and not with flight; the traveller kept his patience in hardship; and the fruit of the journey was something greater than the traveller himself — the guidance of a people, the founding of a civilisation, or the deliverance of a nation.
So in the eyes of the religions, the worth of a journey lies neither in the length of the road nor in the splendour of the destination, but in what the traveller becomes upon the way, and in what he brings back for others.
And perhaps it is just here that the old wisdom of our own people finds its meaning: that proverb which says that if you wish to know someone truly, travel with him. For a person upon a journey, far from the habits and the masks of everyday life, reveals his own truth; his patience or his restlessness, his forbearance or his selfishness — all of it comes to light in the narrow places of the road. Travel is at once a mirror for the traveller and a touchstone for his companions.
And this brings us to the question which the next chapter takes up: what does travel do to the mind and to the soul of a human being?
Sources: the Holy Qur’an, the chapters of al-Baqara, al-A’raf, Hud, al-Anbiya, Yusuf, Ta-Ha, al-Qasas, al-Shu’ara, al-Saffat, al- Tawba, al-Naml, Saba and Luqman; Ibn Hisham, al-Sira al-Nabawiyya; the shared biblical accounts of David, Solomon and Jesus (Genesis, Psalms, the Gospels); the maqatil and the historical sources for the events of Karbala and Arba’een; the old Persian proverb concerning the knowing of a companion upon a journey.