The Genre of Rihla from the Middle Ages to Postmodernizm

The Arabic travelogue, rihla, is dedicated to the travels of an Eastern man around the world. The purpose of the study is to show the significance of this genre for Arabic national culture over the centuries, its influence on modern Arabic prose. The authors described the distinctive features of rihla against the background of similar travels in other cultures and in other time periods, thus substantiating the legitimacy of introducing the term ‘rihla’ itself, despite the already existing in scientific circulation terms ‘travel literature’, ‘travel description’, ‘travelogue’. At the same time, the authors draw parallels between the Arabic rihla and A Journey Beyond the Three Seas by Afanasy Nikitin. The deep rooting of the phenomenon of rihla in the Arab culture, and its close connection with religion and science, in the opinion of the authors, did not allow the genre to disappear in the Middle Ages. Therefore, one of the objectives of the work was to trace and generalize the history of rihla in the Modern era and later. The work substantiates the conditions for the formation of the genre, describes its transformation by the 19th century, explains the role in the emergence of late national fiction, found an appeal to it in the latest literature, an attempt was made to present various types of its authorial implementations based on the works of modern Egyptian writers (N. Mahfouz, G. Al-Gitani, Yu. Zeidan). All this allowed us to build a single thread of the genre’s history, to show that the emerging Arabic novel relied on it in many ways, and that the experimenters of Arabic postmodernism, which coincided in time with the wave of rising national consciousness, preferred to turn to it.At the same time, the connection betweenmodern literature and the genre of richliis established preserving one of its two most important characteristics – closeness to scientific factography or the presentation of travel as a spiritual test.