ABSTRACT
A vast literature on international migration exists. Most of it is focused on labour migration and on the economic, demographic, and social implications of that migration on the economies and polities of sending and receiving countries.1 Little attention has been paid to the interpersonal aspects of migration and the reactions of migrants to prolonged exposure to alien cultures and political systems and to radically different living circumstances. Even less attention has been paid to international migration for education. One of the few books to focus on the more personal aspects of migration and, peripherally, on education, Eickelman and Piscatori’s (1990) Muslim Travellers: Pilgrimage, Migration, and the Religious Imagination discusses migration mainly in terms of the quest for and realization of religious identity. It points out (see, for example, the chapter by Masud) that the institutions of hajj (annual pilgrimage to Mecca) and hijra (the religious obligation of Muslims to migrate and simultaneously break ties, distance oneself from evil, and form new bonds of religious brother-hood) have over the centuries institutionalized migration. In addition, the Qur’an and the Traditions of the Prophet have urged the quest for knowledge abroad, and Muslim scholars widely pursued knowledge peripatetically in the medieval Islamic world (see Gellens 1990).
