When Sept. 11, 2001, focused the world's attention on radical Islamists, Roxanne Euben, professor of political science at Wellesley College, said that suddenly she found her highly specialized research on Islam catapulted into the limelight.

"The world changed, and almost everything that I have done and written on Islam since 9/11 has been received as extremely political," said Euben in an interview prior to her Aug. 30 College of Arts and Sciences Humanities Lecture, "Travel, Translation and Comparative Political Theory."

But increased interest in Islam has not resulted in greater understanding about its complexity, Euben noted, citing how scholarly and popular rhetoric often divides the world into "us-them" narratives. While such dichotomies can help people make sense of a confusing reality, dividing the world into "an ecumenical curious West and an incurious intolerant Islam" is not only inaccurate, Euben said, but also quite dangerous. "Such binaries distort rather than illuminate the political landscape, and such categories can help to bring about the reality that they purport to describe," she said in the lecture.

Divisions like "Islam" and the "West" are more political categories than descriptive ones, said Euben. "They don't capture geographic boundaries or linguistic, cultural or historical boundaries. They reflect how some people see the world, not necessarily how the world is."

Political theory, according to Euben's definition, is in part a process of making one's own implicit assumptions and commitments explicit and then subject to examination and even transformation, a process that requires critical distance from our daily preoccupations. Travel, whether literal or figurative, can provide that critical distance, she said, although its outcomes are invariably unpredictable. But the study of all kinds of travelers from very different directions makes visible this process of theorizing, she said, and further shows that "curiosity about what is strange, the capacity for critical distance and the will to remake what is unfamiliar in one's own image, is no more Western than is travel or thinking itself."

Euben noted that the root of the word "theory" comes from an ancient Greek practice of "theoria," a journey undertaken to observe the laws, institutions and practices of other places. To illustrate how travel between cultures can uncover and transform the categories and meanings embedded in the traveler's own political landscape, Euben drew parallels between the 19th-century journeys of early Egyptian reformer Rifa'a Rafi' al-Tahtawi to France and Alexis de Tocqueville to America. Both journeys show how mobility enlarges these travelers' field of vision, but also how their own assumptions work to narrow and domesticate what they see.

Euben's work, said Nicolas van de Walle, chair of government, in his lecture introduction, "is principally responsible for giving shape to comparative political theory as a distinct field of study within contemporary political science and is widely regarded as such."

Euben, author of "Enemy in the Mirror: Islamic Fundamentalism and the Limits of Modern Rationalism," "Journeys to the Other Shore: Muslim and Western Travelers in Search of Knowledge" and co-editor/writer of "Princeton Readings in Islamist Thought: Texts and Contexts from al-Banna to Bin Laden," is working on a new project on Islamism, gender and the politics of humiliation in Islamist discourses. She argues that in Islamism, references to humiliation "basically recast a number of threats to conventional notions of masculinity as an assault on Islam."

Linda B. Glaser is a staff writer for the College of Arts and Sciences.