An Interview with Shahnaz Habib: Author of “Airplane Mode: An Irreverent History of Travel”

What does it mean to travel when we live in the ruins of colonialism, capitalism and climate change?

I have a complicated relationship to travel. It is the thing that I longed and dreamt about as a teenager and in my twenties, it is an activity that still terrifies and delights me in equal measure, and it is an activity that can easily become an escape from one’s life rather than a space for reflection and growth. It can seem like a personality.

Some of my moments of deepest clarity have been away from home and at the same time, travel is tricky ethically, particularly in a time of deep climate change and widening social inequality.

I recently read an incredible book titled “Airplane Mode: An Irreverent History of Travel” and loved it. (It is not an understatement to say that this book is one of my favourite reads of all time).

It is a book that interrogates our desire to explore and the reality that travel is “not an uncomplicated good.”¹ My copy is underlined and scribbled with notes, reflections and take-aways and still weeks later, I cannot stop thinking about it. In January I spoke to author Shahnaz Habib to discuss “Airplane Mode” further. Our conversation was wide-ranging, and touched on how guidebooks have shaped travel, the universalized perspective found within many travelogues, the myth of must-sees, what it means to be a Muslim female traveller and so much more. Below is an edited and condensed version of our conversation.

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Shagufta: I really loved Airplane Mode. Where did this idea of writing not just a travel memoir, but “an irreverent history of travel” come from?

Shahnaz: Like many of us, I grew up with romantic notions of travel. And because I was a writer, I always wanted to write about travel. For a long time, that was the only kind of book I was reading. Books set in other places to me, travel books, books by travellers. And I was also pitching travel stories to magazines and trying to step into the shoes of a travel writer, and I was very unsuccessful at this. Every now and then I would be able to actually publish an article, but most of the time my pitches were rejected, and I realized that I was actually writing all these essays about not travelling.

I wrote an essay about not going to Paris and it was published in a literary magazine, and the same with my father who doesn’t want to travel. And it struck me that I was actually writing more about not travelling than about travelling. So  I wanted to put together an essay collection on not travelling.

My agent took it to editors and the editor who bought it Megha Majumdar - she's an amazing writer in her own right - said, “Well, this is great, but do you have any interest in thinking through the history of travel to understand better the question of not travelling?” And my essays were already leaning in that direction because I was talking about passports and talking about the history of why people like my father don't feel like they have access to travel. And the moment she said that - I mean, even before she finished saying it, I was like, “Yes! Obviously I want to do it. That sounds amazing.”

 I'm so grateful that she proposed it, because I don't think it would have occurred to me that I could write a history of travel. And immediately I started diving into all these histories that I was so interested in, but there had never seemed to be a moment to actually sit down, think through them, interrogate them and try to connect these different histories. The history of guidebooks and the history of passports are actually connected but who would have thought it?

Shagufta: I'm curious about the process of putting it together. In this book, you discuss the history of hill stations. You talk about sugar. You talk about walking being a leisure activity, about guidebooks, even carousel history. How did you decide what you wanted to include and what didn't quite fit?

Shahnaz: There's a lot that didn't fit. It's such a rich topic! Mostly I just followed my interests. I was super interested in the history of sugar, the history of cotton, and how these have impacted the history of tourism. Because by creating, supporting and enabling colonial wealth to be centred in these imperial capitals like London, those objects had such an important role to play in the history of recreational travel. So I wanted to find objects whose connections were not so obvious. With guidebooks and passports, you can tell the obvious connections, but with something like cotton, you can't really tell that there is an obvious connection.

And I'm glad you brought up carousels, because as a metaphor, a carousel is such a great symbol of travel and tourism in particular. The way we can go around and around in the same place without really being anywhere, but we can still enjoy that moment and it's so meaningful. But again, it's not a very obvious travel related object. So I'm very grateful that I got to write a book in which I could follow these unlikely connections and unlikely histories.

Shagufta: It felt like you were also practising de-centring yourself, something the book also invites the reader to do. You could have gone on for chapters about your own story, and then bring in the history, but it's really more that your story is the accompaniment to the broader travel history. Here you are not the protagonist of the story, travel itself is the protagonist.

Shahnaz:  That is one of the things that does bother me a lot about a lot of travel writing. It is centred on the individual travel writer as the protagonist and their feelings, their experience of that place. I think that is in many ways the reason why I could not get my travel stories published - because I did not fit the prototype of that protagonist. That protagonist has to be the sort of falsely universalized American or European protagonist with an American or European white audience to speak to, right? So I knew that I wanted to write a story that was not primarily a memoir of my own travels. Do you know the writer Leslie Jamison? She does a lot of writing where she mixes the personal with the larger story. 

In one of her interviews about her writing, she talks about how research is such an integral part of her personal storytelling, and she had this wonderful phrase that I immediately wrote down: “the alibi of exceptionality that masquerades as self-knowledge.”

Shagufta: Oh that's beautiful.

Shahnaz: Right? It's about how this idea that we have of our exceptionality can masquerade as self-awareness or self-knowledge. That is what is wrong with so much of travel writing today. I wanted to de-centre myself as you said, and connect my personal story to these larger histories. A kind of auto-ethnography. It's so tricky when you're writing, because writing is such an individualistic act and so much of writing craft talks about bringing your personal story more and more into the page and centring yourself. So I had to keep that idea constantly at the top of my mind as I wrote this book.

Shagufta: I read an NPR article where you spoke about how the locals are these side characters to form the broader plot –

Shahnaz Yes! And even that term local. As if we're not all local somewhere, right? The locals are always these people who have to become the background in the story of discovery, and whatever epiphany the travel writer is going to have. It's such a falsehood. When you think about it, part of the reason why so many of us enjoy travel is because people elsewhere - the people that we meet - are as complex and as human as we are, as any of our friends or our family are. And so why does travel writing not acknowledge the fact that those people have far more interesting stories to tell than the traveller who often is writing about them?

Shagufta: In the beginning of the book you describe this experience of being in Istanbul and being this not very “adventurous” traveller, as you call it, and doing just one thing a day. And then you meet Megan, who has less fear, a lot more entitlement, and you feel this guilt about the way you’ve been travelling.

You write:

“In a new place, I'm never adventurous. I am cautious. It takes me a few days simply to get used to stepping up out of wherever I am staying. At first, I stick to the neighbourhood like an animal, getting used to a new environment. I want to be curious and intrepid; instead, I am confused and lonely. (Jet lag does not help.) And always I am conscious of what a waste of time this is. If only I could just get up and go do things, how much time I could save. I basically am the opposite of Anthony Bourdain. Not cool, not adventurous. And vegetarian! As I walked around the market staring, asking in my feeble herbivorous voice, Etsiz yemek var mi?, I sensed each precious day in Istanbul turning like the pages of an unread guidebook.”²

There is a narrative that if you have 9-10 days in a country, do four cities. Why are you in Konya for weeks just walking around? You could be in other countries. It's a very real thing you're describing that really presses on the experience of travel itself, and I don’t think many other leisure activities suffer from such normative ideas.

Where do you think this idea – that we should be fast, we shouldn’t be reluctant -comes from?

Shahnaz: To my mind, it's something that definitely starts with the way guidebooks have created our idea of a day in travel. When you look at the history of guidebooks, right from the middle of the 19th century, the way guidebooks set out an itinerary for travellers with certain must-see places or must-see monuments or must-experience experiences - that has infiltrated into our idea of travel, that has become our idea of travel. That there is a certain itinerary and there's a certain trail of must-see things to do and places to be.  You have to see the sunrise at this particular place. This is the best viewpoint. You have to go and then get a coffee at this particular cafe. So travel guidebooks have systematized our travel days for us. That is a huge part of it.

But also, when travel guides like Baedeker and Murray were creating their first travel guidebooks, people were travelling for much longer. People were travelling for months because the people who had the opportunity and resources to travel then, had the time to travel. Now, the way we travel has become as you said, nine days and you have to fit in four countries and all these different experiences. And so there's a way in which modern day capitalism, late stage capitalism, has added all these pressures because it has shrunk our leisure time to very little. Right?

And I actually disagree with you about how other leisure activities don't have the same pressure. When it’s the weekend you're supposed to do yoga, walk in the park, meet a friend for coffee. There's so much that we want to pack into these days because our leisure time has become so little and even leisure has become a to-do thing. Self-care has become another item to just tick off.

 And here's the other interesting thing. Almost every guidebook writer that I wrote about or I dug into was a workaholic. Baedeker died of overwork. Rick Steves is always on the go. So for guidebook writers it's work, and they're creating these super packed, busy days. We don't have to follow that same itinerary. For us, we are possibly looking for a more leisurely or more thoughtful experience. In short, I think it's a confluence of the way guidebook writers and guidebooks have systematized our days into these itineraries, and the pressure put on our leisure time by the fact that now so many of us have to do multiple jobs, so many of us have to work round the clock. And so our leisure time has shrunk.

Shagufta: What has been your way to sit with the idea “I don't have to do this?” Has it been through learning this history? Has it been other things?

Shahnaz: I think for me a really critical point was seeing my father's travels in New York and realising that you don't really have to go and see the must-see sights. And just knowing that the idea of a must-see is a falsehood has been so liberating for me as a traveller. I think about all the times that I have stood in lines to get into monuments or book something ahead of time, because if you don't get there at this particular time, you don't get the best view, and I think: “Did those moments, did all that planning and standing in line really enrich my life?” and I'm not sure it did.

I had just had a child, and that slows you down a lot, and I was open to listening to my parents in a way that I was never before. It was this moment when my father was staying at home with us and refusing to go and see anything that made me realise that this other way of thinking about travel is really resonating with me.

Shagufta:  He just wanted to enjoy the apples of New York.

Shahnaz: He just wanted to go grocery shopping. And now I love that. In fact, when I go to a new place and I don't feel like going to the monuments, and I don't feel terribly motivated to go and do the things that the guidebooks tell me I must, I go to the grocery store. I go to the markets, the supermarkets, I see what's in the shops.

Shagufta: The economic linkages between travel and tourism is a really strong theme in this book. You’re not saying don't travel, you're saying really contend with the political privileges, the economic privileges, the power that comes with travel. What does that mean? Because sometimes I think I have a commitment to anti-capitalism and then I see a flight.

Shahnaz: It's really hard. And yes, I have so many subscriptions to cheap flight aggregators and deal finders. So I'm right there with you. It’s a really tough question because what you really asking is, how do we live moral lives in capitalism?

Shagufta: Yes.

Shahnaz: It's such a vast philosophical undertaking to think through that. I think it's almost impossible to escape capitalism. I mean, unless we go and live in utopian, intentional communities where everything is bartered, how do you live outside of capitalism? So for ordinary people like us living where we are, we have to be really self-compassionate about what we can achieve within the limitations of the capitalist, neo colonialist world that we live in. Right? So that's why in the book I talk about the low moral ground. Which is you're aware of the economic impact of your choices, but you're also aware of the accumulated political history that has led to some people, some countries, some institutions having so much economic power and cultural power.

So sometimes we are aware of all this and still end up having to make certain choices that are not in alignment. Maybe you're giving tourist dollars to a country whose economy you don't want to support. Maybe you have to choose to stay in a big corporate hotel compared to the small mom and pop guest house that you really want to stay in in order to make your money go further. Every day of our travel, we have to contend with these small difficult choices. It’s difficult to get every choice exactly right. But what are the choices you can get mostly right? And I think as long as you can be on the low moral ground where you make good choices for yourself as far as possible, and then forgive yourself for the other choices, because, like I said, we live within all these limitations, and it's so difficult to lead a pure life. I have tried and failed so many times!

 And I really don't want my book to be a prescriptive book either, where I say don't do this and don't do that. I have certain tenets that I believe in with travel. Personally, it's important for me to stay in places where the workers are treated well. It's part of the politics of labour. You’re a worker somewhere, so you want to go to places where workers are treated well. And also, I think that actually enhances your travel experience. It's a very selfishly good thing to do because when you stay in a place or when you give your money to a business that treats its workers well, you're getting a better service or you're getting better goods.  So that's one of the things that I try to do. Rather than reviews of how customers are treated, I look for reviews of how workers are treated by these tourist establishments. But everyone has to come up with their own list of things of what is important to you.

For me, this is important because as a gig worker in the capitalist economy, I am very conscious of workers’ rights. So that's the thing that I focus on. As a woman of colour, as a Muslim, there are certain ways in which I experience travel, but there are certain discriminations I don't face. I am able bodied, I am very heteronormative presenting. So because of that, there are certain privileges that I have. And so other people have to make choices based on their own specific intersection of privilege and underprivilege.

Shagufta: Yes! This book doesn’t give you a checklist or rules, you have to grapple with questions. So after I read your book my husband and I sat down and asked ourselves: “Where do we want to go this year and why?” And then once we got really clear on intention I realized I have to zone out everything else.

Shahnaz: I think that's beautiful Shagufta, and thank you for telling me that. And everything comes down to intentions. We’re both Muslim. Intention, or niyyah is such a powerful factor in our religion, in our faith. Being really clear about our intentions. And as human beings, it's so hard to be clear about our intentions because we are so good at self-deception. So digging into ourselves again and again and finding our intentions, I think that's a huge part of becoming a better traveller.

Shagufta:  Speaking of being a Muslim woman traveller, how does your identity as a Muslim and your identity as a traveller shape and impact one another?

Shahnaz: It's such a good question. Doing research for this book has been this joyful discovery of the history of Muslim travel. In the medieval period - in terms of actual logistics, travel was harder because you didn't have trains and aeroplanes, of course. But in terms of documentation, people travelled without passports, people travelled without visas, people travelled in much more unencumbered ways than we travel in the modern world. And also there was this idea of hospitality in Muslim cultures around the world, that if you came to a Muslim country, if you came to a Muslim town, you could find hospitality. As a Muslim, but also as non-Muslims. So travellers like Ibn Battuta had a sense of freedom because they knew that as long as they went and found the mosque and talked to the imam, appealed to the Muslim king or emperor, they had this wonderful, free avenue for travel and hospitality. It was open to them in a way that it's not open to me as a Muslim in the 21st century. So for me that was such a delightful window into the history of Muslim travel.

And I don't know if I even wrote about this in the book, but coming across all these maps of the world made by Muslim cartographers. It's so beautiful to see these maps.  There are some maps which have Mecca or Jerusalem at the centre. Or they're sort of upside down, from our current perspective, because who decided that Northern Europe was at the top? And these were maps made by Muslim cartographers, but they were widely in use in Europe. It's not as if these were maps made by Muslims, for Muslims, they were just the maps of the world in the medieval era.

So seeing those maps – my head just exploded thinking about how free and how unencumbered the medieval Muslim traveller was stretching across these vast distances from Jerusalem to the eastern end of China. Muslim sailors, Muslim pilgrims, Muslim merchants were making these long journeys linking entire continents. They were the people in the middle between Europe and the Far East, making trade possible, making cultural connections possible. So that was a just a really joyful discovery.

Shagufta: This could have been a book about racial profiling. But it felt like you were making a choice to tell these other really specific stories rather than tell an Islamophobia story. Why was it important to bring that sensibility and that storytelling to the book?

Shahnaz: Again, such a good question. You know, I would keep writing about the medieval Muslim travel. I was stuck in the research period for that for ages because there was so much to read and process, and I just really enjoyed reading and researching that part. And there was a part of me that was always saying, “Oh, I have to write about racial profiling. I have to write about all that stuff too.”

And the fact that I was so unhappy thinking, “I have to write about that” was a clue to me. There is this way in which the Muslim writer in the West is expected to talk about being Muslim. “Oh. I'm discriminated. Oh, here's my trauma story.” And I'm just so tired of that trauma story.

Shagufta: Me too.

Shahnaz:  I'm so grateful to the people who spoke up and represented those stories. But now there is this way in which reading those stories has become this act of redemption for the white liberal reader. There is this expectation that this is the kind of story that you have to tell in order to get published. So I think that's what I was resisting, and I didn't even know I was resisting that. I thought I would be writing about that stuff. I had to understand why I felt so unhappy writing that part of Muslim travel and so joyful when researching and reading about the medieval Muslim travellers.

You talked about being a somatic practitioner. The resistance we feel in our bodies, the tightening in our throat when we think about telling that story, the choking we feel when we are not allowed to tell certain stories. Those are such powerful clues about the politics of power in storytelling.

Shagufta: I love how many books you reference in this book. Are there particular travelogues that you were reading in the research of this book that you really loved?

Shahnaz: There is a fabulous book that came out in 2022 that is an anthology of Muslim women's travel writing from medieval times until really recent times. So that was a really helpful book to read. It’s called Three Centuries of Travel Writing by Muslim Women.

I was trying to read more writing by people from the Global South. Do you know Sanmao? She was a Chinese woman who ended up marrying a Moroccan man and she moves to the Western Sahara.   So here’s this East Asian woman in Western Sahara, and she's going into the desert trying to understand the community there. And it's just delightful. [Book Link: Stories of the Sahara by Sanmao]

 I think what's so delightful about the non-Western travel writer is that they don't think of their point of view as this universal point of view, so they have so much humility.  Sanmao has so much humility about who she is. And she doesn't mind at all explaining herself to people because she knows that her perspective is not some kind of universalised colonial perspective everyone should know about already. The interesting thing about non-Western travel writers is that they think (ideally) of themselves as locals going to another place. They don't think of themselves as these globals going to meet locals. It’s the local meeting the local versus the global meeting the local. So that’s the difference in perspective.

The book that I drew on a lot is an anthology edited by Tabish Khair called Other Roads: 1500 years of African and Asian travel.” It's such a fantastic book. And it's funny because I got my book contract, and then a few months later, the pandemic started. And I knew that it would be a research - intensive book.  So I was complaining to my husband saying, “I don't know how I'll go to the library. The libraries are all shut down. How am I going to do all this research?”

I had dreamed of sitting in the library for days on end reading books. That was not going to happen. And I was so disappointed and just moaning about it. And my husband led me by the hand to my library and said, “Look at this book.” And it was this book that I bought 15, 20 years ago. And he said, “Look at all the books that you have bought. You've been buying books in anticipation of this moment. You have at least enough material to start your research right here.”

And to me, that was such a powerful moment because I realised that “Oh, this is what I was going to do.”

Shagufta: Yes!

Shahnaz: I didn’t know it, but I had been working my way towards this moment.

Shagufta:  In Airplane Mode you talk about wanderlust and how you have this hobby of decoding wanderlust advertising copy. Sometimes it's luxury travel, or the way it is used as an Instagram hashtag, you even go through a Sabyasachi collection.

It's not only absurd, it's about the insatiability of consumption. How do we resist this? How do we bring our class and economic politics to how we interact with what you call “the dream of the tourist industry” and what it dresses up as a dream? This idea that we are just “naturally” explorers, that we are the kinds of people who explore, who venture out. Because sometimes it taps into our cool decolonial sensibilities about ourselves, and then we purchase something.  It’s very obvious, easy to critique when it's not Sabyasachi, but it's more insidious than that.

Shahnaz: You're right. It's so insidious. It's a political question. It's also a spiritual question. And I think it really helps to have an awareness of how the mind works. I love this quote by Jiddu Krishnamurti: “You think you are thinking your thoughts. You are not. You are thinking your culture’s thoughts.”

And I think it's so true about wanderlust especially. It's really a social thought. It's a huge modern society thought that has been planted and programmed into our heads and appears very innocently in our mind as our own original thought. And there are so many other thoughts like that, I'm sure. But the tourism industry is so clever because it knows how to appeal to travellers who have a more political sensibility. Travellers who don't buy other forms of consumption advertising. I mean, for a long time, the travel industry was telling us “Don't buy goods buy experiences!”

Shagufta: Right, yes!

Shahnaz: It’s meant to appeal to people like me who have this kneejerk anti-consumerist attitude or at least think they do. So of course, I said, “Yes! that's the experience I want to spend money on!”  But at the end of the day, travel is as materialistic and consumerist as any other thing. So partly it is about becoming aware of political dynamics. Partly it's about becoming aware of histories and not just the mainstream history, but these submerged histories. But then partly it's also about just being aware about how our own mind works and how our mind, our intention, like we talked about, is an unreliable thing, and we cannot completely just trust ourselves.

And it takes a lot of humility to know that, and we have to constantly decentre ourselves because everything in the world helps us centre ourselves, even those of us who are on the anti-colonial, anti-consumer spectrum. The tools that we have are the masters’ tools. And the masters’ tools are very much about centring us, centring human feelings, centring human experiences. So sometimes it's very hard. But my personal jihad (personal struggle) is to constantly question myself and not trust my own intentions and desires fully.

Shagufta: That’s beautiful.

One of the most powerful points for me in Airplane Mode was that you highlight the cost of leisure. What we're doing when we're travelling is that we are not noticing. You write:

“The working-class tourist excursion was a solution to a question that vexed English policymakers and social reformers deeply in the middle of the nineteenth century. In “The Tourist Gaze” John Urry writes that as work came to be organized as relatively time-bound and space-bound activity separate from play, religion and festivity, it became necessary to invent rational recreation. As the idle poor were converted into working classes, it became necessary to give them opportunities for well-behaved leisure.”³

So reading that, it felt like what you’re saying is that vacations are a way to prevent workers from revolting and noticing all the other parts of our life where we’re time poor and in late capitalism. And that felt like such an important reflection. Is there any else you want to say about what we're losing out on or missing when we’re focused on travel?

Shahnaz: Exactly. I love the way you put it. Vacations are there to prevent us from revolting. That's amazing. Because, yes, vacation and vacation travel became necessary because of work, right? Because working conditions were so difficult and so painful during the Industrial Revolution in England. That's where modern day tourism started. Partly because the cities became unliveable, to take attention away from the fact that we were degrading the environment, and our own living conditions, it became necessary to go in search of mountains and beaches. And then the other part of it was that there was this great upper-class anxiety about what would the working poor be doing in their spare time? And part of it was this moral panic that the working poor will just fritter away their money and time on gambling and alcohol. But partly also, I'm sure, is this anxiety about letting them [workers] have too much time to think. There is definitely that strain of travel where capitalism keeps us moving, keeps us travelling, keeps us on the go with all these forms of leisure so that our playtime is as packed as our work time.

Shagufta: Yes.

Shahnaz: And there is a whole movement around leisure activism now and taking back time. It's not something I've dug into a lot, I've just read a tiny bit about it, and it's something I'm very curious to dig into more.

Shagufta: Like Jennifer Odell. She wrote How to Do Nothing and she has a new book called Saving Time.

Shahnaz:  I loved How to Do Nothing. On the face of it, it seemed like yet another book about self-care. But the book was so much deeper than that. It's a book about the political nature of leisure, the political nature of where we put our attention.

Shagufta: Last question. Because this Substack is called “A Little Bit of Hope”, what is giving you hope right now in these times?

Shahnaz: With Gaza, it's a time of utter hopelessness and also hope. So many more people are educated about how the Palestinians have been oppressed for 75 years. So many more people are talking about it and thinking about it. And it's coming at the cost of Palestinian lives. Which is such a tragic thing that so many people have to die in order for so many parts of the world to wake up and think about them. So it's a hope that's tied in with despair, and I think that is the whole point of hope to present itself at times like this.

I was thinking just this morning, this is not a fully formed thought, but I was thinking, if the Black Lives Matter movement hadn't happened, I wonder if people would have been open to understanding the kind of oppression that's happening in Palestine? I started thinking about how these movements are feeding each other and how anti-colonial movements, anti-racism movements throughout our history feed each other. Even when it seems like nothing much was accomplished, and people have gone back to the old ways of thinking and living. I've just been trying to find hope from the fact that even when these movements seem to peter out, they feed into these other movements. So that's definitely what's giving me hope. And I've just been in awe of all the Jewish people who have been coming out to protest. That gives me so much hope. Just to know that the resistance is so complex, that it's so powerful. It's being led by Palestinians, but with so many Jewish allies.

Shagufta: And I loved that you mentioned Palestine repeatedly throughout the book, And that's very rare for travel books.

Shahnaz: Always in my heart, always on my mind as it is for so many of us.

Shagufta:  Yes. Thank you so much for your time. This has been such a joy.

Shahnaz: Thank you so much for reading so closely and asking all these beautiful questions.

1. p.99

2. p.5

3. p.217