The Book of Travels. Hannā Diyāb

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СКАЧАТЬ who composed accounts of their experiences in the Western Catholic world. Though interested in travelogues, he composed his Book of Travels very much as a personal narrative, and it consequently exhibits, both in plot and the perspective, specific features characteristic of autobiography.

      We can get some idea of the literary models available to Diyāb by looking at his library. Besides his own Book of Travels, written at the end of his life, Diyāb owned at least six other books. Four are handwritten copies of devotional works:

      1 a Treatise on the Seven Deadly Sins and the Seven Virtues (Sharḥ mukhtaṣar fī al-sabʿ al-radhāyil wa-mā yuqābiluhā aʿnī al-sabʿ faḍāyil), translated from Latin, and bound in a volume dated July 1753;

      2 A Useful Book on Knowing One’s Will (Kitāb Mufīd fī ʿilm al-niyyah), another treatise on moral theology;³³

      3 The Precious Pearl on the Holy Life of Saint Francis (al-Durr al-nafīs fī sīrat al-qiddīs Fransīs),³⁴ a vita of Saint Francis Xavier (d. 1552), the founder of the Jesuit order, based on the account by Dominique Bouhours (d. 1702), and translated into Arabic by a Jesuit missionary in Aleppo, dated December 1753; and

      4 a four-volume collection of hagiographic tales (Kitāb Akhbār al-qiddīsīn) translated into Arabic by Pierre Fromage (d. 1740), dated between 1755 and 1757. The owner’s name, being partially struck out, is not entirely legible, but the handwriting of this codex resembles that of the works above, as well as that of The Book of Travels.

      The two other books are travelogues, probably copied in the 1750s or ’60s, and bound in a single volume:

      1 a copy of The Book of Travels (Kitāb al-Siyāḥah) by Ilyās al-Mawṣilī (d. after 1692). A struck-off name deciphered by Antoine Rabbath (d. 1913) as “Ḥannā son of Diyāb” appears as a former owner.³⁵

      2 an Arabic translation of the Turkish sefâretnâmeh by Yirmisekiz Mehmed Çelebi Effendi.

      From this list, and from the way Diyāb’s name appears in the codices, one can draw a few inferences about his participation in the written culture of Aleppo. First, the codices establish him as an owner but not necessarily a writer of books. Second, the items in his library, which include translations from Western European languages, represent an ideological affiliation with the Catholic world and with the Western institutions of knowledge production and power he depicts in his travelogue. Finally, although Diyāb had other travelogues at his disposal, his own adopts a different and distinct mode of self-representation.

With respect to ownership, the name “Ḥannā ibn Diyāb” appears six times as the owner of a particular text. A few volumes state, using a well-known formula, that Diyāb had “obtained the book for himself from his own money.”³⁶ A unique inscription in the copy of Saint Francis Xavier’s vita implies that Diyāb had “copied,”“transmitted,” or even “translated” (naqala) the book.³⁷ It remains uncertain whether he copied his books himself, commissioned others to do so, or dictated them, along with The Book of Travels, to the same scribe.

      The layout of The Book of Travels suggests that it may have been dictated. Although a large portion is presented as a finalized codex, with colored and centered chapter headings and the same number of lines per page, almost every folio contains words that have been crossed out and replaced with others. Also, the oral and colloquial nature of the text smacks of dictation. The language is a register of so-called Middle Arabic, containing many dialect features as well as many loanwords from Ottoman Turkish and Italian. Although typical of oral storytelling, as with the popular epic (siyar) tradition, Diyāb’s language displays more variation than do other examples of Middle Arabic, notably the orthography, which is highly idiosyncratic: The same word might be spelled two different ways in as many lines. Such inconsistencies may well be the result of rapid writing that reflects actual pronunciation, and serves as a reminder of the story’s initial orality.

Oral narrative, as Walter Ong has argued, displays greater redundancy than its written counterpart.³⁸ In The Book of Travels, redundancy is evident on different levels, from single words to entire episodes. For instance, Diyāb tells the story of his mother’s recovery from melancholia no less than three times. He also recycles structural formulas such as “let me get back to what I was saying,” a characteristic of oral performance, to link successive episodes.³⁹ In these respects, The Book of Travels resembles a performance by a public storyteller. Indeed, it may be the result of an extended performance that included some of the embedded stories.

As for the Catholic element, some of Diyāb’s devotional books contain stories that resonate with the material found in his Book of Travels. The Precious Pearl, a multivolume collection of hagiographies, had served as a synaxarion, a collection of saints’ lives read as part of the liturgy. It had been translated into Arabic from a French composition that was in turn based on a Spanish collection of vitae, one for each day of the year. Short hagiographic stories proliferated widely in the eighteenth-century Levant. Around the time Diyāb set out for the monastery, the superior of the Lebanese Maronite order, and later bishop of Aleppo, Jirmānūs Farḥāt (d. 1732), had just completed his rewriting of a Byzantine collection of hagiographic and other edifying tales from Eastern and Western Christianity. Titled The Monks’ Garden (Bustān al-ruhbān), this work garnered considerable attention.⁴⁰ Diyāb repurposed the contents of The Precious Pearl for his own narrative, borrowing elements from the stories of Saint Genevieve of Paris and Saint Elizabeth of Hungary and merging them into one narrative. He refers to the biblical story of Saint Mary Magdalene and her fate in Marseille, and to the story of Helena of Constantinople, both of which also appear in The Precious Pearl.

Diyāb seems also to have drawn on accounts of missionary activities, of which he was a great admirer, as he notes in several passages of the travelogue. His library included one such account, the vita of Saint Francis Xavier. A kind of spiritual travelogue, it recounts the attempt to convert Indians and Japanese to Catholic belief. Diyāb also owned a copy of the travelogue of Ilyās al-Mawṣilī, a member of the small Catholic Chaldean community of Iraq. Al-Mawṣilī’s seventeenth-century journey took him across France, Italy, and other European countries, with the aim of fostering connections and collecting money from Catholics there. After arriving at the Spanish court, al-Mawṣilī was offered the opportunity to travel to the New World, where he remained through at least 1683. Like Diyāb, he expresses awareness of being a curiosity in the territories he visits. Similarly, he presents his readers with the picture of a world divided between Catholics and native populations awaiting conversion.⁴¹ Both authors are interested in displays of linguistic knowledge, in acts of healing, and in the workings of charitable institutions. Each describes a meeting with an Ottoman ambassador, and each declares himself a recipient of divine guidance.

Like al-Mawṣilī, Diyāb titles his account siyāḥah, literally “wandering” or “peregrination.” This is different from riḥlah (“journey”), a term used by many Muslim authors, but only rarely by Diyāb. A riḥlah is a journey undertaken with a clear destination or defined purpose; it also denotes a written account of such a journey. Siyāḥah, СКАЧАТЬ