The Book of Travels. Hannā Diyāb

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СКАЧАТЬ rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_8ab83a56-3370-50cd-9a3e-e2e81efaafcf">⁴² The term siyāḥah may also suggest a protracted journey. The famous Ibn Baṭṭūṭah, who traveled for more than thirty years, uses the term several times. So do al-Mawṣilī, who traveled for at least fifteen years, and Evliya Çelebi, who spent his life traveling, and even seems to define himself by that activity.⁴³ Yet, despite the conceptual similarities, the scope of the two books, and their strong Catholic impetus, Diyāb does not model his account closely on al-Mawṣilī’s. Whereas the latter’s travelogue consists of a terse listing of events and activities, Diyāb offers long descriptions and complex, embedded secondary narratives. Diyāb is a much more personal narrator who, unlike al-Mawṣilī, does not depict himself as an audacious adventurer, but rather as an inexperienced and God-fearing young man. In this respect, it is noticeable that Diyāb, especially when recounting his journey home, makes use of the relief-after-hardship motif, which is reminiscent of classical Arabic prose.

The volume containing Ilyās al-Mawṣilī’s account also contains the embassy account (sefâretnâmeh) of Yirmisekiz Mehmed Çelebi Effendi, a travelogue by one of the most important Ottoman diplomats of the eighteenth century. His travelogue circulated in Aleppo, where it was copied several times.⁴⁴ It seems to have been translated into Arabic in the 1740s or ’50s.⁴⁵ A copy of it exists as a standalone codex in the library of Diyāb’s contemporary Ḥannā ibn Shukrī al-Ṭabīb (d. 1775), an Aleppan physician, who was himself the author of travelogues. In 1764 he turned the travel diary of his younger brother Arsāniyūs Shukrī (d. 1786) into a comprehensive travel account,⁴⁶ and in 1765 composed an ethnographic account of Istanbul, which he had visited the previous fall. It is quite likely that Diyāb’s report of the Ottoman embassy is copied from that of Ḥannā al-Ṭabīb.

Diyāb thus appears to have been part of a culture of sharing and reading travelogues, something that must have informed his own writing. For example, upon reading Yirmisekiz Çelebi’s account of his festive reception in Toulon, which included crowds of French people waving at him on the streets, Diyāb might have recalled being welcomed with great curiosity at the French court. Similarly, Yirmisekiz Çelebi’s description of the opera and other festive events may have reminded Diyāb of his own visit to the opera in 1709 and his attendance at a banquet of statesmen in Istanbul.⁴⁷

      Although he writes from a Catholic perspective, Diyāb nevertheless emphasizes the importance of European-Ottoman relations. He discusses an Ottoman ambassador’s visit to the French court, recounts his employment with the Venetian consul in Istanbul, and relates several stories about the cordial relationship between the governor of Tripoli (in North Africa) and a French deputy. His possession of the travelogues by al-Mawṣilī and Yirmisekiz Çelebi suggests an interest in the links between Istanbul, Aleppo, Paris, and other European centers of power—an interest he shares with his contemporary Ḥannā al-Ṭabīb.

      The Book of Travels is no meticulous description of distant places. Rather, it has the character of an early-modern adventure novel with some picaresque elements. Speaking of his experiences, Diyāb often employs the term qiṣṣah (story). From the passages where the term appears, one can track those parts of the travelogue that relate to Diyāb’s own story. These passages describe, first, the loss of his ties to his workplace in Aleppo, and his decision to travel back to the monastery; second, his encounter with Paul Lucas, who made possible the journey to Paris that takes up the bulk of the story; and third, the scheme by which Antoine Galland and a French nobleman, the Abbé de Signy, induced him to travel back to Aleppo.

These three travel episodes form the main part of Diyāb’s wanderings and are encapsulated by the monastic experience at the beginning of the existing narrative and the final adventure that took place upon Lucas’s return. The main episode, which fills more than two-thirds of the 174 extant folios, is the story of an unfulfilled promise. It parallels the experience that befell many other travelers from the Levant in this period, including Niqūlāwus al-Ḥalabī (d. ca. 1661) and Salomon Negri (d. 1727), who were hired by Western travelers and scholars.⁴⁸ During Diyāb’s travels, he encounters several such people—that is, catholicized Christians from the Middle East who somehow ended up in Europe, working as merchants, coffeehouse owners, and practitioners of other trades. Although some of these individuals succeeded where Diyāb did not, in the sense that they managed to gain employment in Europe, they too lament the difficulties of survival in their new home. By writing about them in his travelogue, Diyāb affirms his ties to these diasporic catholicized Middle Easterners.

Throughout The Book of Travels, Diyāb refers to his own thoughts and emotions, though he often relies on formulaic expressions to describe his state of mind. To express despair, for example, he often uses an expression that means “the world closed up on me” (see §§1.28 and Volume Two, §10.42); of interest is the fact that such moments of despair are often followed by a radical shift in the direction of the plot. And while he often expresses his delight at the beauties of nature or architecture (see §3.7 and §3.19), the emotion he experiences most often is fear, which he expresses in many different ways.⁴⁹

Diyāb’s ability to produce a work that focuses on himself suggests that he was familiar with other autobiographical narratives. Whether in oral or written form, the autobiographies of figures such as the monk and bishop ʿAbdallāh Qarāʿalī⁵⁰ and the nun and living saint Hindiyyah al-ʿUjaymī⁵¹ were known in Aleppo during the 1740s and 1750s. Like Qarāʿalī and al-ʿUjaymī, Diyāb describes leaving his family to start a life of his own, and in doing so creates a particular perspective on the traveling younger self.

      Diyāb’s narrative style merges the craftsmanship expected of a Thousand and One Nights storyteller with the conventions of travel writing popular among the catholicized Christians of his time. By embedding and framing personal narratives, Diyāb moves between different positions of perception. As he comments on his own actions, adds illustrative stories, and reproduces dialogue, the narrator alternates between proximity and distance to the story world. In this respect, Diyāb’s Book of Travels has much in common with the fictional narratives that appeared in Arabic during the nineteenth century.

Like other works in Middle Arabic, Diyāb’s travelogue has been marginalized in the study of Arabic literary history. Works from the late-medieval and early-modern periods, especially those in what has been termed Middle Arabic, have routinely been dismissed as illustrative of decadence and decline. But the travelogues of Ḥannā ibn Shukrī al-Ṭabīb and Fatḥallāh al-Ṣāyigh (fl. 1810, an Aleppan who traveled with Lascaris de Vintimille),⁵² to name but two, deserve, like Diyāb’s, to be read as Arabic literature—that is, read with attention to their oral narrative style, their patchwork character, and their autobiographical conventions, as well as their connections to other travelogues from the Arabic literary tradition. Thanks to the recent revival of interest in the Arabic textual archive of the early-modern period, Middle Arabic works are, fortunately, beginning to receive more attention. Reading them as literary constructions, rather than as examples of decadence and decline, will help us rethink the ways in which we write and understand Arabic literary history.

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