The Book of Travels. Hannā Diyāb
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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, by contrast, emphasizes the activity of moving around, and also describes the practice of wandering that formed part of Sufi and Christian piety.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