The Book of Travels. Hannā Diyāb

is neighbor to inquiry. At the opera, Diyāb is dazzled by stage contraptions. Knowing how they are built does nothing to lessen their magic. Mechanical causes with magical effects: this is art.

      Yasmine Seale

      Istanbul

      Acknowledgments

      Editor’s acknowledgments

      I wish to express my sincere gratitude to those colleagues who helped me during the process of preparing this edition and added to my understanding of the text and its context. Altogether, this work is the outcome of a physical and mental voyage over almost a decade. I wish to first of all thank Reinhard Schulze in Bern (Switzerland), who directed me to the scarcely studied group of texts written by Maronite travelers from Aleppo during the mid-eighteenth century. Leafing through Georg Graf’s famous reference work, itself a time machine through early modern and modern Ottoman history, I noticed Ḥannā Diyāb’s text, attributed to “Anonymous.” That sparked my curiosity. In the years to follow and with the support of the University of Bern I was able to travel to Lebanon and to the Vatican to see The Book of Travels, as well as to Germany, to the Forschungsbibliothek in Gotha to consult manuscripts from Ḥannā Diyāb’s time. I wish to thank the Orient-Institut Beirut for their support during my stay as a researcher there in 2013. I was able to gain insight into numerous collections of manuscripts from the early modern period in Lebanon. My stay in Lebanon brought me in touch with the Bibliothèque Orientale at the Université de Saint-Joseph in Beirut, where employees Magda Nammour and Karam El Hoyek in particular helped with the consultation of manuscripts relevant to this project.

      Over the years of working on my PhD thesis on Ḥannā Diyāb and this edition I enjoyed informative conversations with Ibrahim Akel, Bernard Heyberger, Paule Fahmé-Thiéry, and Hilary Kilpatrick, among others, during my trips to Denmark, France, and Switzerland. All of them shared important perspectives on the material at hand. For help with the preparation of the edition I wish to thank Ziad Bou Akl and Enass Khansa as well as my students in Bern for sharing their impressions on the tone, style, and linguistic register of the text. Thanks also to Elias Muhanna and Michael Cooperson for the fruitful exchange and for the efficient collaborative process; the same goes for the whole Library of Arabic Literature crew for their support of this project. I also wish to express my gratitude to everyone at the Kalīla and Dimna – AnonymClassic project, where I currently hold a research post, notably Beatrice Gründler and Isabel Toral who are interested in the continuation of my research on the Middle Arabic register. Special thanks, lastly, go to my partner Feriel who during our holidays followed my geeky attempt to find the “Tower of Skulls,” without any doubt one of today’s most thrilling sights in Houmt Souk (Djerba, Tunisia).

      Translator’s acknowledgments

       For Laila and Maya

      I wish to express my gratitude to the many individuals whose contributions have enriched this book. Johannes Stephan has been all that one could ask for in a co-author, and Michael Cooperson’s erudition and wit have improved our work immeasurably. I’m grateful to Paolo Horta for helping to interest the Library of Arabic Literature in the manuscript, to Philip Kennedy and the rest of the Editorial Board for their faith in the project, and to an anonymous reviewer for many helpful suggestions. Chip Rossetti, Lucie Taylor, and the production team have taken scrupulous care of our work. I would like to thank Professors Hilary Kilpatrick and Jérôme Lentin for introducing me to Diyāb’s manuscript many years ago. Finally, I thank my wife Jen, whose discernment has caught many an unmusical phrase, and my daughters Laila Rose and Maya, whose love has kept me whole when, as Diyāb would say, the world seemed to crowd in upon my miserable self.

      Introduction

      Johannes Stephan

The author of The Book of Travels (Kitāb al-Siyāḥah),¹ Ḥannā Diyāb,² became known to Western scholarship more than a century after his death, when his name was discovered in the diaries of Antoine Galland, the great French Orientalist and translator of the Thousand and One Nights.³ Since that discovery, Diyāb, a Maronite Christian merchant and storyteller from Aleppo, has become a familiar figure to scholars interested in the textual history of the Nights. He has been described as Galland’s muse: The informant who supplied several famous stories to the French translation of the collection, including “Aladdin” and “ʿAlī Bābā and the Forty Thieves.”

Until the early 1990s, few scholars were aware that in 1764 Diyāb had written his own travelogue.⁴ Because the first pages were missing, his work was catalogued as anonymous by the Catholic priest Paul Sbath, who came into possession of it at some point in the early twentieth century.⁵ After Sbath’s death in 1945, his family gave the manuscript to the Vatican Library, where it remains today. The work is an account of Diyāb’s travels, mostly in the company of a Frenchman named Paul Lucas. Starting in early 1707, from the vicinity of Diyāb’s hometown of Aleppo, the two journeyed through Ottoman Syria, then traveled across the Mediterranean to Paris, passing through Cyprus, Alexandria, Cairo, Fayoum, Tripoli, Djerba, Tunis, Livorno, Genoa, Marseille, Lyon, and the court of Versailles, among many other places. They arrived in Paris in September 1708 and lived there together for several months. In June 1709, Diyāb set out for home. His voyage took him first to Istanbul, where he lived for some time. After crossing Anatolia by caravan, he returned home to Aleppo in June 1710.

Ḥannā Diyāb’s connection to the Thousand and One Nights has long tantalized scholars, and the publication of his travelogue may help shed light on that.⁶ But The Book of Travels is also significant in its own right. Among the topics it allows us to explore are Diyāb’s relationship to his French patron, Paul Lucas; different forms of oral storytelling proper to The Book of Travels; and the culture of Arabic writing in eighteenth-century Aleppo.

      The Aleppan Traveler and His French Patron

      For the most part, The Book of Travels centers on the relationship between an Aleppan working man and a French antiquarian, which began as a business agreement. In exchange for serving as a translator, Diyāb was offered the chance to accompany Lucas on a journey that would span three continents. The asymmetry of this master-servant arrangement reflects, in a way, the relationship between Catholic states in the West and the Ottoman Empire during the early and mid-eighteenth century, just as it portrays an ambivalent relationship between East and West. Diyāb’s relationship to his patron encompasses a combination of postures and affects, ranging from servitude, respect, and emulation to the occasional display of irony. For his part, Lucas, who also wrote an account of the voyage, does not mention Diyāb once.

Apart from a few scraps of manuscript evidence, the only available record of Diyāb’s life is to be found in his travelogue, which also seems to be the only text he authored. Toward the end of the book, he indicates that he wrote it at the age of seventy-five. This means that he must have been born between 1687 and 1689, probably in the northern Aleppo suburb of al-Jdayde, a traditionally Christian quarter. The manuscript was completed in March 1764. It ends with an account of Diyāb’s final adventure with Lucas after the latter’s return to Aleppo in 1716. By then, Diyāb had begun a career as a textile merchant.⁷ Half a century later, when he set about writing The Book of Travels, he enjoyed a respected social position within the Maronite community of Aleppo.⁸