The Book of Travels. Hannā Diyāb

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.

      Note on the Text

      The Manuscript

There is only one known manuscript of Ḥannā Diyāb’s Kitāb al-Siyāḥah (Book of Travels), preserved in the Vatican Apostolic Library’s Sbath collection under the class mark 254. The first ten pages of the manuscript are missing, judging from the numbers handwritten in brown ink on the first forty folios. In the absence of the opening pages, both Paul Sbath in his Catalogue and Georg Graf in the Geschichte der christlichen arabischen Literatur categorized the text as anonymous. This erroneous designation may explain why the text was disregarded until the early 1990s, when Jérôme Lentin identified the author as Ḥannā Diyāb.⁵³

The binding of the codex is typical of Ottoman codices. It contains some fragments, including a page in Syriac script. Aside from the missing pages, which were evidently torn out after the book was first composed,⁵⁴ and some water stains, the codex is relatively well preserved. Although it has some of the features characteristic of professionally prepared codices, it also shows signs of being a work in progress. As was typical for Diyāb’s time, the text is laid out in black ink interspersed with red for decorative and structural purposes. The first six chapter headings are centered and followed by a short subtitle in red. The subsequent chapters lack rubrication. The last sections seem to have been planned as chapters but are not marked as such, nor is there any room left for large chapter headings. On nearly every page, letters and words have been struck through or replaced. Most of the strikethrough lines are colored in red ink. Red ink is also used for scribal marks, such as the pilcrows that indicate the ends of episodes. Some of the lines bearing paragraph marks at the end are indented, as can be seen frequently after folio 45 of the manuscript. Another structuring device is the use of dots to mark the end of syntactic units such as interrogative sentences and to mark a change of speakers. With its subdivision into paragraphs and its proto-punctuation, The Book of Travels is in some respects reminiscent of a modern book. The manuscript text, which ends on folio 174, is followed by a few names, such as the mention (given also in Roman script on the same page) of the book’s owner, Anṭūn Yūsuf Ḥannā Diyāb, probably the author’s son. On the bottom of the page that describes Diyāb’s journey from Marseille to Paris, a great-grandchild left an ownership note: “This account of the voyage of my father’s grandfather entered the possession of Jibrāyil, son of Dīdakūz Diyāb, of the Maronite community, on the 19th of April in the year 1840 of the Christian era.”