Читать книгу The Book of Travels - Hannā Diyāb - Страница 10

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 From the book we learn that he married a few years after his return, and fathered several children. He mentions his mother, but says nothing of his father. He does speak of his older brothers, ʿAbdallāh and Anṭūn, whose correspondence with him during his travels suggests they were responsible for him.⁹

Another detail one may infer from the book’s first pages pertains to the Maronite community to which Diyāb belonged. Like other Eastern churches, it was undergoing a process of catholicization that had begun in the sixteenth century. Only a few years after the Council of Trent, in the late sixteenth century, the first Catholic missionaries established themselves in Aleppo and began to reformulate Eastern Christian rites and dogma. A decade later, the Holy See opened a Maronite college in Rome. This catholicizing of the Eastern churches, which peaked in the first decades of the eighteenth century, entailed the establishment of new teaching institutions, the proliferation of books and literacy, the introduction of a printing press, and the formation of the Melkite Greek Catholic church.¹⁰

It was during this time of change that Diyāb set out, in 1706, for the Monastery of Saint Elishaʿ, the main residence of the Lebanese Maronite order. The order had been established in 1694 by the young Aleppans ʿAbdallāh Qarāʿalī, Jibrīl Ḥawwā, and Yūsuf al-Baṭn, with the permission of the patriarch Iṣṭifān al-Duwayhī.¹¹ In founding the first indigenous monastic order based on a European model, these young men became important figures in the catholicization of the Maronite community.¹² Hoping to become a monk, Diyāb arrived at a moment when the community was still in the throes of an internal dispute over hierarchy and doctrinal direction.¹³

The experience at Saint Elishaʿ and his meeting with one of the founders, ʿAbdallāh Qarāʿalī (d. 1742), left a profound impression on Diyāb. He vividly portrays his reverence for the monks’ “angelic conduct” (§1.17) and for the orderly rhythms of monastic life. He soon came to feel, however, that he did not belong in the community. When at one point he fell ill, he received permission from the abbot to leave the monastery, under the pretext of convalescing in his hometown. Failing to find a job in Aleppo, he resigned himself to returning to the monastery. On his way back, he met Paul Lucas, a traveler “dispatched by the sultan of France,” and joined his entourage (§1.29).

The “gentleman” (khawājah) Paul Lucas, as Diyāb first calls him, was born in 1664 to a merchant family in Rouen. Two years later, after serving in the Venetian army, he embarked on his first tour to the Levant.¹⁴ By the time he met Diyāb, he was in the midst of his third voyage to the East. Drawn by Diyāb’s linguistic skills, Lucas offered him the job of personal companion and dragoman on a journey across the Mediterranean world. In exchange, Lucas promised Diyāb a position at the Royal Library in Paris. The young Aleppan was intrigued by the offer, and quickly accepted, presenting himself as a traveler interested in seeing the world rather than a humble novice returning to his monastery. After making a few discreet inquiries about the Frenchman’s integrity, he agreed to accompany him on his travels.

When they arrived in Paris, Diyāb lived with Lucas, from September 1708 to June 1709, waiting patiently to be hired into the position at the Royal Library, as he had been promised. When no such job materialized, Diyāb grew frustrated. In the meantime, he had made the acquaintance of Antoine Galland, whom he describes as an “old man who was assigned to oversee the library of Arabic books and could read Arabic well,” (Volume Two, §10.9). After Galland arranged for Diyāb to be hired by a member of the French court to work, like his former master, as a traveler dispatched by Louis XIV, he decided he would leave the French capital, but the offer of employment—like the library position he coveted—never came through. On his way home to Syria, he stopped for some time in Istanbul, where he worked as a valet and a housekeeper until he was urged by a friend to accompany him to Aleppo. Right after Diyāb’s return from his travels in June 1710, his brother ʿAbdallāh, with the help of an uncle, opened a textile shop for him. A few years later, Paul Lucas returned to Aleppo, sought out Diyāb, and reproached him for leaving Paris so rashly. After going on one last adventure together in the vicinity of Aleppo, the two men went their separate ways. Diyāb tells us that he worked as a textile merchant for twenty-two years, but gives no details about his life after he retired in his forties.

The encounter with Lucas had a profound influence on Diyāb. It was common for Aleppan Christians in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to work for (French) consuls, traders, missionaries, and travelers who formed part of the social fabric of the city. In fact, Lucas was not Diyāb’s first patron; like his brothers, Diyāb had worked for a dozen years, beginning before he was ten years old, as a domestic servant in the employ of various French merchants. His contact with Europeans helped him acquire a good knowledge of French, Italian, and Turkish. His association with Lucas also helped him to attain a prestigious position within his community. In the 1760s, when he wrote The Book of Travels, it was important to Diyāb to assert this prestige before his extended family and larger community. Lucas is accordingly mentioned in two of the book’s chapter headings. He doubtless also appeared in the now-lost first pages of the narrative, and perhaps even in the title of the book.

In the first chapters of Diyāb’s travelogue, Lucas’s discoveries and his acquisition of artifacts—rare precious stones, coins, books, and a mummy, among other things—are the main focus of the narrative. Diyāb describes how Lucas offered to treat people’s illnesses in exchange for objects he wanted to acquire, something Lucas himself reports that he did. Diyāb mentions Lucas’s expertise in astronomy, geometry, philosophy, natural history, and other disciplines. He recounts how Lucas came to his aid on more than one occasion, such as when Diyāb nearly froze to death during the icy winter in Paris, or when he was arrested by the French gendarmerie.

Given Diyāb’s apparently reverential attitude toward Lucas, it is noteworthy that the latter nowhere mentions Diyāb in his own travelogue. The young Syrian cannot even be discerned among the nameless servants and dragomans that Lucas happens to mention on occasion.¹⁵ This discrepancy between the two works can be seen in other ways. Diyāb offers a richly detailed account of the logistics of travel, of the food they consumed, and of the different types of clothing he saw. Lucas’s focus is, rather, on sightseeing at ancient ruins, collecting antiquities, and describing his adventures, which include the occasional miracle.¹⁶ He excludes from his account the countries of Catholic Europe that so fascinated Diyāb, who describes them along with the parts of the Ottoman Empire that were largely unknown to Aleppans. Thus, although the itinerary described in the two travelogues is generally the same, only a few episodes correspond well enough to be fruitfully compared.¹⁷

One such episode is the story of the jerboas that Lucas presented to Louis XIV and his entourage at Versailles. In his account, Lucas offers a drawing of a jerboa,¹⁸ and claims to have witnessed a hunt for the animals in the desert in Upper Egypt.¹⁹ In Diyāb’s version of the story, we learn that Lucas had in fact acquired the jerboas at a French merchant’s house in Tunis. As he reports the lie his patron told the king, Diyāb gives his readers a glimpse of his own feelings about Lucas’s posturing. He also recounts how Lucas, unable to identify the exotic species for the king, turned to his companion for help. Diyāb knew the animal’s name in both French and Arabic and was able to write these down at Louis XIV’s request.

The jerboas—a subject of great interest to the members of the royal court—served as Diyāb’s entry to the king’s private chambers. As he was paraded through the palace and its various mansions, carrying the cage with the two jerboas to present them to the royal family, Diyāb, dressed in a turban, bouffant pantaloons, and a fancy striped overcoat, and wearing a silver-plated dagger in his belt, came to be regarded as a curiosity in his own right. In Diyāb’s account, it is at this moment that he becomes the protagonist of his own story. By sharing with the French court his knowledge of the Orient, he outdoes his master, the supposed authority. Recollecting these events more than fifty years later, Diyāb reveals to his readers his patron’s unreliability, correcting the record of what Lucas attempts to convey about his own experiences.

A further element of Diyāb’s relationship with Lucas is the medical knowledge he believed he had acquired by association with him. On his journey home, Diyāb used those skills to treat people in exchange for accommodation and food. Dressed as a European, he came to be known in Anatolia as a “Frankish doctor,” (Volume Two, §11.83) modeled on his master. Like Lucas, Diyāb recounts how rumors of his medical skill spread as he traveled through Anatolia, and that the masses flocked to him to receive treatment.²⁰ However, while Lucas regarded himself as a genuine master of various treatments and procedures, Diyāb’s self-portrayal is decidedly less confident. He presents himself as overwhelmed by the difficulties of masquerading as a physician. His humility, confusion, and reliance on God’s guidance stand in clear contrast to the self-confident mastery Lucas ascribes to himself. Setting these two accounts alongside each other, one might read Diyāb’s description of his experience as a traveling doctor as a parody of Lucas’s account. But it is unlikely that Diyāb meant it that way. Whereas Diyāb mentions Lucas’s journaling and the fact that he had sent his book manuscript to the printer after arriving in Paris, it is unlikely that Diyāb read much of Lucas’s book or earlier notes. That said, he would have known Lucas’s perspectives on their shared adventures.

The relationship between Ḥannā Diyāb and Paul Lucas was one of mutual dependence. Lucas was an antiquarian with little knowledge of Arabic and other Southern Mediterranean languages and literary traditions. His dependence on local Eastern Christian guides who could move flexibly within a Western Christian context is indisputable, even if that dependence was not reflected in his own accounts. On the other hand, Lucas seems to have served both as a source of personal protection and, to some extent, as a model for the young man from Aleppo. Diyāb’s interest in Lucas’s professional activities during the long journey to the “lands of the Christians,” as well as his emulation of his medical practices, mean he was not merely an “Oriental” servant to a French traveler, but also a Catholic familiar with global institutions such as the missionary movement and Mediterranean trade.