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Diyāb was one of several Maronites and other catholicized Christians who composed accounts of their experiences in the Western Catholic world. Though interested in travelogues, he composed his Book of Travels very much as a personal narrative, and it consequently exhibits, both in plot and the perspective, specific features characteristic of autobiography.

We can get some idea of the literary models available to Diyāb by looking at his library. Besides his own Book of Travels, written at the end of his life, Diyāb owned at least six other books. Four are handwritten copies of devotional works:

1 a Treatise on the Seven Deadly Sins and the Seven Virtues (Sharḥ mukhtaṣar fī al-sabʿ al-radhāyil wa-mā yuqābiluhā aʿnī al-sabʿ faḍāyil), translated from Latin, and bound in a volume dated July 1753;

2 A Useful Book on Knowing One’s Will (Kitāb Mufīd fī ʿilm al-niyyah), another treatise on moral theology;³³

3 The Precious Pearl on the Holy Life of Saint Francis (al-Durr al-nafīs fī sīrat al-qiddīs Fransīs),³⁴ a vita of Saint Francis Xavier (d. 1552), the founder of the Jesuit order, based on the account by Dominique Bouhours (d. 1702), and translated into Arabic by a Jesuit missionary in Aleppo, dated December 1753; and

4 a four-volume collection of hagiographic tales (Kitāb Akhbār al-qiddīsīn) translated into Arabic by Pierre Fromage (d. 1740), dated between 1755 and 1757. The owner’s name, being partially struck out, is not entirely legible, but the handwriting of this codex resembles that of the works above, as well as that of The Book of Travels.

The two other books are travelogues, probably copied in the 1750s or ’60s, and bound in a single volume:

1 a copy of The Book of Travels (Kitāb al-Siyāḥah) by Ilyās al-Mawṣilī (d. after 1692). A struck-off name deciphered by Antoine Rabbath (d. 1913) as “Ḥannā son of Diyāb” appears as a former owner.³⁵

2 an Arabic translation of the Turkish sefâretnâmeh by Yirmisekiz Mehmed Çelebi Effendi.

From this list, and from the way Diyāb’s name appears in the codices, 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 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.