Hannā Diyāb (1688–1766): Early Life, French Fluency, and Storytelling

1.1.1 Introduction: Why Care About Hannā Diyāb?

“Aladdin and the Magic Lamp” and “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves” are the most familiar and best loved stories in Antoine Galland’s (1646–1715) 12-volume translation and edition of Mille et Une Nuit(s) (Thousand and One Nights, popularly known as Arabian Nights, 1704–1717). Although stories told by Hannā Diyāb comprise nearly 1/3 of Galland’s “Contes Arabes” (Arab Tales), his name appears nowhere in that œuvre. Sometime between 1800 and 1810 Michel Sabbāgh (1775–1816) forged a copy of the Nights and dated it “1703” to antedate Galland’s first published volumes and to re-affirm the anonymous Arab-ness of the entire collection. Thus, when Herman Zotenberg (1834–1909) discovered Antoine Galland’s journals in the Bibliothèque nationale de France and, within it, the words written on 5 May 1709: “Le matin, le Maronit Hanna d’Alep, acheva de me faire le recit du Conte de La Lampe.”^[1] (In the morning the Maronite Hannā from Aleppo, finished telling me the Story of The Lamp), Zotenberg’s discovery electrified Nights researchers and revived Hannā Diyāb as a name. As a person, however, he was solely a Manonite named “Hanna” from Aleppo of unspecified age.

Scholars and journalists filled in blank spaces of Diyāb’s life with assumptions that a storytelling Maronite Christian from Aleppo must be illiterate and have told all of his stories to Antoine Galland (a knowledgeable scholar of Arabic) in Arabic, while the gripping plots of Diyāb’s stories suggested experience and thus a long life. Moreover, late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century expectations for storytellers idealized illiteracy, an expectation that led to assumptions that Diyāb had learned his stories through his ears from other Arabic-speaking storytellers.

The documented presence of the plot of the Diyāb story “The Two Jealous Sisters”, in Giovan Franesco Straparola’s mid-1500s Piacevoli Notti meant – in the view of nineteenth-century literary scholars – that some unknown and necessarily bilingual storyteller had carried that story from the East to the West, where Straparola then created his “Ancilotto”. No-one then knew that “The Two Jealous Sisters” was not part of the Nights in the 1500s, not, in fact, associated with it until Diyāb told it to Galland in 1709.

In 1964 Mia Gerhardt reified a different proposition: the native-Arabic-speaking Diyāb must have taken this and other stories (the so-called “orphan stories”) from a never documented Arabic oral narrative tradition and have told it, along with other tales, to Antoine Galland. The accompanying expectation? The native Arabic-speaking Hannā told his “Arabic tales”, as Galland always called them, to Galland in Arabic.

All these propositions were called into question by articles such as “East Meets West” (2014), “Reading for Fun in Eighteenth-Century Aleppo” (2019) and “Hannâ Diyâb’s Tales in Antoine Galland’s MILLE ET UNE NUIT(S): I. New Perspectives … (2020). In these articles I argued that its teller Hannā Diyāb had access to French-language books (including French translations of Straparola’s Italian tales) and Arabic-language manuscript-published popular tales.

The 2015 publication of d’Alep à Paris, Hannā Diyāb’s 1763/1764 travel memoir, freed Diyāb from century-long allegations of illiteracy and monolingualism. With that, false truisms about his life story began to fall away. D’Alep à Paris and other translations demonstrate that Hannā Diyāb was not old and illiterate, but young, a ready reader, a traveler curious about his surroundings, and innocent as well as canny about his experiences in the world unfolding before him.

1.1.2 Adding Detail to Hannā Diyāb’s Early Life Through Forensic Reading

Partial references scattered throughout Hannā Diyāb’s travel memoir and other documents hint at facts of his early life. Gathering them into related categories produces interrelated semantic contents that overlap with and complement one another until a text-generated fact emerges. For instance, writing at the age of 75, Diyāb mentions a variety of household tasks he performed for a man called khawājah Rimbaud. At another point we learn that khawājah Rimbaud returned to Marseille. In other places we find that Diyāb worked for Rimbaud for twelve years, beginning at a young age and that his older brother Antūn also worked for the same employer. Initially unrelated, these and other facts coalesce into a coherent history of Diyāb’s childhood employment by a sympathetic employer.

The emerging facts of Hannā Diyāb’s life, a microhistory, are amplified by studies of daily life such as Alexander Russell’s 1756 Natural History of Aleppo and Abraham Marcus’s 1989 Middle East on the Eve of Modernity. Similarly detailed studies in other disciplines – such as lists of Marseille merchants – illuminate and extend the information assembled from detail-oriented readings of the travel memoir: eventually, disparate details aggregate into an image that has much the same standing as a citable fact.

Because this kind of reasoning duplicates that customary in courts of law, it is called forensic reading. Forensic reading of Diyāb’s travel memoir yields footnoted components of each aggregate fact. Applying the same technique to Galland’s journal recordings of Diyāb’s stories yields similarly relevant results for the mechanics and dynamics of Diyāb’s storytelling.

1.1.3 Hannā Diyāb’s Name

When the 2015 Fahmé-Thiéry / Heyberger / Lentin translation of the Diyāb travel memoir included an inscription declaring “Antūn Yoūsef Hanna Dyāb” as the manuscript’s owner and dated that claim with the notation “in the Christian year 1766”, “Antūn Yoūsef Hanna Dyāb” was understood as Hannā Diyāb’s full and complete name.^[2] However, much argues against that proposition.

1. During his entire life, Hannā used the patronymic “ibn Diyāb” when referring to himself. (See below, “Diyāb as Patronymic and Surname”.)

2. In terms of his given name, Diyāb refers to himself only as “Hannā” and never as “Antūn” or “Yoūsef”.

3. The discrepancy in naming outlined in 1. and 2. suggests that “Antūn Yoūsef Hanna Dyāb” refers to someone other than Hannā ibn Diyāb.

4. Thus, the inscription declares (new) ownership of the manuscript.

5. New ownership clearly implies the cessation of prior ownership. For Hannā Diyāb, who was 75 in 1763 (see below “Hannā Diyāb’s Probable Year of Death” and “Early 1688 as Hannā Diyab’s Year and Season of Birth”) a death in 1766 at the age of 77 or 78 is a reasonable conjecture.

6. Cessation of ownership strongly implies death as having caused that cessation.

7. The ownership of family items is regularly transferred to a lineal descendant of the decedent Hannā ibn Diyāb.

8. It is reasonable to conclude that “Antūn Yoūsef Hanna Dyāb” is a surviving son of Hannā (ibn) Diyāb,^[3]

9. and that “Antūn Yoūsef Hanna Dyāb” was Hannā ibn Diyāb’s first surviving son, because the given name “Antūn” may memorialize Hannā’s older brother Antūn, with whom he worked and lived during his his childhood and youth (see below, “Hannā Goes to Work” and “The ibn Diyāb Siblings”) and to whose house he returned home in 1710.^[4]

10. The evident closeness between Antūn and Hannā may have inclined Hannā ibn Diyāb to name a son of his after that older brother. I have no explanation for the second given name “Yoūsef”.

The third forename, “Hanna”, gives pause. One possibility is that “Antūn Yoūsef Hanna Dyāb”, the book’s new owner, was called something different during his childhood and youth. After all, his father Hannā ibn Diyāb used a patronymic, and perhaps Antūn Yoūsef followed this habit during all or part of his father’s lifetime. In that case he would have been known as “Antūn Yoūsef ibn Hannā”. And then, because “Hannā”s was so common a name in Aleppo, Antūn Yoūsef, or others, may have added “ibn Diyāb” to distinguish him from other Aleppan “ibn Hannā”s. That would produce the lengthy name “Antūn Yoūsef ibn Hannā ibn Diyāb”. Dropping both “ibn”s would then yield the name as it appears in the 1766 inscription, “Antūn Yoūsef Hannā Diyāb”. Whatever its earlier form, the “Diyāb” name, as written by the travel memoir’s new possessor, marks a shift from “ibn Diyāb” as a patronymic to “Diyāb” as a henceforth stable family name. (See below, “A Word About Names”.).

1.1.4 Hannā Diyāb’s Probable Year of Death

The “Antūn Yoūsef Hanna Dyāb” book ownership mark is dated 1766. For those who believe the bookmark was penned by Hannā ibn Diyāb, it would follow that Hannā ibn Diyāb was still living in 1766 and that the date of his death must be understood as “1766 or after”. If one holds that the book ownership mark was written not by Hannā ibn Diyāb but by an inheritor, then the date of death must be 1766 or before.

If we understand the person named in the post-memoir inscription as Hannā ibn Diyāb’s son rather than as Hannā ibn Diyāb himself, then the inscription changes from an unnecessary repetition of authorship to marking a change in ownership through which the book passed from Hannā ibn Diyāb’s possession to “Antūn Yoūsef Hanna Dyāb” genitives ownership. In this case, dating the change in ownership as 1766, the person writing the inscription inadvertently dates the year in which Hannā Diyāb’s ownership ceased by virtue of his death. Consequently, the year 1766 becomes the highly probable date of Hannā Diyāb’s death.^[5]

1.1.5 1688 as Hannā Diyab’s Year of Birth

About midway through his travel memoir, Hannā Diyāb notes: “As I now write this account of my voyage, it is the year 1763”.^[6] Twenty-four pages earlier, about halfway through the travel memoir manuscript, Diyāb announces his age: “I’m now seventy-five years old …”^[7] The simple calculation – 1763 – 75 – yields 1688 as Diyab’s year of birth.

If Hanna had just turned 75 when he stated his age in 1763, 1688 would unquestioningly be his year of birth. If, however, he had been 75 years old for nearly a year when he wrote these words, then, of course, he was about to turn 76 and thus his 76th birthday might still fall in 1763. That would change his year of birth to late 1687.^[8] In an appendix I use data established subsequently in this article to further explore the question of Hannā Diyāb’s season of birth. Although that exercise entails assumptions about probabilities, it has nonetheless led me to the working hypothesis that Diyāb was born in early 1688.

1.1.6 “Diyāb” as Patronymic and Surname

In transliterations of Arabic– here into the Roman alphabet – names, and words in general, may legitimately be transliterated according to their Arabic spelling, their standard pronunciation, or their colloquial pronunciation. That observation is relevant for the Diyāb name: it was the forename of Hannā ibn Diyāb’s father, which we know to be the case, because Hannā used “Hannā ibn Diyāb” as his own name during his life. (See below.) After his death, and possibly during his lifetime, however, Hannā ibn Diyāb’s descendants began using “Diyāb” as a family name. Whether used as a patronymic (ibn Diyāb), or as a family name (Diyāb) the name appears in the 1764 travel memoir as دياب (d-y-long a-b). The travel memoir’s French translators transliterate the name’s spelling as “Dyāb”, the spelling used here in citations from the French translation. In the English translation of the travel memoir, and in English popular and scholarly writing as a whole, the same Arabic name, دياب, is transliterated with an “i” – “Diyāb”. This apparently results from incorporating a barely audible sound that links the name’s initial “d” to the following “y”. To the best of my knowledge, this issue has not been directly addressed with reference to the transliteration of the Dyāb / Diyāb name. In the Roman alphabet, the alif, ا, or long “a”, appears typographically either as “â” or “ā”. Hence, commonly encountered transliterations include “Dyâb” and “Dyāb” as well as “Diyâb” and “Diyāb”. The same name also appears as “Diab”^[9] and “Diyab”, that is, without diacritical marks, with the latter often in articles written for general audiences.^[10] Since this article is in English, I follow the current English academic spelling, “Diyāb”.

The name “Dipy”, “Dipi”, or “Dippi” is associated with another person entirely, Pierre Dipy (birth date unknown-died February 1709). Born in Aleppo and widely but incorrectly identified in modern scholarship as a Maronite Christian, Dipy lived in Paris at least from the 1670s onward, rose from Arabic-French translator to keeper of Oriental manuscripts for Louis XIV’s library and eventually to holder of a chair in Arabic at the Collège Royal. In 1674, however, Dipy inscribed a reader’s mark onto a manuscript copy of Kalila wa Dimna in Louis XIV’s library, where he wrote his name and patronymic as “Butrus ibn Hajj Diyāb”^[11] / “Diyāb”.^[12] Galland’s acute awareness of Pierre Dipy^[13] may account for his mistaken reference to Hannā Diyāb (as he may have known him) as “Jean Dipy” in a 1711 journal entry^[14] that converted “Dyāb” into the name of his Syrian Melkite predecessor in the Chair of Arabic the Collège Royal.

As outlined above, the man we now know as Hannā Diyāb called himself “Hannā ibn Diyāb”, which is confirmed by several ownership marks in his personal library. Into one he marked his personal ownership six times as “Hannā ibn Diyāb” (Hannā son of Diyāb).^[15] In the general absence of family names in Aleppo at the time (except for the wealthy or the highly placed), a patronymic was crucial. A sixfold repetition of his ownership also bespeaks a youthful joy at acquiring a book of his own, a delightful glimpse into Hannā ibn Diyāb’s persona.

Before Hannā Diyāb’s 1707–1710 journey to and back from France, he would have been known in Aleppo as “Hannā ibn Diyāb” within and outside of the Maronite community.^[16] Although necessary to distinguish one Aleppan boy named Hannā from another, in distant Paris, where no-one knew or had known the father named “Diyāb”, the patronymic-introducing “ibn” would be meaningless except for fellow Aleppan Maronites. Thus we may imagine that Paul Lucas (1664–1737) introduced Hannā to Antoine Galland and others as “Hannā Diyāb”, a naming pattern that fit into the Parisian social environment within which Paul Lucas circulated.^[17] Signatures on petitions in 1748, 1753 and 1763,^[18] in the colophon of a book he may have copied,^[19] and in his own Book of Travels show that he was once again “Hannā ibn Diyāb” when he returned to Aleppo in 1710.

For generations, scholars called the teller of the tales designated “orphan stories” in Mille et une nuits “Hannā”, his given name, while referring to the man to whom he told those tales as “Galland”. Because his own signature shows that he identified himself as “Hannā ibn Diyab”, it seems appropriate to call him by the name that he used for himself, up to and including the completions of The Book of Travels in 1764. For that reason, I call him “Hannā” or “Hannā ibn Diyāb” in the context of his life in Aleppo but “Diyāb” or “Hannā Diyāb” in referring to modern scholarship. I do this to remind myself and others that the Hannā ibn Diyāb, whom we are still in the process of coming to know, often differs from the Hannā Diyāb depicted in scholarly and popular literature.

1.1.7 The Ghazālah Surname

Hannā’s mother was a “Ghazālah”. She herself is nowhere named on the surviving pages of The Book of Travels, and today we learn her family of origin only when Hannā names his maternal uncle, Shahīn Ghazālah, who supervised his entry into the cloth trade in Aleppo in 1710.^[20] In the Muhanna translation this man is “my uncle Shāhīn Ghazzālah”^[21] ” and “mon oncle maternel Chahine Ghazāleh” in the Fahmé-Thiéry / Heyberger / Lentin translation (433). Differing spellingsof the Ghazālah family name reflect the differences in French and English transliteration conventions discussed above. Contemporary variant spellings include “Gazalé”, “Ghazalé”, and “Gazaleh”. I have settled on “Ghazālah” with one “z” as in the Fahmé-Thiéry / Heyberger / Lentin translation and “ah” as in the Muhanna translation.

1.1.8 The ibn Diyāb Siblings

Even without specific documentation, we may assume that a wedding united a man whose given name was Diyāb with a girl or young woman whose given name we do not know, but whose family name was Ghazālah. This marriage eventually produced Hannā ibn Diyāb, the youngest of at least five surviving siblings, a number based on Hannā’s statement that his brothers and sisters came to welcome him on his return to Aleppo in 1710.^[22] Thus we may assume Hannā ibn Diyāb – 22 years old in 1710 – had two named brothers, ‘Abdullāh and Antūn and at least two surviving sisters (whom he does not name).^[23]

Throughout Hannā ibn Diyāb’s travel memoir, his brother ‘Abdallāh functions as head of the family. That does not necessarily mean that he was the oldest surviving child, but it does indicate that he was the eldest son. Readers may also note that one or both sisters may have been born before ‘Abdullāh, and that the statistically high level of infant mortality in Aleppo in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries makes it highly likely that at least three or more children in addition to the three named brothers were born to Hannā’s parents.

In a sibling constellation like that in Figure 1, the closeness exhibited by Hannā toward his brother, Antūn throughout the memoir,^[24] probably reflects a nearness in birth order that often produces a personal closeness and that is evident in Hannā’s travel memoir. The names of his mother and sisters, not included in the memoir’s surviving pages, may have appeared in the now-missing first five leaves.

Figure 1:

Hannā Diyāb’s Nuclear Family.

Hannā mentions no younger brother or sister, although it is possible that one or more subsequently born siblings died in infancy or early childhood. With no mention of younger siblings, it is reasonable to conclude that his father died at the earliest during his wife’s final pregnancy in 1687-early 1688 and at the latest during Hannā’s infancy or early childhood. As a young child without a father and with a mother who was routinely debilitated by depression, it is equally reasonable to conclude that little Hannā was often in the care of one or more older sisters. In his first six years Hannā would have absorbed the domestic habits, tastes, and practices of his own and similar Aleppan households.

1.1.9 Hannā Goes To Work

Whatever the family’s childcare arrangements, they changed suddenly when Hannā ibn Diyāb entered the workforce, around the age of six, not uncommon in Aleppo at that time.^[25] His older brothers ‘Abdallāh and Antūn were already employed – ‘Abdallāh by khawājah Sauron and Antūn by khawājah Rimbaud (khawājah was a respectful form of address for both foreign and local merchants^[26]).

As Hannā approached the age of six, and, in particular when his brothers knew that he would be employed by the same French merchant for whom Antūn already worked, we may hypothesize that ‘Abdallāh and Antūn began supplying their little brother with useful workaday information, like standard French phrases of courtesy and inquiry, such as the French equivalents for “May I bring you a cup of coffee?” and “What would it please you that I do now?” Young Hannā would also have needed to learn how to carry out oral instructions for simple housekeeping, as well as the kitchen tasks that he eventually took over from the household cook.^[27]

Here and there in The Book of Travels Hannā Diyāb refers to neighborhoods or buildings by name, references that show that he knew his way around the city on the streets where he lived and worked. He would also have known the souks at which he purchased foodstuffs for khawājah Rimbaud’s meals as well as the khans of the French merchants to whom he would have delivered messages. Hannā does not state any of this in so many words, but such knowledge is consistent with the duties to which he alludes as part of his employment by khawājah Rimbaud.

The city in which Hannā ibn Diyāb spent his childhood and youth was described enthusiastically by Paul Lucas in Chapter XXIII of volume 1 of Voyage du Sieur Paul Lucas dans le Levant juin 1699 – juillet 1703 (2 vols., 1704, Journey of the Gentleman Paul Lucas in the Levant [June 1699–July 1703]). It was August 1700 when Lucas reported that the city’s well-constructed houses were built of dressed stone, its streets were paved, the level of its active commerce was high with a large number of caravans arriving from all over Asia, especially from Persia. Its merchants from England, France, and the Netherlands each had an established merchant colony and / or consul and sent goods on to European markets. Local shops were in bazaars whose streets (rues) were closed and locked at night to deter theft.^[28]

Lucas’s descriptions of his first visit to Aleppo furnish vivid images of the physical environment of twelve-year-old Hannā ibn Diyāb’s urban environment, as he ran errands for khahwājah Rimbaud. to whom Hannā later referred as Rimbaud the elder.^[29]

When Hannā ibn Diyāb entered Rimbaud’s employ his life must have taken on a certain Frenchness. In Rimbaud’s household, Hannā learned to cook, to serve food and drink in a manner that suited his French employer and eventually to manage the compact household in its entirety.^[30] After twelve years, Hannā had mastered a range of domestic skills.

If khawājah Rimbaud lived like other French merchants in Aleppo, his living quarters would have been on the floor above the ground-floor-warehouse,^[31] where Antūn worked and was thus a close and ready guide as Hannā learned the habits and needs of his new employer upstairs. Young Hannā’s employment put him under the care and protection of an older man. That Rimbaud regarded him warmly was shown in 1708, when they met in Marseilles and Rimbaud declared to Paul Lucas that he’d “raised” Hannā.^[32]

While Hannā and Antūn were employed by khawājah Rimbaud, their older brother ‘Abdallāh was working as warehouse steward for one of Aleppo’s most prominent French merchants, khawājah Sauron.^[33] ‘Abdallāh’s responsible position made both Hannā and Antūn known among Aleppo’s French community there and abroad, for in France Hannā was often recognized by someone who knew of him or his brother ‘Abdallāh or who was personally acquainted with him in Aleppo and who made him welcome among French merchants and their Maronite employees. Hannā experienced this not only in the Levant, but also in North Africa, Marseille, and Paris. Such was the nature of the international French and Maronite merchant communities.

1.1.10 The Friends of Hannā ibn Diyāb’s Childhood and Youth

As a child and youth, Hannā ibn Diyāb formed longstanding friendships with other boys in Aleppo. Many venues were available: Maronite social gatherings; group instruction in reading and writing Arabic; group religious instruction in Roman Catholic and / or Maronite beliefs and practices; shadow theater performances; snatched moments of free time during workdays; or informal gatherings to play games, such as stick and shield.^[34] One friend from Hannā’s youth was Hannā ibn Mikhāyīl Mīro, who – when he accompanied his father to Aleppo – lodged at the Khān al-‘Ulabiyya, where Hannā and his brother Antūn lived.^[35] The closeness of the boys’ relationship was expressed by his friend’s salutation years later, when the two met unexpectedly far from Aleppo: “Brother Hannā … [i]t’s me, Hannā ibn Mikhāyīl Mīro, your dear friend from Aleppo.”^[36]

Hannā also lists three fellow novitiates, together with whom he went to, and subsequently left, the Maronite monastery of St. Elias. They were Dāwūd ibn Jabbūr al-Kwayyis, Mikhā’īl ibn Tūmā Hawā, and Yūsuf ibn Shāhīn.^[37] (Yūsuf was one of several Çelebi brothers, three of whom achieved eminent positions in later life: one in Ottoman administration, another in international commerce, and a third, Christofalo Çelebi, who rose in the service of the Roman Catholic church in Paris to the position of chief deputy to Cardinal Noailles (1651–1729) and was known as the Chevalier Maunier (?–1740).^[38] Another friend was Yūsuf ibn al-Mukahhal,^[39] also a Maronite from Aleppo, whom Hannā unexpectedly encountered in Beirut and who took him to “see the cave of the dragon slain by Saint George”.^[40] There was also Hannā ibn al-Zughbī, another Maronite from Aleppo, who persuaded Hannā to return to Aleppo from Istanbul rather than undertake further adventures abroad.^[41] We may assume that Hannā spoke his own native Arabic with all of these native-Arabic-speaking friends from his childhood, adolescence, and the early years of his adulthood. Nowhere does he explicitly say so, but it is a reasonable conclusion.

1.1.11 The Journey from Aleppo to Paris

The first precisely datable event in Diyāb’s young life is 24 March 1707, as Paul Lucas dates their departure from Aleppo. On that morning he rose early, packed up a few belongings, left the inn to go to khān al-Zayt, the gathering point for caravans setting out southwest to Tripoli and managed to avoid encountering Paul Lucas and the prominent Aleppo merchants accompanying him to his departure. In Hannā ibn Diyāb’s mind, his departure from Aleppo turned him back toward the contemplative life of Christian obedience and service that he had rejected months earlier, because he had concluded he had no vocation for that life. His joining the caravan going to Tripoli was meant to go only as far as Mount Lebanon, where he would ponder eternal questions. Little wonder, then, that he did not note the date.

Paul Lucas noted the date, however. In chronicling his second voyage to the Levant he was also justifying the use he made of the funds his monarch’s government invested in his expedition. The raw journal that his editor transformed into The Second Voyage to the Levant dated arrival and / or departure dates far more scrupulously than had been the case with the published account of his first voyage to the Levant. To be sure, Lucas noted the date obliquely, saying that he stayed in Aleppo “until the 24th^” [of March].”^[42]

1.1.12 Maronites within Eastern Christianities and Hannā Diyāb

In many areas of daily life Muslim-favoring governmental regulations reinforced Muslim political dominance. It was a fact of life. Under these conditions, the minority status of Maronites and other Eastern Christians^[43] meant that they suffered from the Muslim governing and taxing structure. As a result, confessional differences remained relatively inconsequential between Christian communities and individual members of communities like the Eastern Christian “Greek”-oriented Ghazālahs and the Eastern Christian but Western Catholic-oriented Maronites.

By the time Paul Lucas observed and recorded religious divisions in Aleppo in the first years of the eighteenth century, the Eastern Christian religious world he describes had begun to change from a generalized Eastern Christianity comprising internal groups of different coloration. In his view Eastern Christians in Aleppo consisted of three groups, whom he briefly identified as “Greeks”, “Armenians”, and “Jacobins” (Syrians). In contrast he described Aleppo’s Maronites as having familial and / or individual connections with the clerics of one or more of the four Roman Catholic orders in Aleppo: Jesuit, Carmelite, Capuchin, and the Fathers of the Holy Land.^[44]

When Paul Lucas first described Aleppo in August 1700 he was staying with his old friend Monsieur Sauron, and only two degrees of separation (Sauron and Sauron’s warehouse steward ‘Abdullāh ibn Diyāb) lay between him and Hannā ibn Diyāb. In August 1700 Hannā was a boy of 12. He had been working for khawājah Rimbaud for six years and was one of the Maronites whom Lucas described as being well acquainted with Western Catholic clerics. Details like these confirm the importance of the religious resources that Hannā made use of during his journey abroad when he needed reliable information about people and places. When the 36-year-old Lucas met the 19-year-old Hannā ibn Diyāb in March 1707 he had not only Hannā’s knowledge of French to recommend him, but also his participation in known and trusted commercial (the French merchant community) and religious (Maronite) networks. In Lucas’s mind these factors made Hannā a suitable choice for immediate employment as a dragoman and valet and eventual employment as royal librarian in Paris.^[45]

Much more can and will be written about the larger role of Maronite Christianity in the formation of the personal, workaday, and family experiences of Hannā ibn Diyāb’s life. That, however, will be addressed in a subsequent article.

1.1.13 Social and Economic Divides Between the Ghazālahs and the ibn Diyābs

The striking absence of grandparents and first cousins that characterizes Hannā ibn Diyāb’s travel memoir invites scrutiny. Many causes may have contributed to the evident separation between the Ghazālahs and the ibn Diyābs during Hannā’s childhood and youth. Ghazālah family wealth, as exemplified in the seventeenth century by their palatial dwelling,^[46] contrasts sharply with the cramped living conditions of their ibn Diyāb grandsons Antūn and Hannā in the al-‘Ulabiyya khān (see above, “ Hannā Goes To Work” and immediately below). The Ghazālahs’ prosperity continued robustly into the eighteenth century when they added an imposing and expensive reception space (iwan) to the Ghazālah mansion in 1737.

The one dwelling that can be precisely located for the brothers Antūn and Hannā is the khān al-‘Ulabiyya, where they lived when Hannā would have been working for khawājah Rimbaud. The khān may also have been the “house” to which Hannā returned, after he and three friends left St. Elias monastery in late 1706.^[47] Hannā used the word beit for “house”, but Aleppo’s “houses” ranged widely in size from 900 square-meter multi-courtyard mansions to small cramped dwellings of only 83 square meters.^[48] More humble still were apartment-like units in shared housing associated with workshops (qaysaria), like those attached to the khān al-‘Ulabiyya where Hannā and Antūn lived sometime during the 1690s and / or early 1700s. The contrast between this beit and the grandeur of the Ghazāllah family house, even before its magnificent iwan was constructed, must have been stark.

By 1710, when Hannā returned to Aleppo from his travels through North Africa, France, and Turkey, his two older brothers each had his own dwelling. Antūn lived in a narrow street (alley) called Zuqāq al-Khall in the northern suburbs of Aleppo^[49] and ‘Abdullāh lived somewhere else.^[50] A few years later, the three brothers lived together in a single house, probably outside the walls, since Hannā speaks of going “to the city” from their shared home.^[51] Thirty years after that, in 1740, Hannā was listed in a census report as the head of a 12-person household, six male and six female.^[52] With that many family members, he probably had a two-story courtyard house. But it would still have been a far cry from the splendor of the Ghazālahs’ mansion.^[53]

2.1.1 1694–1706: Childhood and Adolescence

Before Hannā ibn Diyāb went to work for khawājah Rimbaud, he would have lived at home and played with friends as a native Arabic-speaking child in a predominantly Arabic-speaking urban environment within the Ottoman Empire. As a child, he would have thought about his daily life in terms that affected him personally: the weather, playing with friends, and perhaps lessons of some sort. At some point in his childhood, he was also instructed to read and write Arabic.^[54] Such teaching could have taken place in a formal setting with a small group of other Maronite youngsters or informally, possibly at home with his mother, his next older brother Antūn, and / or older sisters, perhaps even in Aleppo’s Jesuit collège.

Once Hanna began to work for khawājah Rimbaud, both the dominant culture and the culture of dominance changed to French: He needed to understand requests, directives, and commands and to respond with appropriate actions. In the initial stages of learning how to work successfully for khawājah Rimbaud, Hannā could turn to his brother Antūn, working downstairs in the warehouse. The more French he learned, the more his employer could rely on him to fulfill the requirements of his working environment. As Hannā’s fluency in French expanded and his knowledge of his employer’s habits and needs increased, he would have been able to function with less guidance and a greater ability to observe intelligently and learn on his own.

Hannā Diyāb’s learning French in the twelve years from 1694 to 1706 extended beyond Rimbaud’s household and business, for in those years Hannā ibn Diyāb’s “dearest friend”^[55] was “Samatan” (=surname),^[56] probably the son of the prominent French merchant of the same name in Aleppo at that time. Hannā might have met his dearest friend through his brother ‘Abdullāh, who had once worked for khawājah Samatan.^[57] Young Hannā’s warm friendship with Samatan would have broadened his French vocabulary, unless Samatan’s spoke Arabic fluently, which was uncommon among French merchants in Aleppo. Unlike the merchants Sauron and Rimbaud, who seem to have been many years older than ‘Abdullāh, Antūn, and Hannā, Samatan must have been much closer in age to Hannā. Whatever his age, conversation with this dear friend would have broadened Hannā’s French vocabulary. Through connections like this, Hannā, ‘Abdullāh, and Antūn were close to sons of wealthy Marseille merchants,^[58] most of whom represented their families’ interests in Aleppo for years at a time from the 1690s to the 1720s.^[59] Personal convergences like these confirm the ibn Diyāb brothers’ close connections to the world of French Catholic commerce and culture in Aleppo.

Personal relationships with members of Aleppo’s French merchant community not only deepened Hannā’s knowledge of the French language; they also exposed him to the French spoken by southern Frenchmen from Marseille, the home city of nearly all of Aleppo’s French merchants in those years.^[60] Provençal-tinged vocabulary, usage, and pronunciation apparently influenced Hannā’s French, witness Antoine Galland’s March 1709 statement that Hannā spoke Provençal.^[61] There is also considerable evidence of Provençal influence in the speech in which Hānna later told tales to Galland.^[62] To sum up: The linguistic evidence suggests that during his childhood and adolescence Hannā ibn Diyāb learned French from speakers who themselves spoke a Provençal-based French. This affected Hannā’s pronunciation of French, which occasionally shines through Antoine Galland’s recordings of his 1709 storytelling.

In the twelve years that Hannā worked for khawājah Rimbaud, he spent the greater part of each working day in the linguistic environment of speakers from Marseille. But at the end of each workday and on holidays, he returned to the linguistically Arabic and culturally Arab world that he shared with members of his nuclear family in their homes or at the khān al-‘Ulabiyya,^[63] where he and his brother Antūn lived (see above, “Hannā Goes To work”). By his teenage years, Hannā knew how to live within both his natal world, as well as within Rimbaud’s individual and French general linguistic habits and domestic order. The first world was lococentric, familial, filled with arabophone friends. The other, oriented westward, was commercial and francophone.

2.1.2 1706–1707: A Non-French Interval

During the spring to fall months that Hannā ibn Diyāb spent at the St. Elias monastery in 1706, he would have spoken Arabic conversationally and Syriac liturgically. Certain fixed prayers he would have heard and possibly spoken in ancient Syro-Aramaic. His memoir gives no evidence that he spoke French during these months.

In the autumn of 1706 Hannā left monastic life and returned to Aleppo. When he found no employment with any of Aleppo’s French merchants, it is likely that his contact with French language and culture remained low for more months. By March 1707 he had determined to return to St. Elias monastery, knowing that its abbot would welcome him back.^[64] He secretly booked passage with a caravan heading toward Tripoli, but within hours of the caravan’s early morning departure, he became acquainted with Paul Lucas, the ”Frank who was staying at the home of khawājah Sauron, my brother’s master”.^[65]

On the first evening of the caravan journey Hannā rendered Lucas a service, and Lucas invited him to eat dinner with him. The two “stayed up”, smoking pipes, “chatting into the night”.^[66] Since Paul Lucas spoke no Arabic, he needed a translator (1:23) and their chat was in French. Having witnessed Hannā ibn Diyāb’s fluency in both Arabic and French, and learning that he was literate in both languages, Lucas promised “a position for [him] at the Arabic Library [in Paris] … [,] a salary” and lifelong royal protection (ibid.). Cautiously wishing to check Lucas’s credentials in Tripoli, Hannā promised to deliver a decision within a few days. This moment effectively marked the beginning of daily French-language interaction between the two men.

2.1.3 Spring 1707 – Summer 1708: On the Road with Paul Lucas

Hannā ibn Diyāb was not part of a group migration and re-settlement.^[67] He was an individual Christian, a native speaker of Arabic with a native experience of Christian Arab life in Aleppo, a commercial entrepôt in the Ottoman Empire that linked East, South, and Central Asia with European markets. As such, his experience was similar to that of a small number of other individual Eastern Christians who moved between the Levant and Europe.^[68]

When Hannā ibn Diyāb accepted Paul Lucas’s 1707 offer of a permanent position in the Royal Library in Paris, he demonstrated an intention to leave Aleppo permanently and to begin a new life in Paris. At nineteen, the hopelessness of repeated failures to find employment turned into confidence in his competence in French language, culture, and social skills. His year and a half on the road with a native French speaker who had been born and raised in Rouen provided Hannā with a new experience of French, the French spoken in northern France and at the court of Louis XIV. His experiences as a guest of eminent French merchants in the Levant and North Africa, and his translations of long conversations between the Bey of Tunis and Paul Lucas imply an ever-expanding knowledge of French vocabulary about local commerce, social conditions, and medical practice. Under these conditions Hannā ibn Diyāb expanded his linguistic competence beyond commercial French and began to move toward functional bilingualism through his inquisitiveness as he and Lucas raveled along the southern shore of the Eastern Mediterranean, able to translate into and out of French, as it was spoken in both southern and northern France.

2.1.4 1710: Hannā Diyāb Uses French to Revise and Reverse His Identity

In France, Hannā Diyāb had been an Arab among Europeans. As he journeyed homeward through the Ottoman Empire, Diyāb reversed his identity and became a Frenchman among a varying population of Ottoman subjects and administrators and made use of his French-Arabic bilingualism to do so. He adopted the identity of a French-speaking physician traveling in search of medicinal plants in the service of the king of France. He dressed his hair in the French manner, dressed his body in French clothing, and spoke the French language. This disguise must have been comfortably familiar from his travels with Paul Lucas; it also gained him exemption from governmental levies he would have had to pay as an Ottoman subject. Passing as a Frenchman also enabled him to practice his Christian religion without arousing antagonism, which contrasts sharply with his wearing a white turban to pass as a Muslim on the outward journey from Aleppo to Tunis in 1707.

In Lucas’s company in North Africa Hannā had learned how to turn outsiderdom to advantage among the populations through which he passed. As an Arab at the court of Versailles, Diyāb and his Aleppan dress-up clothes aroused curiosity. And in his amazement at theater mechanics in Paris he amused salon guests. On occasion he slipped smoothly into the entourage of a visiting Turkish ambassador. Genial, open, and appealing, Hannā Diyāb seemed to know that he could turn outsiderdom into a useful alias. He did so in North Africa by wearing a white turban and passing as just another Muslim in a population hostile to Christians. In Paris he grew his hair, shaved his face, and dressed as a Frenchman. On the road, he continued to do so until he re-entered the city of his birth and childhood, but once there, he shaved his head, put on a blue turban, and returned to his life as a Maronite Christian in Muslim Aleppo.

3.1.1 The “Greeks”

It is likely that Hanna’s mother was born into a “Greek” family. For centuries the “Greeks” were a heterogeneous group, both of whose constituent groups had for centuries used the same Byzantine liturgy. The smaller of the groups forming the “Greeks” were the Melkites, whose liturgical language had originally been Syriac but subsequently became Arabic. They recognized the Patriarch of Antioch as the head of their religious community. In 1724 Melkites split into those who recognized the Roman Catholic Pope as the ultimate head of their church and those who continued to adhere to the Antiochian Patriarchate.^[70]

The larger group among the “Greeks” before the early 1670s was composed of those who used Greek as their liturgical language, who recognized the primacy of Patriarchate in Istanbul (the former Constantinople), and whose church eventually evolved into today’s Greek Orthodox Church.^[71]

3.1.2 Maronites within Eastern Christianity in Syria and Lebanon

Among Easter Christians until 1724, that is, during Hannā ibn Diyāb’s parents’ marriage and during his childhood, youth, young adulthood, and the first fourteen years of his life as a cloth merchant in Aleppo, Maronites were the only Eastern Christians who recognized the primacy of the Roman Catholic papacy. Before the 1670s this difference was of little consequence to other Eastern Christians, since all Eastern Christians suffered similar legal and financial burdens, because of their minority religious status in the Ottoman Empire, where Muslim-favoring governmental regulations reinforced Muslim political dominance in many areas of daily life. It was a fact of life. All Eastern Christians in the Muslim Ottoman Empire suffered in common from repressive governance and extra taxation. As a result, confessional differences remained rather inconsequential between religious communities and individual members of those communities. That began to change when Roman Catholic missionaries began arriving in the 1670s.

3.1.3 Roman Catholic Proselytizing and Its Consequences Among Eastern Christians 1670s to 1724

The fifty years between the early 1670s and 1724 encompasses the years in which Hannā’s parents, married and had children, he himself grew up (without mention of cousins, aunts, uncles, and grandparents in Hannā ibn Diyāb’s memoir), traveled to France and back, and settled into commercial life in the cloth trade in Aleppo. In addition to coinciding with Hannā’s childhood, youth, and early adulthood in Aleppo in these years, the course of the post-Tridentine Roman Catholic proselytization there also has the potential to illuminate opaque or puzzling aspects of Hannā ibn Diyāb’s life.

The sixteenth-century Counterreformation, now more often called the Catholic Reformation, fostered a broad proselytizing movement to draw former Roman Catholics back to Roman Catholicism. In the Levant the same proselytizing impulse addressed Eastern Christians whose allegiance was also to geographically and religiously Eastern prelates and patriarchs. This movement emerged in the late sixteenth century, strengthened through the seventeenth century and into the eighteenth century.

Maronites in the Levant, with their historic acknowledgement of the Roman Catholic Pope’s primacy must have felt comfortable with – or at least unthreatened by – Roman Catholic proselytization. Other Eastern Christian churches in the Levant, however, lost communicants in this process, a situation that began to create a new and ever-widening divide between Maronites and other Eastern Catholics. It is within the realm of possibility that the Ghazālah and ibn-Diyāb families may have been caught up in and separated by religiously based hostilities.

Let us test this hypothesis against documented post-Tridentine Roman Catholic outreach to and conversion of Eastern Christians in the fifty years between the early 1670s and 1724, the period in which Roman Catholic proselytization attained its highest level. To repeat, these decades were also those during which Hannā’s Ghazālah mother was married to Diyāb ibn [unknown], bore six or more children, suffered from “black humor”^[72] (with symptoms that modern psychiatry would characterize as major depression), was widowed, saw her older sons launched into the French sector of Aleppo’s commercial world and the Roman Catholic Church’s sphere of influence. She must have known that her youngest son Hannā began pursuing a religious calling at the Maronite monastery of St. Elias on Mount Lebanon,^[73] but left it and subsequently set out for promised employment in distant Paris. Some of her daughters already were, or soon would be, married and living in other households, she was more alone.

3.1.4 The Proselytizers’ Work

In the Levant four major Roman Catholic orders worked to win souls for the Roman Catholic Church. This meant persuading Eastern Catholics to convert to Western Catholicism.^[74] Resistance, often fierce, inevitably arose within Eastern Christian communities when they lost communicants to Roman Catholicism: Hannā witnessed and reported one such instance of “Greek” hostility to a Franciscan missionary in Cyprus in 1707 and included it in his memoir decades later.^[75]

In the early years of proselytization, Western monks had apparently focused on religious differences between Christians and Muslims. But as the process continued and Western Catholic religious orders recorded their proselytizing successes among Eastern Christians, a different picture emerges. For instance, one Franciscan record lists the names of newly won souls for Roman Catholic Christianity throughout the Eastern Mediterranean, often listing the “nation” the converts had been persuaded to leave. This information reveals large numbers of former “Greek” adherents (which in this case referred to the “Rum” component of Eastern Christianity) in Aleppo converting to Roman Catholicism in 1698 and 1699.^[76] In this way, Western Catholics’ proselytizing success among the “Greek” (i.e. “Rum”), Armenian, and Syrian Eastern Christians engendered “frontiers”^[77] in religious identity. This further separated Maronite communities – who were already identified with Western Catholicism – from other Eastern Christian communities. On occasion, these frontiers also divided other Eastern Christians among themselves.^[78] This overall movement coincided with an expansion of the influence of Western (i.e., Roman Catholic) missionaries among Maronites.^[79] As chronicled in Hannā’s travel memoir,^[80] Roman Catholic individuals as well as Roman Catholic institutions became central in the formation of his youth and adolescence and during the peregrinations of his early adulthood. Nonetheless, a perception that Maronites were closely connected to a process that reduced the numbers of fellow Eastern Christian congregants may be understood as cause for hostility to them by other East Christians.

Maronites as a group had a second association with the West that brought real-world benefits: they had enjoyed financial, educational, and travel benefits that the Sun King Louis XIV had conferred on them in 1646. In the intervening years French merchants had also negotiated a series of tax benefits for their Maronite employees and their families.^[81]

3.1.5 The Maronite Identity of Hannā ibn Diyāb’s Father

No extant evidence documents the religious affiliation of Hannā ibn Diyāb’s father and paternal grandparents. To ascertain their religious affiliation, we must return to existing information with a forensic approach. All Christian religious options are theoretically open as far as Hannā ibn Diyāb’s paternal grandparents are concerned. However, working backward from what is known and documented about Hannā ibn Diyāb’s Maronite religion we may arrive at his forebears’ probable confession.

There is no doubt that Hannā himself was a Maronite in 1706, when he entered the Maronite monastery of St. Elias. He declared himself to be a Maronite Christian to Paul Lucas in 1707, when he was nineteen. Tellingly, he worked for French merchants from the age of six in a city where French merchants employed Maronites preferentially, and perhaps solely. Since his older brothers similarly worked for French merchants in Aleppo and would therefore also have been Maronites, that dates ‘Abdallāh ibn Diyāb’s Maronite identity at least as far back as the mid 1670s, when his father Diyāb ibn [unknown] was in the early years of his marriage to [first name unknown] Ghazālah. In a part of the world where sons’ religion generally followed their father’s, and in a city where French merchants employed Maronites almost exclusively, and as part of human sensibilities in which children aged six and under rarely if ever change their religious affiliation, we may conclude with a high degree of certainty that the first young Maronite employee, ‘Abdallāh, was a Maronite because his father was a Maronite before him. But we do not know how long Hannā’s father had been a Maronite.

Because we cannot identify Diyāb ibn [unknown]’s religious affiliation at the time of his marriage to a daughter of the Ghazālah family, we may conclude that Hannā ibn Diyāb’s father was a Maronite at the time he married Hannā ibn Diyāb’s mother. The wedding’s date cannot be verified from surviving Maronite church or any other records.

The fact that the Diyāb name first appears in Maronite church records in the early eighteenth century (see note 18) suggests that Diyāb ibn [unknown] was not a sufficiently active or observant Maronite to be recorded in its official documents. Documents relevant to the religious affiliation of Diyāb ibn [unknown] may have perished over the centuries, or may never have existed.

In his writings about Eastern Christians in Aleppo and in the Near East as a whole, Bernard Heyberger posits a fluidity among Eastern Christians in terms of religion, before active Roman Catholic proselytization set “in the early 1670s”. Long ingrained habits like these give way only slowly. On the other hand, it is notable that Hannā ibn Diyāb understands so many of his childhood friends as Maronites.

This article identifies Hannā ibn Diyāb’s father, Diyāb ibn [unknown] as a Maronite from a point early in his first son’s life. His son Hannā ibn Diyāb’s residence with his brother Antūn in the khān al-‘Ulabiyya aligns his orphaned sons with impoverished circumstances that bespeak the poverty that was common among most seventeenth-century Maronites. In the countryside that poverty had impelled hundreds of Maronites, individually or in family groups, to leave the rural Mount Lebanon area and move to urban Aleppo.^[82] Such a migration, together with the fact that Hannā ibn Diyāb mentions no cousins on his father’s side, suggests that if his father took part in that overall migration from country to city, he did so on his own rather than with family members. Hannā ibn Diyāb wrote much about Mount Lebanon and Cyprus. Although large numbers of Maronites migrated from both places to Aleppo in the seventeenth century, Hannā has no recognizable family associations with either place. His father’s geographic origins are as unknown as early is his religious affiliation.

As far as the date of Diyāb ibn [unknown]’s death is concerned, simple logic tells us that Diyāb ibn [unkinown]’s death must postdate the conception of his youngest child. That youngest child is probably Hannā, born in early 1688 and therefore conceived in the spring of 1687. Since Hannā survived, the likelihood is that his mother nursed him, which typically postponed a succeeding conception and birth for 2–3 years. If a subsequent child was conceived, when Hannā would have been 2–3 years old. It is even possible that another child was born 2–3 years later but did not survive. With no mention of Hannā’s father anywhere in the travel memoir, we conclude that Diyāb ibn [unknown] died sometime between the second half of 1687 and the early 1690s.

3.1.6 Hannā ibn Diyāb’s Mother and his Maternal Grandparents

We hear a great deal about Hannā ibn Diyāb’s Ghazālah mother, whose church attendance Hannā mentions in passing. We assume from the laconic manner in which he mentions her church attendance that it was something familiar, and not a “Greek” church with Byzantine liturgy. Hannā principally writes about his mother in terms of her long-enduring depression.

3.1.7 Ghazālah Religious Identity

Theoretically, the Ghazālah family of Hannā’s mother could have been part of either component of the “Greeks”, as they existed in the 1670s. Ghazālah family tradition holds that their ancestors had always been members of the church that became today’s Greek Orthodox Church.^[83] In the 1670s, however, when the marriage contract for Hannā’s parents was drawn up, the significant distinction appears to have been that the Ghazālahs were “Greeks” rather than Maronites. In any case, differences between “Greeks” and Maronites would not have in themselves impeded the betrothal of the two young people of differing confessions, because in the 1670s Eastern Christians were still a relatively inclusive group, undeterred by their adherence to differing patriarchs and different liturgical languages.

3.1.8 Religious Discord Between Ghazālahs and Diyābs?

Let us try to place Hannā ibn Diyāb’s childhood and youth in Aleppo within that city’s late 17th- and early 18th-century religious history.^[84] As mentioned before, friends named Ghazālah are notably absent, even though Hannā’s maternal uncle(s) could be expected to have produced a generation of first cousins and possible playmates for the ibn Diyāb boys – many or few depending on the number of his mother’s siblings.

The Ghazālahs’ place of residence, in the Judayda (New Town) quarter, a predominantly Christian area outside the western end of the north wall around Aleppo contrasts sharply with Antūn and Hannā’s humble khān al-‘Ulabiyya quarters. The Judayda’s Eastern Christian churches drew Christian residents to the neighborhood and undoubtedly fostered higher housing prices in the neighborhood. Antūn and Hannā’s dwelling in the khān al-‘Ulabiyya lay well inside the city walls but was still within walking distance of the Ghazālah mansion.

Wherever the children of Diyāb ibn [unknown] lived with his Ghazālah wife or his widow and her children lived after his death, the absence of Ghazālah cousins in the late 1600s and early 1700s must have been a separation of choice by the Ghazālahs, the ibn Diyābs or both. Only one instance of mutual acknowledgment can be found in the travel memoir – when Hannā ibn Diyāb’s uncle Shāhīn Ghazālah oversaw his entry into the cloth trade in 1710.^[85]

The near-total absence of Ghazālahs on the surviving pages of Hannā ibn Diyāb’s late-life memoir suggests that relations between the Ghazālahs on the one hand, and their daughter, her husband, and their children on the other hand, were slight or non-existent. In a memoir filled with accounts of affectionate connections between individuals, the absence of inter-family gatherings and the already discussed absence of Ghazālah playmates invites further study.

The growing confessional hostilities among Eastern Christians produced by Roman Catholic proselytization may have played a part in the absence of Ghazālah cousins from Hannā’s record of childhood friendships, as well as in the apparent absence of Ghazālah family members to care for the ailing Ghazālah daughter who married Diyāb ibn [unknown] and was the mother of ‘Abdallāh, Antūn, Hannā, and their sisters. If the estrangement was felt strongly on the ibn Diyāb side, it may explain the five torn-out leaves at the beginning of Hannā ibn Diyāb’s Book of Travels. The same post-Tridentine proselytization had drawn Hannā ibn Diyāb closer to the French language, literature in French, and his eventual storytelling to Antoine Galland in Paris, an episode that enriched and expanded the range of the Arabian Nights.

3.1.9 Concluding Thoughts and Further Research

Between the late seventeenth- and the early eighteenth centuries Hannā Diyāb was one of a small number of early modern native Arabic speakers who gained an intimate knowledge of French language and culture. His acquaintance with a broad variety of writings--Eastern Christian devotional writings in Arabic, Western ones in French, Arabic secular chronicles and entertaining books (such as Thousand and One Nights and Sindbad tales), French-language publications such as Straparola’s Nuicts Facétieuses and Mme d’Aulnoy’s contes de fées had a greater lasting impact on Western culture than did that of any other French-speaking Arab of his day.

Hannā ibn Diyāb’s account of his travels with Paul Lucas from the time he left Aleppo on horseback in March 1707 until he arrived via coach in Paris in the late summer of 1708 has raised questions about memory and identity creation.^[86] With evidence of family letter-writing at both the beginning and the end of The Book of Travels,^[87] it seems more than likely that Hannā wrote additional letters to his family that communicated the remarkable details of freshly encountered things (like astonishing clockworks), places (like hospitals, churches and shrines), and people (like courtiers at Versailles). If such letters survived, they would have preserved the colorfully exact details that seem impossible to have been accurately remembered for over fifty years. The validity of this suggestion remains to be explored in detail.

Also awaiting further attention are the individual tales in the Diyāb œuvre, each with its own set of intra- and intertextual references, textual anomalies, and internal evidence of Hannā Diyāb’s quondam performances. A rich resource awaits new research.