Nabil Matar (ed. and tr.). In the Lands of the Christians: Arabic Travel Writing in the Seventeenth Century. New York and London: Routledge, 2003. Pp. xlviii + 229. $23.95.
Linda
Wheatley-irving
Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute
George A. Kiraz
James E. Walters
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Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute
2005
Vol. 8, No. 1
For this publication, a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
license has been granted by the author(s), who retain full
copyright.
https://hugoye.bethmardutho.org/article/hv8n1prwheatleyirving
Linda Wheatley-Irving
Nabil Matar (ed. and tr.). In the Lands of the Christians: Arabic Travel Writing in the Seventeenth Century. New York and London: Routledge, 2003. Pp. xlviii + 229. $23.95.
https://hugoye.bethmardutho.org/pdf/vol8/HV8N1PRWheatleyIrving.pdf
Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies
Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute,
vol 8
issue 1
Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies is an electronic journal dedicated to the study
of the Syriac tradition, published semi-annually (in January and July) by Beth
Mardutho: The Syriac Institute. Published since 1998, Hugoye seeks to offer the
best scholarship available in the field of Syriac studies.
Syriac Studies
Nabil Matar
Ilyas b. Hanna al-Mawsuli
File created by XSLT transformation of original HTML encoded article.
[1] In
the Lands of the Christians, by Nabil Matar
Nabil Matar is Professor of English and department
head of Humanities and Communication at the Florida Institute
of Technology. His other works include Turks, Moors,
and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (New York, 1999)
and Islam in Britain: 1558-1685 (Cambridge,
1998).
offers the first
English translations of four seventeenth-century travel
narratives originally written in Arabic. Of special
importance to students of Middle Eastern history is the fact
that these texts are about travel to the countries of Europe
and South America, while readers of Hugoye will find
particularly interesting the selection by Ilyas b. Hanna
al-Mawsuli, a Chaldean Catholic priest (later, bishop) of
Baghdad. In this review, I wish to focus first on Matar’s
introductory essay, which views the travel writings of Ilyas b.
Hanna and the other authors from the perspective of current
academic historical and Middle East studies. Secondly, I wish
to look at Ilyas b. Hanna’s narrative more closely, and
suggest another possible way of contextualizing his
travels.
The work of Ilyas b. Hanna al-Mawsuli has recently
been given another translation; c.f. Caesar E. Farah, An
Arab’s journey to colonial Spanish America: the
travels of Elias al-Musili in the seventeenth century (New
York, 2003). Unfortunately this study came to my attention too
late to be incorporated into this review.
[2] The
collection opens with a substantial essay, introducing the
travel narratives and explaining why the theme is of
interest. At thirty-five pages and almost one hundred
endnotes, it reads like the outline of a course that I would
love to take. Matar specifically confronts a notion
espoused most strongly by Bernard Lewis and in turn cited by
many others, namely that Muslims of the Middle Ages were
completely lacking in “curiosity” towards
Europeans.
Matar, Lands, p. xiv, citing Bernard
Lewis, The Muslim Discovery of Europe (New York,
1983), p. 299 [sic; probably p. 297 was intended]. A professor
emeritus of Princeton University, Lewis is a prolific
author of academic and popular works on Islam and the Middle
East, and has been a prominent advisor on Middle Eastern
affairs to successive American federal administrations.
The response of the late Edward Said, who
suspected that Lewis’ book was written as a riposte to
his own Orientalism published just a few years
earlier, was to wonder how Lewis could feel that knowledge
about Europe was “the only acceptable criterion for true
knowledge.”
Said, “Orientalism Reconsidered,” p.
351, in Alexander Lyon Macfie (ed.), Orientalism: A
Reader (New York, 2000), pp. 345-61. Originally
published in F. Barker, P. Hulme, M. Iverson and D. Loxley
(eds.), Literature, Politics and Theory (London,
1986), pp. 210-29.
Matar’s response is to fill in the
silence from which Lewis and his followers argue.
[3] The
theme of exploration and travel writing is already quite
familiar to students of the early modern to modern history of
the Middle East and elsewhere; however, Matar argues that his
Arab authors can be distinguished from the bulk of
contemporary, European-based travel writers:
The travelers did not frame their encounter with the
Europeans within the “particular myths, visions and
fantasies” that characterize many (if not necessarily
all) European texts. The Arabic travel accounts cannot
therefore be approached through the theoretical models with
which European accounts have been studied by writers as
different as Stephen Greenblatt, Edward Said, and Gayatri
Spivak. They belong to a tradition that is different not
only in its history but in its epistemology: the
travelers were not harbingers of an Islamic imperialism
compelled to alterize and to present, in the words of Mary
Louise Pratt, the “redundancy, discontinuity, and
unreality” of the Christians. Rather, they wrote
empirical accounts about Europe with the same precision that
many of their coreligionists used to describe their journeys
within the world of Islam, and in the case of the Christian
travelers, within the world at large. Furthermore, and
unlike the European travelers who used classical or biblical
sources as their guides, the Arabs did not have previous
models with which to compare or contrast Europe and
America. They went with an open mind and a clean
slate. And even when a traveler such as al-Ghassani went
with anger and antipathy—repeatedly denouncing the
nasara for having expelled his forefathers and
coreligionists from Spain—he still admitted, on the
first page of his account, that he had kept himself open to
the wonders and innovations of the nasara. (p.
xxxii, nn. 75-77.)
One might question the “open mind and clean
slate” of Matar’s authors, since it is axiomatic in
literary studies today that no author ever “starts from
scratch.” However, it is impossible not to notice
the difference in tone between the selection of travel
narratives that Matar presents, and many of those discussed by
Mary Louise Pratt, which were written in the mid-eighteenth to
nineteenth centuries.
Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel
Writing and Transculturation (London and New York, 1992).
But here, as Matar admits, the issue
of timing is crucial: “The seventeenth century visitors
belonged to an Islamic society that appeared as powerful and as
wealthy as the society of Europe. Neither Muslim nor
Christian was put on the cultural or historical defensive
during his European journey.”
Matar, Lands, p. xxxv.
Similarly, it would be
anachronistic to suppose that the recollections of a Briton
traveling or living in the Ottoman world in the seventeenth
century would be characterized by the imperialism of the
nineteenth century.
C.f. Daniel Goffman, Britons in the Ottoman
Empire, 1642-1660 (Seattle and London, 1998), pp. 3-12.
In the seventeenth century, attitudes
and boundaries had not hardened.
[4]
Matar’s particular topic—Arab (or Muslim, or
Ottoman subject; it almost does not matter) knowledge of Europe
and Europeans—can easily be seen to be a response to a
larger theme, represented in both academic and non-academic
works, whereby the achievements of peoples of the Islamic world
are held up to those of Europe’s, and found
lacking. A very brief search in the library netted the
next two examples of responses. Perhaps a more popular
sub-theme is the purported decline of mediaeval Islamic
science, especially astronomy. In a lengthy review of Toby
E. Huff’s The Rise of Early Modern
Science: Islam, China and the West (Cambridge
University Press, 1993), the historian of science George Saliba
notes how this decline (once argued to have been well under way
in the early twelfth century) keeps having to be pushed later
and later in time, as scholars start to read new manuscripts
and process their findings.
Saliba, “Seeking the origins of early modern
science?” [review article]. Bulletin of the
Royal Institute for Inter-Faith Studies 1, no. 2 (Autumn
1999):139-52. Also deflated is the often concurrently
held notion that the decline in Arabic science is due to the
oppressive force of Islam: the reknowned astronomer Ibn
al-Shatir (d. 1375) was a timekeeper at the Umayyad Mosque in
Damascus, and a number of his contemporaries and followers
“were religious scholars in their own right” (pp.
147-8).
Closer to Matar’s own
topic, Ahmad Dallal has written on Muslims’
“curiosity” and knowledge of Jews (particularly in
Yemen), from the early modern period to the early nineteenth
century.
Ahmad Dallal, “On Muslim curiosity and the
historiography of the Jews of Yemen.” Bulletin
of the Royal Institute for Inter-Faith Studies 1, no. 2
(Autumn 1999):77-112.
He notes that it is a commonplace even in
relatively recent works for scholars to assert that Muslims had
no positive interest in Jews and Jewish learning, thereby
ignoring the large corpus of (predominantly Shi’ite
Yemeni) jurisprudence and Muslim Torah scholarship.
Ibid., pp. 88-90, nn. 65-79.
With so much archival material only now
being made available to scholars, and so much more still under
wraps, arguments that depend upon absence or paucity of
evidence seem like a risky venture academically speaking, quite
apart from any other goal the author may wish to advance.
[5] The
manuscript sources for the travels of Priest Ilyas b. Hanna
al-Mawsuli, written in Arabic, are very interesting in their
own right.
Matar, Lands, p. 48.
One in the “Syriac Bishopric in
Aleppo” contains the travel narrative in the first
hundred pages, followed by over two hundred pages of
translations from European authors on the discovery of America,
and a fifty-five page account of the visit of an Ottoman
ambassador to France. This manuscript forms the basis of
Antoine Rabbat’s 1906 edition, which has been recently
reprinted. The other manuscript, British Library Oriental MS
3537, omits the ambassador’s visit.
[6] From the
narrative we learn maddeningly little about Ilyas b. Hanna
al-Mawsuli himself, a Chaldean Catholic priest whose travels
took him away from Baghdad to live in Paris, Spain, and South
America and Mexico for a period of fifteen years. The
first seven years of his travels were spent in Europe, and this
period is only covered briefly (pp. 51-6). While in
France, he visited King Louis XIV and his brother the Duke of
Orleans, remaining in Paris for eight months and acting as a
translator into Turkish for correspondence between the king and
Sultan Mehmed IV. He then visited Spain, and was granted
permission to celebrate mass before the child King Carlos II
and his mother the regent. When he was told to request
anything he desired in return, he consulted with his friends
and, rather against his better judgment, asked for “a
permit and an irrevocable order to visit the West
Indies.”
Matar, Lands, p. 56. The West
Indies, India, and Yenki Dunia (the New World) seem to
be used almost interchangeably. The care taken by Spain to
restrict access to her American colonies is well known.
He sailed from Cadiz on February 12,
1675. His goal was the city of Lima, Peru, whose minister was a
man whom he had met in Spain. He remained there one year
before receiving permission to go to “the mountains of
silver.”
[7] Ilyas b.
Hanna’s narrative of his travels in South America and
Mexico (pp. 57-104) has a number of recurrent themes—the
clerics, monasteries and churches he visited (where he often
celebrated mass in Syriac for his fellow Catholics),
observations about the Indians and how they were treated by the
Spaniards, the number of times he fell seriously ill and was
saved by the Virgin, and remarks about landscape, climate, and
flora and fauna. But it is his travels through the mining
regions of Peru and Bolivia that receives the most sustained
treatment (pp. 67; 73-88). The bulk of this section is taken up
by descriptions of visits to primarily silver, but also gold
and mercury mines, processing centers and mints. He
visited at least thirteen such operations, and made detailed
observations of their location, size and especially their
processing techniques. He even bought gold (p. 67) and
some silver dust (p. 82).
[8] The
narrative is rather quiet as to why Ilyas b. Hanna visited
these places (at considerable trouble and cost to his health),
and Matar does not hazard a guess. I can only note that
the priest’s intense interest in mining overlapped with a
period of crisis in the Ottoman coinage supply in the later
seventeenth century.
C.f. Sevket Pamuk, A Monetary
History of the Ottoman Empire (Cambridge UK, 2000),
Ch. 8-10, pp. 131-71.
This crisis had its roots in the
sixteenth century, when silver pouring into Europe from the
South American mines entered the Ottoman lands as coinage, by
the later part of the century in the form of the European
groschen (Ottoman kuruş), forming an
increasingly popular currency alongside the Ottoman silver
akçe. Ultimately, the Ottoman state silver
mines in the Balkans could not compete with this cheaper
source, and the mines were virtually closed by the
1640s. But the influx of silver was more than matched by
outflows, and the seventeenth century (not unlike the later
sixteenth century) was marked by a series of debasements in the
akçe, accompanied by counterfeiting. This
led to currency substitution and hoarding; sources for Ottoman
coinage dried up to the point where, from the mid-1650s to the
mid-1680s, the minting of new gold and silver coinage in
Istanbul was primarily to provide for ceremonial
usage. During the reign of Mehmed IV (1648-87), only seven
mints at most produced the akçe and
para. But the European currency that was
substituted for Ottoman had a curious feature—in the
mid-seventeenth century, it was mainly copper, with a silver
wash. This currency was called luigini, and it
reached its peak usage between 1656 and 1669. Minted by
French, Italian and Dutch merchants, it was not legal in its
places of origin, but was made under contract, specifically for
the Ottoman market. Both observers of the era and many
modern scholars have been scandalized by this debased coinage,
but, as Pamuk notes, the Ottoman empire was at war with Venice
over Crete, and “debased coinage was better than no
coinage.”
Ibid., p. 154.
The story of Ottoman currency continues
with the end of the war with Venice and the currency reforms
beginning in 1669, the minting of copper coinage for a brief
period starting in 1688, and finally the minting of the new
kuruş starting in 1690. American silver
production had been in decline since 1670, to a degree that
made the Anatolian and Balkan mines viable again, and these
were the sources for the new kuruş.
[9] The
priest Ilyas b. Hanna’s travels in South America from
1676-1681 thus took place within a period of considerable
economic turmoil revolving around silver. As to why he
stayed in South America for six years, this seems to have been
connected to some commercial expectations, partly unfulfilled
because his friend the minister of Lima was dismissed during
his stay. After several years the minister successfully refuted
the charges against him, but was not reinstated. At this
juncture, the priest left for Mexico, where he remained for a
number of months before sailing for Spain. It seems that he
continued in service to the Church of Rome, where he died and
was buried in 1693.
Matar, Lands, p. 106, citing I. IU.
Krachkovskii, Tarikh al-adab al-jughrafi
al-‘Arabi (Cairo, 1963), vol. 2, pp. 701-6.
[10] In
focusing on only one of Matar’s four travel narratives, I
have omitted much of interest. Readers of the book will
learn of religious debates held over the dinner table, a man
struggling with his feelings for a beautiful young woman, a man
on a diplomatic mission who is welcomed into the bosom of a
French family, and much else. These are some of the
intimate and often light-hearted moments in narratives that
were assembled in response to a rather serious academic
issue: that of Arabic speakers’ interest in, and
knowledge of Europe and Europeans. Part of the importance of
this issue lies in the ease in which it can be
politicized. Both the larger issue and the individual
seventeenth century authors have been well served by Professor
Matar._______
Notes