Imran Abdullah
How do you write realistic notes about a new world describing it to readers who have never seen it themselves, and who may not have heard of it at all, or some may consider it a kind of literary fiction drenched in myths?
This was the challenge that confronted an Arab traveler, Reverend Elias Ibn Hanna Al-Musli in the 17th century when he began writing what appears to be the first deserted literature and Arab notes on the New World behind the Atlantic Ocean.
Al-Musli was an Arab, Iraqi and Christian priest, and despite the lack of information about his early life and date of birth, he wrote down his trip to America or the new world, which was recently discovered at the time, as he began his journey from Baghdad in 1668 and went to Jerusalem, then Aleppo, Antioch, Cyprus, Italy, then France, Spain and Portugal before he crossed The Atlantic Ocean is on a cruise heading to the northeast of the southern continent in the region now known as Venezuela.
From northern South America, al-Musli went to several regions in present-day Latin America and settled in the capital of Peru for a while, to write his journey as the first Levantine Arab to write his memoirs in the New World, before returning to Rome and publishing the text of the exciting trip.
The literature of the Arab journey and
in the notes he edited and presented to her by the Syrian poet Nuri al-Jarrah, al-Musli recounted the details of the lives and customs of people in the new world and mentioned the conditions of the country he visited, their animals and their food, and he told stories he heard in a language mixed between Al-Fusha and the Syrian colloquial.
In the introduction to the memoirs issued by the Al-Suwaidi Publishing House and the Arab Institute for Studies in Beirut, Al-Jarrah considered that Arab and Muslim travelers are among the most qualified who traveled the geography of the world, which made them at the forefront of those who wrote "The Literature of the Journey", citing the first Arab travelers such as Abu Delph Al-Yanboui, Ibn Battuta and Ibn Jubeir And Ibn Fadlan, Nasir Khusraw and others, all the way to Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi, Sheikh Abd al-Ghani al-Nabulsi, Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq and Rafaa al-Tahtawi, as well as Muhammad Labib al-Batnouni, Muhammad Kurd Ali, Amin al-Rihani, Prince Muhammad Ali, and many others.
The Arab travelers traveled to the regions of the world near and far and explored the places and wrote about them and their peoples, customs and traditions. The literature of the Arab trip included the work of tourists, geographers, and thinkers searching for knowledge, mystic journeys, pilgrims, diplomatic and spy activities, and others, according to the Syrian poet residing in London, who presented the journey of Al-Mawsali.
A quarter of a century of nomadic journeys
lasted 26 years between Moses 1668 and 1683, and it was in the beginnings of European settlement to the new world, in the fever of settlement building and the search for gold and silver, the spread of slavery, the practices of the Catholic "Inspection Bureau" and the forced evangelization and extermination practiced by the Spanish colonists towards the children of Latin continent.
The surgeon investigated the text of Al-Mawsali and his journey, adding to it information found from the book "The History of Arab Geographical Literature" by the Russian oriental Ignatius Kratchkovsky.
Father Rabat Al-Jesoui had found the manuscript of the trip in the Diocese of Syriac in Aleppo, and published it in mid-May of the year 1905 in the magazine "Al-Mashriq" and wrote about it "While we were looking at the manuscripts preserved in the Diocese of Syriac in Aleppo, we looked at an Arabic book titled Tourism of El-Khoury Elias Al-Mosli So, we embezzled the free time to read it and we were surprised when we saw an eastern priest who visited most of the American parts in the second part of the seventeenth century and described it as a description that is not without pleasure ... ".
Al-Musli described on his trip to Italy the period he spent in quarantine for more than forty days to check on the fact that they did not carry the plague, before being allowed to enter the city.
A journey across the world and
on his way to America, Al-Mussali passed through the Spanish Canary Islands, all the way to the Venezuelan capital Caracas, Margarita Island, Cartagena, and Portobello in Venezuela, then to Panama, through hundreds of cities, villages and islands, and toured Peru, Guatemala, Colombia, Chile and Bolivia, and reached areas of the line He flattened, visited silver mines, gold, and mercury in the colonies, and on his way back to Europe after an eight-year-long tourism, he visited Mexico, which he calls on his journey (the land of Yankee Dunia) and Central America, and stops on the island of Cuba.
The flight investigator said that al-Musli wrote it in a beautiful house in the capital of Peru in poor language, and the surgeon in turn completed correcting some linguistic errors and explaining some old words and divided them into four parts to make it easier for the reader to read according to their geographical stages, namely: the European journey from Baghdad to Lisbon, and the American trip from Madrid To Caracas, the Mexican flight from Taboca to Mexico, and the return trip from Mexico to Rome.
And the surgeon says that the trip is full of news and stories as well as real and strange, and reveals smart snapshots, and there is nothing but objectivity in spite of the fact that its author was moving in the circle of "Inspection Bureau" but perhaps because of his eastern origins or a conflict between his ecclesiastical consciousness and his human conscience, it was not Completely satisfied with the collective punishment punished by the Bureau with the indigenous people and the crimes it committed against them, which revealed the unholy alliance between economic and religious exploitation to which the inhabitants of the continent were subjected, in the words of Nuri al-Jarrah.
A mysterious goal,
and in the introduction to his trip, Al-Musali narrates how the inhabitants of Latin America embraced Christianity through Hispanic missionaries, describing urbanization, construction, customs, indigenous cooking, conditions of trade, goods, prices, slave trade, marriage customs, and burial of the dead, and the climate of these countries.
Al-Musli calls Latin America in the countries of West India, in order to distinguish them from "East India" in Asia, and before his trip he obtained the approval of the King of Portugal and a letter of recommendation from the Queen of Spain to the bishops, bishops and rulers in all the countries of "West India".
In one of his stories about the cities, Al-Mawsali tells the traditions of the indigenous people, the girl paid what looked like a dowry to her husband, consumed cannibals for the Indians, and the work of coining and its value, and it appeared clear in one of the phrases of the trip that Al-Mawsili was on a missionary mission as he talked about his duty to return the sects to "The True Faith of the Church."
However, the textual investigator did not confirm this, and he wrote in the introduction asking whether there was an official, ecclesiastical, or political mission behind this trip that travelers did not disclose, or whether it was just a personal adventure.
And if the trip is a church assignment from the Pope or from the “Inquisition” then what is the nature of this assignment “and why was Al-Mawsali the son of the Eastern Church chosen for this task, and not any other Roman or European person, for example?”, The surgeon who considers that what Al-Mawsili enjoyed was efficient Experience, as well as his family’s relationship with the Vatican, may have a role in his choice of a task not explicitly disclosed in his diaries.