THE JOURNEY OF THE FIRST LEVANTINE TO AMERICA: BEING THE WANDERING OF THE PRIEST ILYAS SON OF THE CLERIC HANNA AL-MAWSULI FROM THE AMMOON AL-KILDANI FAMILY: 1668–1683.*
Edited by Fr. Antoon Rabbat al-Yasooi’i (Beirut: Catholic Press, 1906).
The journal of Hanna al-Mawsuli constitutes the first account of Spanish America to be written in Arabic. Although the account, Rihla, was not published until the beginning of the twentieth century, and therefore had no influence on Arabic thought, it provides an important perspective on the “Levantine” view of America and of the Spanish and American Indian populations in the early modern period.
The writer was a Syriac Catholic priest who belonged to an oriental church that was Uniate with the Papacy. His church retained its Syriac liturgy and language, but was ecclesiastically administered from Rome. This link with Rome is crucial as it helps explain not only the familiarity al-Mawsuli showed with Christian European writings about America, but his adoption of the European discourse in those writings. Despite the difference in liturgy, background, language, and history between himself and Rome, al-Mawsuli used the European discourse as the lens through which to view the New World.
From the very outset al-Mawsuli confirmed that the native populations of America were “savage” and not “different from animals.” They worshipped “Satan” or trees or wild animals, and offered sacrifices to the “cursed devil”(p. 2). Not surprisingly, these observations repeated the views that appeared in the Spanish texts about America by Pedro di Candia and D’Acosta, which al-Mawsuli had read, and some of which he had translated into Arabic. Al-Mawsuli adopted without reflection the anti-Indian position of the conquerors. Furthermore, the term he used for America was again the Spanish term, India of the West, (Hind al-gharb), or simply India (al-Hind); the term had been used at the end of the sixteenth century by the Moroccan historian al-Fishtali, while in the early seventeenth century, the term al-Hunood al Maghribiyya had been used by the Morisco writer Ahmad bin Qasim.1 Such usage confirms that the Arabic was a direct translation from the Spanish and that the Arabs derived their nomenclature for America from the Europeans. Curiously, neither in al-Fishtali nor in al-Mawsuli does the name “America” appear. Also from the Spanish/European sources was the racial categorization al-Mawsuli used for the American Indians—“red”—which appears both as an adjective and as a noun: “The red came out and shouted” (p. 19). Not unlike other visitors to America, al-Mawsuli saw what he had read.
Al-Mawsuli was very conscious of himself as a Uniate Christian from the Ottoman Empire. After arriving in Paris he had to stay in the city for eight months because the messenger from Sultan Mohammad, who was visiting the French King in August of 1669, needed him to act as a translator from French into Arabic and Turkish. Later in Syracuse, he mentioned his servant, who was a “Roman Catholic” (ruumi) from Aleppo (p. 10). He was sensitive about the difference between the Catholic and the Syriac Church—a sensitivity that has continued into the twentieth century. Throughout his journey in America, al-Mawsuli celebrated mass in Syriac and distributed rosaries and crucifixes from Jerusalem, much to the devout joy of the Spanish congregation and clergy. Meanwhile, he was thrilled at the Spaniards’ wonderment at his different clothes and long beard—the Syriac clergy do not trim their beards. People often sought his benediction and were eager to participate in a Syriac mass (pp. 30, 34). Al-Mawsuli also practiced oriental medicine, and after successfully curing patients with frog powder he recalled how the people had eagerly tried to keep him permanently among them (p. 50). When he reconciled the governor of Provincial with the Dominican abbot, he recalled how the latter praised God and said, “Here is a priest who came from the city of Baghdad to reconcile us” (p. 62).
Al-Mawsuli recognized himself as a cultural stranger in the land of the Indians and the Spaniards, but he was assured of his place there because of his allegiance to the same church to which the Spaniards belonged. America, for him, was a Christian land. The proof of this was that he met with many miracles there that were performed chiefly but not exclusively by the Virgin Mary (pp. 14, 25, 43, 46), whom he described on one occasion as “a-sitt alisbanyuliyya”—the Spanish lady (p. 65). That Mary, whose city of Nazareth al-Mawsuli had visited early on in his Rihla, was a Spanish lady demonstrates the power and awe with which he viewed Spanish/Catholic Christianity. For him, the imperial hegemony of Spain in America could only have been assisted by a Spanish, not a Jewish or a Levantine Mother of God. It is no wonder that America was suffused with Catholic miracles, and no wonder that, as a Uniate with the Catholics, he was eager to enjoy the legitimacy to wander in Spanish America and to study its people and geography, just like any other Catholic. Christianity was empowerment.
This Christianity was repeatedly confirmed as Catholic and therefore anti-Protestant. In his introduction to the Rihla, al-Mawsuli explained that it was apropos of the rebellion of some Christians against the Roman Church that Jesus compensated for the loss of the heretics by inviting into His church peoples of different races and traditions. During his journey he repeatedly met and therefore mentioned those “heretics.” From Iskandaroon to Europe, he used an English ship to transport him (p. 4), and in Caracas, he learned, the Indians sold nutmeg to the English and the Dutch, but not to the Spaniards (p. 26). Having realized that the heretics were both in the Mediterranean and in the Atlantic, al-Mawsuli started to share in the anxiety that fellow Catholics felt at the growing presence of Protestants in “their” part of the world.
In spite of his religious and polemical identification with the Catholics of the New World, al-Mawsuli never forgot that he was a Levantine and therefore frequently compared and contrasted what he saw among the Indians with his native society and land—in the same way Spanish and English writers did. The fish he saw in the river Colan resembled the fish in the Tigris (p. 29); when he saw the raging sea, he recalled a description he had read in the Thousand and OneNights (p. 20). Later he compared the desolate and waterless path he traveled to the “land of Egypt” (p. 30). In Buenos Aires there was a medicinal drink that was as popular as “coffee in our country” (p. 51). In Misque the Indians used horses and spears like “the Arabs” (p. 52). As he looked at the Indians al-Mawsuli relied on both his Western readings and his Levantine geography. He could not help but sometimes be reminded of the Mediterranean world of Islam. At one point he met a priest who had been captured by Algerian pirates while returning from the West Indies to Spain (p. 63). When he realized that in the southern hemisphere it rained between May and September, he observed that this was different from “the habits and weather of our country” (p. 66). Most interestingly, however, in this Mediterranean-American cross referencing is al-Mawsuli’s use of the word futuh to describe the Spanish conquest of America—the word that in Arabic describes the early Muslim conquests of the Levant, North Africa, and central Asia (p. 52). Was al-Mawsuli favorably comparing the spread of Islam in the Middle East with the spread of Christianity in America?
With regard to the American Indians al-Mawsuli had very little to say at the beginning of his account, except to repeat the Spanish epithets about their heathenism and devil worship. He was confused and perhaps even afraid; after all, he had steeped himself in the anti-Indian discourse of European texts. That is why he repeatedly added the adjective kafara (infidels) when describing Indians, recalling the term heathen, which was always applied to them in European writings. For al-Mawsuli, however, the term must have had an especially negative connotation—it was the same term the Ottoman Turks often pejoratively and derisively applied to Christians. Perhaps in a kind of unconscious vindictiveness, al-Mawsuli used the same epithet for the Indians that the Ottomans used for the Christians: just as he and other Christians had been denigrated as kafara, he would denigrate the Indians as kafara too. Perhaps he felt he could do unto others what others had done unto him.
As he progressed in his text, however, al-Mawsuli began to provide some accurate, albeit brief, descriptions of the Indians. At one point he mentioned how the Indians did not want the Spaniards to discover their use of “darseen” for fear that the Spaniards would attack them and “take their country” (p. 26). At another point he observed that some Indians were real Christians while others were Christians “out of fear” (p. 30). But al-Mawsuli was no Las Casas—actually he seemed not to have read him. Although he described Spanish violence against the Indians, he did not commiserate with them, but seemed to position himself firmly on the Spanish side. The Spaniards fought the Indians, killed hundreds of them, and the survivors were to be taught Christianity. That, to al-Mawsuli, seemed to be the Catholic God’s design for the Indians. Whatever he wrote about the Indians, therefore, reflected their infidelity and their savagery. Before the Spaniards “took possession of the country,” he noted, the Indians did not know the true God (p. 33). During “the time of their infidelity,” the Indians buried their dead above ground (p. 40); “infidel” Indians worshipped the “red mountain” (p. 44). On one occasion he had an Indian tortured because the Indian would not speak to him in Spanish. After the Indian was brutally whipped he spoke Spanish, and when al-Mawsuli asked him why he had resisted using Spanish the man answered: “We Indians do not obey the Spaniards if they do not beat us” (p. 47). When later he arrived in Potosi, where silver had been extracted with devastating results to the Indians, al-Mawsuli had no comment to make except to describe in detail the intricate process of production (pp. 47–49).
But the more al-Mawsuli traveled in America, the more he softened toward the Indians, especially after an Indian boy saved his life by alerting him to a plot on his life by a “mestico” (p. 28). Later, when an Indian priest told him there were seven Indian men in jail who were innocent, he went down and released them (p. 45). When he asked an Indian why he had not divulged his knowledge about a silver mine, the Indian answered:“I have seen Indians before me who informed the Spaniards and then died under torture. That is the reason. I believed his words regarding the tyranny which I saw them inflict on the Indians” (p. 53). But al-Mawsuli never went beyond such a statement to condemn the Spanish treatment of the natives; much as he may have sympathized with individual cases of injustice and pain, he remained committed to the Christian ideology that had made possible the conquest of America and the journey he had undertaken.
It is unfortunate that although al-Mawsuli came from the Middle East, he did not have a distinct or truly individual view of America or the American Indians. It is also unfortunate that he was not a more compassionate priest or was not more original in his perspective; after all he did belong to a unique community within Christendom. His description reflects Spanish views and shows how ignorant the Arab and Ottoman East was about the India of the West. While al-Mawsuli cited Spanish writers, he did not cite a single work about the New World by Levantine Christians or Muslims. Obviously, none existed.2 That is why al-Mawsuli translated material from Spanish into Arabic and wrote down the account of his journey, thereby providing the first material in Arabic about the New World.
Looked on in a wider context, however, this document sheds some light on the dissemination of anti-Indian sentiment in countries and among communities that had no interaction with America. The Spaniards and their Catholic institution developed racist views of the “reds” to justify their conquest. Racism was necessary for empire and therefore, in the world of realpolitik, serviceable and indispensable. But as the texts that had explained and justified conquest spread from among the Spaniards to other peoples—in this case the Arabs—these texts introduced a hostile and demeaning view of the Indians to groups who had nothing to do with Spain’s imperial goals. Al-Mawsuli had no reason to develop a negative attitude toward the Indians simply because he was not part of the conquering race; yet he did. Had his text been published it would have disseminated a hostile view of the Indians to his seventeenth-century Arabic-speaking audience. This transferability of discourses is yet another bane of imperialism: not only do imperialists denigrate and alterize “natives,” but they establish the definition that is adopted and propagated about the “natives.” In this case, the Arabic-speaking al-Mawusli learned from Spaniards to denigrate Indians in the same way Indians learned to denigrate the African slaves, Africans the mulattos, and mulattos the mesticos. Each group learned from the imperialist the language of racial and ethnic polarization, or as Caliban put it, they learned how “to curse”—not the conqueror but the conquered.
* All translations from Arabic are mine. The numbers in brackets refer to the Arabic edition.