Little is known about Athanasios Ignatius Nouri’s life. We know he was baptized in 1857 and raised in the area between Aleppo, Deir al-Zor and Mosul. We also know that on the 16th of April 1881, the Patriarch Jurjis al-Shalhat in Aleppo made Nouri a priest and sent him off to Baghdad. In 1895, he was made Syriac Bishop of the city. There, Nouri was the head of a relatively small congregation in decline.
In September 1899, Nouri set off for India from Baghdad, spending seven months in the subcontinent. The reasons for his visit are contested, some argue he was interested in selling pious endowments owned by the church which needed the funds. Nouri’s own introduction to the travelogue he would publish some years after his trip does not stress the question of the awaqf at all, rather a far more personal and profound matter is foregrounded, the wisdom gained by man when he travels and sees the world.
The traveler Nouri was, first and foremost, a cleric and a theologian. He was an important figure in his church and deeply involved in the intellectual culture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century Arab world. In 1899, shortly before he departed for India, Nouri sent a letter to Louis Cheikho’s then only year-old journal, al-Mashriq. Nouri, a conservative partisan in the nahda’s culture wars, wrote that al-Mashriq was the antidote to the dangerous writing proliferating in the magazines of the day. Decades later, after he had left Iraq for Syria, Nouri wrote a few articles for his beloved magazine, all of them concerned chiefly with the geography of the Jazira region he was intimately involved with his entire life.
Short accounts of Nouri’s trip to India titled “Recollections (dhikri) of India” were first published in al-Diya’, the Cairo-based journal of the conservative philologist Ibrahim al-Yaziji. In most cases, these articles from 1904 and 1905 were copied verbatim into the subsequent travelogue. Only one passage from the al-Diya’ articles is not included in the book, a trip to the zoo in Karachi. In 1934, the full account of the trip to India was published in the Lebanese city of Harissa, a center of Arab Christian learning and pilgrimage where he had relocated from Baghdad. “This book is a great gift,” read a short review in al-Mashriq upon its publication, “valuable and entertaining.” The review continued: “although the world has changed [since Nouri’s trip], the book is an important historical document and a witness to a situation that will serve the future historian well.”
Indeed, the travelogue is a vivid account of India through Arab eyes. Much is learned about Indian religion, urban life in the fin de siècle Raj, and the transformations gripping the late Ottoman Empire. Libraries and schools are investigated, as are churches, mosques and museums. Like many a learned traveler from the time, Nouri was interested in these institutions of intellectual authority. Traveling through Basra and Bahrain, Nouri made his way to Bombay and then across India, to Pune, Hyderabad, Nagpur and finally Calcutta, where he spent the bulk of his time. With him on his trip was an Englishman by the name of George Blaney, who knew English, Arabic and Hindustani and would serve as his guide. Blaney, a European, was playing the role of dragoman for the Arab.
Early in his account, Nouri hints at the legal mechanisms that had just began to govern the world of travel. Nouri and Blaney ran into trouble in the Persian Gulf city of Bushire (Abu-Shahar), when one Persian fellow, Hay ibn-Bey asked to see their passports as they boarded the dinghy that would take them to their ship. “We are Ottomans,” Nouri responded, “and we have passports but we forgot to bring them, but had we the intention to settle in your country we would have surly brought them.” Their inquisitor was nonplussed and told their seaman not to set sail. “I do not know you or your Ottoman nation,” he told them. At this point, Nouri sent Blaney off to contact the Ottoman consul who smoothed things over. In order to travel in the first place, Nouri, as a member of the clergy and a subject of the Ottoman Empire, had sought clearances from two divinely titled authorities, the Ottoman Sultan and the Pope. Both institutions approved of the Bishop’s travel, although the Ottoman authorities required a bribe. In the final section of his travelogue, Nouri dispenses with the chronological organization of the rest of the text to offer a series of general comments on India. Among these reflections is an exercise in comparison. In a short section on “The Relationship between English and Turkish Forms of Rule,” Nouri skewers what he sees as the Ottoman failure, despite a smaller population and greater number of troops on the ground, to bring peace, justice and security to its subjects. This, he argues, in contrast to the benevolent rule of the British in India, where no more than 70,000 troops are able to defend 300 million people. In British India, Nouri writes, “security is assured, crime is minimal, justice is total, and bribery is unknown.”
In an earlier part of the book, Nouri captures the din of the Eid festival in Calcutta. The passage offers further insight into his perceptions of British rule in India:
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Eid, February 2, 1900: Mosques without Minarets!
I forgot to tell you what I saw on the morning of Eid al-fitr on February 2nd, 1900. We were leaving the hotel—in our usual daily manner—to go to mass at the Church of Sacred Heart of Jesus. We had not walked a few steps before we witnessed a great crowd of some 30,000 souls, all of them Muslims, gathered in the public square. A mosque cannot hold a mass of this size, so they had gathered in the square for the morning Eid prayer. They filled the alleyways to complete their religious duty. The police did what was necessary to prevent any tumult, they stopped all the carriages, trams, and horses and even those just passing through on foot, until the prayer was over. The police were unarmed except for big sticks. They spread across all the streets and alleys, an officer on each street. The public feared them greatly and the slightest gesture from a police officer could clear a huge crowd.
But if you saw those celebrating Eid you would think they were in the Ottoman lands. They were dressed in their finest clothes, with their heads held high like giraffes walking tall at midday. They rented all the best carriages. In fact we could not find one for ourselves. We finally rented one for sixteen rupees for half an hour, even though usually it would cost only two rupees for such a trip.
Between the Sunnites and the Shiites, the population of Muslims in Calcutta number about 160,000 souls, though the majority of them do not know anything beyond the shahada. They have many mosques, but they do not have minarets on their mosques like in our lands. The muezzins call the prayer in the courtyards or on the roofs of the mosques. We may never know why the English have banned the construction of minarets.
Athanasios Ignatius Nouri, Rihla il al-hind, 1899-1900 (Harissa: Matba’it al-Qasis Bolis, 1934). Translated by Esmat Elhalaby.
