Abbassi, Ali Bey el

Ali Bey el Abbassi (1767 - August 30, 1818) was a Spanish expert on the Arab world who published a detailed account of Arabia, North Africa, and the Levant in 1814. Though he extensively documented his travels, the details of Ali Bey el Abbassi's life remain uncertain. By his own account, he was born Domingo Francisco Jorge Badía y Leblich in Barcelona, but due to his father's profession travelled throughout Spain and to London. Becoming fascinated with Arab culture and the Arabic language, he began studying both intensively before living in Morocco for two years, convincing others that he was a Muslim and a descendant of the Abbasid caliphs, and then traveling to Mecca on the hajj before moving through the Ottoman Empire and then returning to Spain. A committed Bonapartist, he fled to France at the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars and published an account of his travels. Ali Bey then returned to the Ottoman Empire under a different assumed identity and possibly working as an agent for the French state when he died in Aleppo in 1818, possibly by poisoning. Since most of the information about him is autobiographical, some contemporaries and later Arabists doubted elements of his accounts and thought that he may have been a Jew or in fact a Muslim from Morocco who had been educated in Spain. Assuming he was actually a Spanish-born non-Muslim, though he was not the first non-Muslim European to enter Mecca, Ali Bey el Abbassi did provide the first extensive descriptions, drawings, and maps of the city.