Infidels: A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam
Page 36
For almost two centuries “M. de M*** d’Ohsson” has seemed as romantic and mysterious a character as Alexander Dumas’ count of Monte Cristo. Was the baron d’Ohsson really the descendant of an ancient Swedish noble family, or was he simply an Armenian trader who worked in the Swedish embassy in Constantinople? He was the son of Oannes Mouradgea, an Ottoman Armenian in the service of the Swedish consulate in Izmir, and Claire Pagy, the daughter of a French consular clerk in the same port. In 1740 Ignatius was born in Pera, a European quarter of Constantinople across the Golden Horn. He followed his father and became a translator to the Swedish embassy in 1763; by 1768 he was chief translator. He was appointed chargé d’affaires in 1795, and later briefly held the highest post in the Constantinople embassy, head of mission.
An advantageous marriage to the daughter of a rich Armenian merchant banker, Abraham Kuliyan, had financed a style of life far beyond his income as a translator. By 1780, Ignatius was also in business with his father-in-law, as well as working for the embassy. In 1786, the king of Sweden allowed him to change his name in honor of an uncle who had shown him “paternal kindness.” This figure was, it seemed, conveniently called d’Ohsson, an imaginative rendering by Ignatius of his uncle’s Armenian patronymic Tosunyan, which meant, roughly, “raging bull.” This francophone appellation carried him a long way. In 1780, he was given a Swedish title of nobility, and he progressed from “le sieur Mouradgea” through “le chevalier de Mouradgea” to, finally, “le chevalier d’Ohsson.” At the French court he presented himself as an unambiguously Oriental figure. Amid the perruques, satins, and silks, he strode about in the flowing robes of an Ottoman official and the tall and peaked fur hat worn by embassy translators. His wife died in 1782, and from 1784 to 1792 he lived in Paris to oversee the publication of his great work.
The project had been in his mind since 1764, when he read one of the first Turkish printed books from the long-defunct press of Ibrahim Müteferrika, which I shall discuss in the next chapter. D’Ohsson planned his Tableau with care over many years. He employed artists to paint and draw locations, costumes, and grand events in conditions of secrecy. His governing principles were accuracy and utility, and the result was a work that lacked the sensationalism of the many Western images. The most telling example of this difference is in his engraver’s portrayal of the women’s bath. By the late eighteenth century this had already become a site of fevered lubricity for Westerners. What happened within could only be imagined, since men had no access. But the later painting by Ingres of The Bath was both the apogee of a long tradition of depicting naked female flesh en masse and also the beginning of a fertile theme in Orientalist art. How did d’Ohsson’s book display the women’s (as well as the separate men’s) bathhouse? The only naked flesh on show was that of a mother discreetly feeding her infant; everyone else was clothed in the tradition of Eastern modesty. Even on this point, where his Western audience expected a different (and possibly titillating) vision of the Ottomans, d’Ohsson adhered to what he knew to be true.
The first volume of the de luxe edition appeared in 1787, the second in 1789. The third and final volume was published in 1820, thirteen years after his death, by his son Abraham. Publication of what he hoped would be a mass market edition began in 1788, but that too was only completed in 1824. Plans for an English translation never came to fruition, nor did schemes for a grand Viennese German-language edition, although parts did appear in German, Swedish, and Russian, while a curious hybrid version was published in Philadelphia in 1788. The latter held out the allure of “Exhibiting Many Curious Pieces of the Eastern Hemisphere, relative to the Christian and Jewish Dispensation; with various Rites and Mysteries of the Oriental Freemasons.” D’Ohsson’s dignified presentation of a true image of the East had been debased. There is an extraordinary graphic quality to both his writing and to the carefully designed images that make his words real. But the market demanded something different: “Curious Pieces,” depicting Oriental lust, despotism, and cruelty. By the time that publication was finally completed, any substantial audience for the Tableau was about to vanish. After the massacre of Chios in 1822, few people in France wanted to read or see anything that presented the Ottomans in a benign light.
D’Ohsson’s attempt to defy the dominant discourse was doomed to failure: not even three volumes in elephant folio could disrupt it. But the form that the discourse took was not immobile. The West’s image of the Ottoman East, Asli Çirakman suggests, moved from a wide disparity of conflicting views in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to a single consistent hostility in the eighteenth. However, this process of change continued, and not always in the same direction. In her view, in the first period the image was a simple tyranny, in the second it appeared as a more complex despotism.40 But if we take the story forward into the nineteenth century, the shape changes again. After 1829, when the Ottomans abandoned the seductive silks and furs and put aside the turban in favor of the fez and Stambouline frock coat, they began to be depicted in the West as new men, set on the path of progress. Yet they still carried the irredeemable taint of their origins, as Gladstone presented it in his diatribe of 1876:
They are not the mild Mahometans of India, nor the chivalrous Saladins of Syria, nor the cultured Moors of Spain. They were, on the whole, from the black day when they first entered Europe, the one great anti-human specimen of humanity … For the guide of this life, they had a relentless fatalism: for its reward hereafter, a sensual paradise.41
Over the centuries, under Western eyes, the Muslim infidel had assumed many different guises.42 They had been Agarenes, Ishmaelites, Saracens, Moors, Turks, Tartars, Bedouins, Arabs. With each iteration the image of the infidel became more precise. Visually speaking, an Agarene or an Ishmaelite or even a Saracen has no particular shape. It is just a name. But Moors, Turks, or Bedouins have a very precise and definite visual image. They have become fixed, in the sense that a photographic image is chemically “fixed” and made permanent, by printed images and by works of art.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The Black Art
A PRINTING PRESS IS A MACHINE.1 IT HAS NO MORALITY. BUT ITS POTENTIAL power is awesome. The visionary poet (and working printer) William Blake imagined that he visited a “printing house in Hell.” There he “saw the method in which knowledge is transmitted from generation to generation” and “printing in the infernal method, by corrosives, which in Hell are salutary and medicinal … displaying the infinite which was hid.” And, as Blake observed, “if the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.”2 He articulated, in an extreme form, his contemporaries’ general confidence in the power of the printing press as a moral agent. This had distant roots, but in the Enlightenment the magical agency of the press to transform society became a near-universal belief. Censorship was the negative recognition of this absolute credence, and the eighteenth-century relaxation of control over the printed word (in the Habsburg domains and in Russia) was a short-lived experiment. But what was the state of those who did not enjoy the benefit of the printed word? They lived in an unimaginable darkness, waiting and longing for the coming of the light. And what of a government that deliberately turned its back upon the printing press? It could only be considered as the epitome of barbarism.
That was precisely the position of the Ottoman Empire and the infidel East. The West believed that the Ottomans “prohibited” the printing press because of their obscurantist faith—Islam. The Turks’ refusal to accept this unique benison from the West was an indication of their deep and fundamental wickedness. By sustaining ignorance they perpetuated the despotism described by Asli Çirakman.3 I believe that the debate over printing was the final formulation of the Western malediction of the Eastern infidel; but it was a condemnation carefully adjusted and attuned to the mores of an Enlightened age. What had begun with the Muslim as “the Abomination of Desolation,” then continued with “the Antichrist,” “the malignant foe,” and all the other epithets, e
nded with a portrayal of debased ignorance. This is the stereotype that has come through to the present day, and still flourishes in the West, but I believe that the Ottoman “failure” to adopt the printing press was the first point at which this prejudice was systematically articulated.
If I am right, then this obscure issue—whether or not some piece of machinery was or was not used at the far end of the Mediterranean—acquires a much deeper symbolic resonance. The shock of Westerners about the “intellectual desert” in the East was a commonplace observation. The French traveler and savant C. F. Volney wrote a hugely popular account of his travels to Syria and Egypt between 1783 and 1785. He was especially appalled at the lack of books. He portrayed a stark contrast: in France reading was common, but “in the East, nothing is rarer.” Over the space of six months in the Levantine provinces of the empire he found a number of texts, but what books he discovered were mostly ancient works on grammar and eloquence, and interpretations of the Qur’an. As far as any other topic was concerned, virtually nothing existed: “very few histories, tales and novels. I only saw two copies of One Thousand and One Nights.” Finally he decided that it was not so much that there were few good books in the East, but more that there were hardly any books at all. The reason was clear: “In this country all books are written by hand.” Volney’s conclusion was that without more books there could not be any major change or advance in the Ottoman Empire.
He saw relatively little merit in Arabic, which simply rendered printing difficult.
The costs of printing are considerable, especially considering that paper has to be imported from Europe and the hand work is very slow. The former problem could be quite simply resolved, but the latter needs a more radical solution. Arabic characters have to be joined by hand, and to join and align them requires great care, and careful attention to each letter. Moreover, the way the letters join depends on where they come in the sentence, and there are even different varieties of letters at the beginning and end of a word. Finally there are many double letters. These cannot be made by simply doubling the existing letters. A compositor has to walk up and down a table eighteen feet long and find the letters which are contained in nine hundred type boxes. All these time-wasting operations mean that Arabic printers can never achieve the greater perfection of our own presses.4
Volney’s solution was a comprehensive reformation of the inconvenient script.5 He was shrewd enough to recognize that simply introducing the printing press alone was no answer to a much more fundamental problem: what was needed was a wholesale transformation of Eastern society, beginning with its language.
In 1791, he returned to the topic. In his much-translated observations on an apocalyptic “Clash of Civilizations,” which he called The Ruins, or, Meditations on the Revolutions of Empires and the Laws of Nature, he began his journey through the past “in the Ottoman dominions and through those provinces which were anciently the kingdoms of Egypt and Syria.” His dire prediction was based upon what he had seen of these lands under Ottoman rule; in chapter 12, “The Lessons of the Past Repeated on the Present,” he laid out the imminent doom of the Ottoman Empire. “Turkish” became an adjective evidencing contempt and condemnation: so China, where cruelty reigned, had “a truly Turkish government.” Moreover, he was sure that like the Muslim world “as long as the Chinese world shall in writing make use of their present characters, they can be expected to make no progress in civilisation.”6 What did Europe have that the Ottoman and the Chinese empires did not? Volney had no doubts, and expressed an idea that remains as potent in our day, a confident vision fulfilled even more successfully by our electronic media. They lacked “the gift of heavenly Genius, the holy art of printing, having furnished the means of communicating in an instant the same idea to millions of men and of fixing it in a durable manner, beyond the power of tyrants to arrest or annihilate.”7
Given the power that attached to the “holy art,” we need to disentangle the reasons that the infidel East apparently spurned it. The failure to adopt Gutenberg’s new art became a touchstone of the essential backwardness of Muslims. From the eighteenth century, it was a convenient explanation for the growing divergence of the Western and Eastern worlds, with the West looking forward and the East looking backward. It has become part of a historical paradigm, what the historian of science Thomas Kuhn called the “normal” state of understanding. To change or even question that norm is to enter a maelstrom. It is easier to pose the question as a counterfactual, a “what if.”8 What if Mehmed II “the Conqueror,” to cap his victory at Constantinople in 1453, had paid the debts of the floundering Mainz entrepreneur Johann Gutenberg, and shipped his printing press to the Old Palace above the Bosphorus? It is perhaps not such a foolish premise, knowing what we do of both Mehmed’s passions and Gutenberg’s financial circumstances. Nor is it entirely fanciful, because the Islamic world had already pioneered a development much more far reaching than Gutenberg’s trio of innovations—reusable metal type, the casting mold, and the printing press.
It was paper more than print that revolutionized the world. Take another counterfactual: what if Johann Gutenberg had had to print his great Bible on the only material available in 1455: sheep, cow, and goat skins? What would have happened to his great invention if there had been no paper in western Europe? The role of paper in the printing revolution has been strangely passed over.9 Yet without paper, transmitted from China to the Muslim world, and thence to Europe, the development of publishing in Europe is virtually unimaginable.
The production of paper in Europe began in Italy in the thirteenth century, at Amalfi, southeast of Naples, and at Fabriano, north of Assisi. It was said that here they had learned the secrets of papermaking from the Moors of Xativa, near Valencia. Both Italian towns managed to make a paper of high quality, which they then shipped back to the Islamic world, still the main market for this product. It was not until 1390 that papermaking moved north of the Alps, with a Nuremberg city official, Ulmann Stromeir, converting his flour mill outside the city into a paper mill, worked by skilled Italians.10 But Italian papers were superior to all others, both in the quality of the writing surface and in durability. Sultan Mehmed II bought paper from Italy for his scribes, but also set up his own paper mill beside the stream called the Kagithane at the head of the Golden Horn.11 Although papermaking rose and declined in the various centers of production in the Islamic lands, it never failed entirely, despite the competition from Italy and later from other parts of Europe. Muslim papermakers continued to experiment and develop new types of paper for different needs certainly until the nineteenth century and, I believe, up to the present.
Contrast this spirit of enterprise with the Islamic obscurantism that supposedly prevented the introduction of Gutenberg’s press. Or perhaps we should think of it as a double dose of conservatism, since the Islamic culture that had adopted Chinese paper evidently failed to adopt Chinese printing from the same source, centuries before Gutenberg. If this were true, it might constitute clear evidence of some innate fear of innovation. But it does not. The prohibition on printing and the printed book is a topic shrouded in mystery, oddly so given the importance that has been attached to it in the West.12 The same story is repeated by a number of visitors to the Ottoman Empire. A prime source was the sixteenth-century French traveler and historiographer to the court of Catherine de’ Medici, André Thevet. He was told that
Greeks, Armenians, Mingrelians, Abyssinians, Turks, Moors, Arabs and Tartars only write their books by hand. Among the Turks they follow the decree of Bajezid, the second of that name their Emperor, proclaimed in 1483, on pain of death, not to read printed books, which ordinance was confirmed by Selim the first of that name his son, in 1515.13
But Walid Gdoura, author of the major study on the slow development of printing in the Middle East, is rightly skeptical about these secondhand accounts. I suspect the ideas about an Islamic prohibition on printing emerged from an Islamic anathema on images.14
Here we might seem to
be on more solid ground. The prohibition on images has been held to be a total, permanent, and unalterable distinction between East and West. It was commented upon from the first centuries of contact, and was confirmed by Muslim disgust at the use of religious images in the Crusader states. But it is not true in these absolute terms. There had been a long tradition of human and animal depiction in the Muslim East, which proliferated under the Ummayad caliphates in both the Levant and in Spain, and which can still be seen in the objects that have survived from their palaces.15 Visual and pictorial arts flourished in private under the Ottomans, and also, preeminently, in Persia and in Mughal India. But unlike the Christian realm, in the Muslim world recognizable human images (and those of animals) played no part in religious art.16 If, exceptionally, the Prophet Mohammed or one of his successors were depicted for any reason, their faces were almost always veiled and “invisible.”
So, the theoretical absolutes crumble and the supposedly immutable mutates. The deeper we dig into the issue of images and of printing, at every point we discover there are unexpected ambiguities. Where the long-established assumptions about the East are tested, anomalies, divergence from the rule, and exceptions immediately emerge. Daniel Goffman has written that the reality of the Ottoman lands was a “world governed by exceptions.”17 This is a striking revision to long-held attitudes. Most writing about the Eastern world has hitherto assumed that the ordering of life as written down in legislation, regulations, and codes of precedence and behavior corresponded precisely to the everyday reality. For this reason Busbecq, writing in the sixteenth century, was still a valued authority in the eighteenth. Many Easterners have also believed in the protective value of a settled order within their world. Those who visited the West often perceived this quality of orderliness to be the best feature of their own world by comparison with what they saw as the turmoil of the West.18