Infidels: A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam

by Andrew Wheatcroft

  Printed images had no public place in this world. They were at most for private enjoyment by the sophisticated few. Esin Atil has described the evolution of the imperial studio (nakkashane) that produced illustrated books.41 In this studio some artists specialized in calligraphy, especially in the elaborate imperial signatures, or tughra. The portrait painters, because of their skill in depicting the human form, were an essential but more marginal and exclusive group within the studio and among its freelance workers. There were many artists working privately in the capital, but few who declared themselves as painters of portraits, in part certainly because of the opprobrium this activity might attract. What was appropriate for the sultan was more risky for the individual artist or collector. Some sultans from Mehmed the Conqueror onward both commissioned books full of images and amassed other illustrated books from a variety of sources. They were all stored with other treasures for the private use of the sultan in the Inner Treasury of the Topkapi Palace.

  The production of these works in the sixteenth century, notably the histories, was an act of state, dramatizing the course of Ottoman history and the successes of Ottoman arms under the sultans. They therefore depicted both Muslims and non-Muslims, but there appears much less of the hostility that dominates many Western images of the infidel. In, for example, Lokman’s Hunername, the Westerners are shown as ordinary human figures. On one page they appear very bored, some playing dice, a few firing their cannon at the Ottoman armies, and one man (improbably) asleep against an artillery piece. None of them are especially vicious images.42 This does not, of course, say anything about popular attitudes, since these images would be seen only by the privileged few.43 But such a presentation in a state document was obviously both appropriate and acceptable to the imperial patron. The Westerners might be ritually reviled in word or in writing, but they were depicted merely as objects of curiosity.

  Magnificently decorated Qur’ans are common but it is impossible to conceive of a Qur’an with images in the way that there were numerous pictorial Bibles.44 Images with a human face or an animal form played, at most, a marginal part in the formation of Muslim culture. To the majority of Muslims, beyond the small groups of urban sophisticates, images were incomprehensible. The closest I can come to understanding this experience is the situation described by the writer Albert Manguel in his enticing book A History of Reading. Manguel relates how in 1978 he was working for a publisher in Milan. One day a package arrived.

  It contained, instead of a manuscript, a large collection of illustrated pages, depicting a number of strange objects and detailed but bizarre operations each captioned in a script none of the editors recognized … Made entirely of invented words and pictures, the Codex Seraphianus [after its author, Luigi Serafini] must be read without the help of a common language, through signs for which there are no meanings except those furnished by a willing and inventive reader.45

  Intrigued, I went to the British Library to see for myself a copy of this odd work. It is in a handsome black cloth binding, and its pages are illuminated like a medieval manuscript. I quickly realized that its meaning to me would be only what I brought to it. The script was indecipherable, but to a degree I could make contact with the images—some of them had bits and pieces within them that I recognized. But there was no way of knowing what the pages really meant, and after half an hour, I gave up. This collision with the incomprehensible is how people living in a world without images respond when first confronted with pictures. It is a new language that has to be learned.

  There is a never-ending debate among scholars about the language and meaning of images. Some perceive them as one element in some vast structure of signs, others as a map of “multimodal texts, vectors and forces.” At the other extremity, images become discrete and powerful entities with a life of their own, “icontexts.”46 Relating the theories to the real world is not easy, especially since images printed in books and other publications are often ignored. Unlike works of art or even artists’ prints, they do not stand alone. They are bound in with the words around them. And just as the words that make up the written text have to be learned or deciphered, so too the images have to be understood.47 But as with the Codex Seraphianus, understanding what an image means is virtually impossible if nothing about it is recognizable. Images remained an unfamiliar, alien presence in the Muslim world before (at the earliest) the eighteenth century. In practice it was not until the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries that they became more commonplace, even in the major cities. For this reason most of the theories produced in the West concerning the nature of images do not seem to have much obvious relevance to the Islamic condition.

  Over many centuries Western (and Eastern) Christians had become adept at understanding figurative images made by a human hand. They were instructed that a statue of a saint had special qualities relating to the saint’s life and story, that a golden reliquary enclosing a withered hand or a bejeweled skull was a holy relic and had meaning. They were taught how to read the image or object by seeing it. Those same visual skills of interpretation were later employed in literacy, in learning to read the written texts.48 The Protestant iconoclasts of the sixteenth century rarely abominated images in an absolute sense: the biblical commandment “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image” meant for them the ungodly worship of images.49 Nowhere in the world of Islam were painted or printed images as common as they were in the Christian world. Muslims, the literate and the nonliterate alike, lived among voices. They learned by hearing, recitation, and repetition. Knowledge was transmitted through the spoken voice, which was more resonant and truthful than mute words printed on a page.50 It was a culture in which the printed image (of animals and human beings) had none of the educational role that it did in the Christian world. Children were not taught to read using visual images, but through recitation and through deciphering a written text.51

  However, the contrast between the two worlds—the West with images and the East without—was not truly absolute: a range of public depictions did exist in the Islamic world and were widely used. As d’Ohsson observed, while Muslims themselves made no coins that bore human images, they were happy to use Western money that did. The silver thaler of Maria Theresa and later the British gold sovereign with the head of Queen Victoria became the trusted common currencies throughout the Arabian peninsula. But nonetheless they belonged to the distant, alien, and infidel outside world.

  It was not until after the development of photography in the nineteenth century that human and animal images entered the Muslim domain more generally. Thereafter, while purists might still anathematize any image that showed a human or animal figure, photography cut away many religious objections. It was argued that creating a photograph was not a human act, but God’s light acting upon an emulsion to make the image. This also opened the way to the acceptance of printed but non-photographic images, for from the mid–nineteenth century photography began to be used for making lithographic plates. By the same logic, etching, aquatint, and mezzotint, all processes that used chemical action to make an image, could also be treated more permissively. Engraving could also be explained away in the same fashion, because blocks were increasingly produced mechanically or chemically.

  The same principles of exception later extended to both film and television. By the last decade of the twentieth century the Muslim realm had adapted to a world where depiction and the image of human forms were normal. Only the most purblind, austere, and narrow-minded continued to abominate all visual images, whether made by human art or God’s divine light. In the 1920s King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia had shocked his ikhwan (brotherhood of warriors) by having his photograph taken. This defender of the holy places of Islam, king of the Hijaz and future king of Saudi Arabia, paid no attention to their protestations, any more than to their fevered objections about cars and airplanes. It was relatively easy for a king to follow his own inclinations, but millions of ordinary Muslims did the same.

  I HAVE INCREASINGL
Y COME TO THE CONCLUSION THAT ATTEMPTING codification of the differences between East and West (while they might have the solid sanction of holy writ) cannot correspond to the quotidian realities of life. Very few, in the East or in the West, in the past as in the present, voluntarily lived or live their lives wholly according to the holy books and the laws. Most people spent their days in conformity to the mores of their own group and community.52 At the interface, where the two worlds collide, problems occur. In one particular context, international commerce, you may observe eminent Western visitors to the East becoming frustrated at the different pace at which business is done. But equally, senior figures from the East can feel discomforted by the pell-mell of meetings in some Western countries: that characteristic phrase “cut to the chase,” taken from Western movie culture, dramatizes the difference. For some, what comes before the main event is only an insignificant prelude; for others, the main event is only part of the whole complex of customs and courtesies. This temporal shift, between an event that can be “cut” and one that cannot, I think, begins to get to the heart of difference.

  There is clock time and there is human time. Gerhard Dohrn–van Rossum has shown how the West became progressively dominated by clock time. By the nineteenth century, one French minister of education could boast that he knew precisely what any school pupil in France would be studying at any hour of the school day.53 In the East, clock time was more controversial. Sultan Murad III, like his ancestor Mehmed the Conqueror, was curious about Western mechanical clocks. Murad’s astronomer and chief astrologer set up an observatory in the capital and wrote the first handbook on mechanical clocks in the empire. In 1561, he made a clock that showed the times of prayer, an instrument eventually destroyed because it was considered to be an infidel device seeking to replace the muezzin and the power of the human voice. Like the printing press, clock time has had a checkered and complex history in the East.

  My great-uncle Otto Veit once had a watch that he had bought in the grand bazaar of Constantinople when he traveled there from Vienna in the years before the First World War. I remember it showed the different times that were used under the Ottoman Empire. One dial showed mosque time (hijri), one dial had time used in government and business offices (mali), and a third showed Western time (alafranga). He told me that he had bought it after he had missed appointments because those he was supposed to meet were using one time and he was using another. I subsequently read of an earlier traveler who had the same problem:

  The time will be given in Turkish fashion, which begins to count at sundown, and goes on for the whole twenty-four hours, so in the middle of the afternoon one may be told it is exactly 17 o’clock. Then as the sun does not have the politeness to set every day at the same time, it is necessary to carry an almanack in one’s head to reduce the Turkish time to English.54

  The issues discussed in this chapter all come down to timing. In the twenty-first century, the West and the East now share many of the same goods and commodities, and especially radio, television, movies, and the Internet, as well as books, magazines, and newspapers. But these did not come into use at the same time. There was a lag, with the West developing new modes of communication, and the East adopting them later. It was four centuries before images and the printed word became as common in the Muslim East as they were in the West. With film, radio, and television it was a matter of decades; with the Internet, less than five years. But that long delay in accepting the printing revolution had profound consequences. It meant that Eastern time scales and Western time scales were not identical, and like my great-uncle in need of the watch, we need a means to relate the two.

  The argument of this book is that both the Christian infidels and the Muslim infidels have regarded each other with suspicion throughout their long connection. Each routinely cursed and abominated the other, which is only to be expected. But the malediction has not been of quite the same kind. Certainly from the invention of printing, and through the proliferation of images, the West’s maledicta have been infinitely more potent and widespread. But now, as the clock moves on, the East has learned the lesson. “Islam” uses the printing press and visual and electronic media with the same skill and sophistication as the West. And it has also learned how these new techniques can now carry the East’s maledicta, farther and more potently than the scribe’s pen.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Maledicta

  WORDS OF HATE

  THE TWO OPPOSING SIDES AT LEPANTO IN 1571 SHOUTED TO EACH other from the galley decks. We can deduce a few things about that exchange. Although the crews and soldiers might not have the language spoken by the enemy, provided they could hear the sounds of speech above the din of battle, their minds would have attempted to make what was said intelligible. Human physiology dictates that the brain cannot choose not to process what it hears as sound. David Crystal puts it, “When we hear sounds, we hear them as speech, or non speech: there seems to be no middle ground. No matter how hard we try, we cannot hear speech as a series of acoustic hisses and buzzes, but only as a sequence of speech sounds.”1

  Curses, maledictions, insults, and invocations of divine aid against the hated enemy were what both Christians and Muslims would have expected in such an extreme context. But the process of understanding what was being said even in the midst of battle was little different from what happened in the mixed communities around the Mediterranean on a daily basis over many centuries. In everyday encounters, the human brain would process all speech sounds. Face-to-face, gesture and body language could be read even if the words were unintelligible. Mistakes might be made, but it was usually easy to determine from the circumstances whether the speaker’s intention was friendly or hostile. The first channel of understanding—interpreting the sounds—is involuntary; only by physically blocking off the sound can this be prevented. The second channel—attributing meaning to those sounds—is, I suggest, in part a conditioned reflex based on past experience and in part a reasoned assessment of the current situation. For example, an insult or a coarse suggestion shouted across the street is usually clear as to its intention. Such an interchange exists below the level of understanding what the words mean. The hearer does not need to master the exact meaning of the words to know that they are not compliments. In his novel Bosnian Chronicle, Ivo Andrić presented precisely such a situation. At one point in his story, set in the Bosnia of 1804, a new French consul, Jean Daville, rides with his escort through the streets of Travnik to meet its Ottoman pasha:

  Then as soon as they reached the first Turkish houses, they began to hear curious sounds: people calling to one another, slamming their courtyard gates and the shutters of their windows. At the very first doorway a small girl opened one of the double gates a crack, and muttering some incomprehensible words began spitting rapidly, as though she were laying a curse upon them. One after the other, gates opened and shutters were raised to reveal for a moment faces possessed with a fanatical hatred. The women, veiled, spat or cursed, and the boys shouted abuse, accompanied by obscene gestures and unambiguous threats, clapping their buttocks or drawing their hands across their throats … Daville saw them dimly, as though through an unpleasant veil trembling in front of his eyes. No one ceased working or smoking or raised his eyes to honour the unusual figure with so much as a glance … Only Easterners can hate and despise others to such an extent and display their hatred and contempt in such a way.2

  Daville knew hate when he heard and saw it. (Would he have been more, or less, affronted had he understood what the women were shouting at him? He might have been able to respond effectively in kind; but on the other hand, the insult might have been even more mordant.) The insults got through, penetrating the armor of incomprehension.

  Words of hate, like words of love, have a strong sense of intention.3 The Christian and Muslim worlds have been religious, geographical, political, and economic rivals and competitors since their point of first contact, and it is no wonder that words of hate rather than words of love have predominat
ed when one world evoked the image of the other. But thereafter, the process and consequence of evoking that image diverge. How was hostility formed out of two contrary experiences of life? The first was, and remains in some areas, that of living side by side. The second was when the object of hatred was never experienced directly, but was nonetheless terrifying. This was largely how the image of the lustful Saracen or the terrible Turk was formulated in the West by scholars who never lifted their eyes from the pages of their texts. Living in close proximity might give a human dimension to the Other. Lack of contact might allow the formation of Romantic notions, which infused many genres in literature and the visual arts. But the outcome was not necessarily predetermined by the context.

  Maledicta exist everywhere. Many people use them, but normally in a private or restricted context. Their significance is defined by where and to whom they are addressed. Everyone will talk to their friends and peers in a language that they would not use publicly—to their parents, their boss, or other figures of respect. But when private speech becomes public knowledge, its significance shifts.4 The power of curses and abuse is directly related to this resonance and since the invention of print, the boundaries between the private and the public contexts have slowly diminished. There is an important distinction: words spoken inside a family, in an isolated village, are functionally (if not philosophically or theologically) different from the same words published in newspapers or broadcast worldwide on television and radio.