29. A modern analogy is the way in which the People’s Republic of China has (as of 2002) modernized its publishing industry while at the same time maintaining government supervision. I owe this analogy to a number of my Chinese students, notably Xiaoyang Chen, whose help I gratefully acknowledge on this topic.
30. See Daniel Roche, “Censorship and the Publishing Industry,” in Darnton and Roche (eds.), Revolution in Print, pp. 3–28, and Jean-Pierre Levandier, Le livre au temps de Marie-Thérèse: Code des lois de censure pour les pays Austro-Bohémiens (1740–1780) (Berne: Peter Lang, 1993), and Le livre au temps de Joseph II et de Léopold II: Code des lois de censure pour les pays Austro-Bohémiens (1780–1792), Berne: Peter Lang, 1995.
31. Marie-Elisabeth Ducreux’s frightening narrative of how Jiri Janda, a Czech peasant, was executed for reading a forbidden book shows that the printed word was still reckoned as a deadly threat in the Habsburg domains in 1761; see “ ‘Reading unto Death’: Books and Readers in Eighteenth-Century Bohemia,” in Chartier (ed.), Culture of Print, pp. 191–229.
32. Klaus Kreiser citing Jale Baysal, Müteferrika’dan Birinci Mesrutiyet’e kadar Osmanli Türklerinin bastiklan kitaplar (Istanbul: Univertesi Edebiyat Facültesi, 1968), in Lehrstuhl, Beginnings, pp. 15–16.
33. Although there were few books, printed religious images played an important role in the Christian communities in the Balkans. Religious images were a strong focus of Christian belief. The devout would brave the perils of travel to visit a monastery and see its icons. Famous icons had long been copied in monasteries, and simple woodblocks of these were produced and sold to the faithful. But by the eighteenth century, much more elaborate work emerged. Skilled monks in the Orthodox monasteries of Mount Athos and Mount Sinai engraved plates for printing, or sometimes drew master copies of the holy images. These would be sent to Vienna, Warsaw, Moscow, or Rome, where local Greeks would pay for their reproduction. Some of the images were obviously produced for a predominantly Slav audience because they bore both Slavic and Greek captions. The printed sheets would be returned to the monasteries, where they were given to traveling monks, who distributed them to the Orthodox faithful in villages throughout the Balkans. Catholic religious texts and pictures circulated widely in the Catholic districts. By these means—word of mouth, written texts, and visual images—the Christians of the Balkans preserved their sense of social and religious identity under Ottoman rule. Details are taken from the exhibition notes for “Orthodox Religious Engravings 18th and 19th Centuries” at the University of Toronto Art Centre, and from the records of the Hellenic Ministry of Culture on Athonite paper icons, www.culture.gr/2/21/218/218ad/e218adoo. A study of books published in Greek between 1749 and 1821 suggests that only about 7 percent were bought by Greek speakers within the lands that eventually formed the independent Greek state. Most of these works were prepared for a highly literate audience, and although there were schools on Patmos and Chios, in the large Greek community of Smyrna, as well as on Mount Athos and in Thessaly, there were not many readers in the southern Greek lands. See Philipos Iliou, “Pour une étude quantitative du public des lecteurs grecs à l’époque des lumières et de la révolution,” in Association d’études du sud-est Européen IV (Sofia: 1969), pp. 475–80, cited by Peter Mack-ridge, “The Greek Intelligentsia 1780–1830: A Balkan Perspective,” in Clogg (ed.), Balkan Society, pp. 68–9.
34. There was a subculture of printed books from the outside world even before local printing got under way. In the Ottoman lands Christians and Jews had access to imported liturgical texts printed in Arabic from an early date. A Greek Orthodox metropolitan established the printing house that printed in Arabic script in Aleppo in 1707. A generation later the Maronite monastery at Al-Shuwayr in Lebanon began to print books for their community. Printing religious books in the Armenian script began in Constantinople, also in the 1730s. But all this activity was invisible to the majority Muslim population, which had no interest in the liturgical texts of other faiths. The Christian and Jewish printers were careful to do nothing to anger the Ottoman authorities by printing work of a more contentious nature. But Armenian commercial printers, who until the nineteenth century were printing in a script incomprehensible to Arabic readers, by then had the equipment and the skills to take a major role in the general printing market. The best studies of Ottoman lithography still remain two short pamphlets. One is Grégoire Zellich, Notice historique sur la lithographie et sur les origines de son introduction en Constantinople, Impr. A. Zellich Fils, 1895. Anton Zellich, the author’s father, was a Croat printer from Dalmatia, who began work with the Cayols in 1840, and set up on his own account in 1869. The other is Nüzhet Gerçek’s Türk tas basmaciliği (Istanbul: Devlet Bashimevi, 1939), which is useful because he had access to the library of the Cayols’ patron Khusrev Pasha’s library at Eyub, which contained many examples of their early lithographic work in the Ottoman Empire.
35. Mehmed Ali had sent Nikola Masabki to Italy in about 1811 to learn the craft of printing. He set up the new government press at Bulaq, with Arabic and Persian fonts. The development of printing in the Middle East (and Masabki’s visit to Milan) has now been covered comprehensively in an important work of collective scholarship edited by Eva Hanebutt-Benz, Dagmar Glass, and Geoffrey Roper: Middle Eastern Languages and the Print Revolution: A Cross-Cultural Encounter, Westhofen: WVA–Verlag Skulima, 2002.
36. On the Cayols, see Johann Strauss, “Le livre Français d’Istanbul (1730–1908),” in Hitzel (ed.), Livres, pp. 276–301.
37. Women’s magazines were especially successful, and some included engravings and (after 1908) photographs of fashionable women. See Kadin Eserleri Kütuphanesi, Bibliografiya Olushturma Komisyonu, Istanbul; Kütüphanelerindeki eski harfli Türkçe kadin dergileri bibliyografyasi (1869–1927), Istanbul: Metis Yainlari, 1993.
38. See Messick, Calligraphic State.
39. This oral system also constituted a very active (and controlling) form of the interpretative community proposed by Stanley Fish. There was much less of the individual forming his or her own singular ideas, as Kevin Sharpe describes in his study of the reading habits of Sir William Drake in seventeenth-century England. As Sharpe put it, Drake “constituted himself … as a thinking and feeling entity, an ego, a ‘conscious self,’ and as an entity to be so conceived; and he did so through writing and reading.” In the “calligraphic state,” texts were formed communally and more often than not reinforced collective views. Other ways of reading came later, with the greater profusion of printed texts. See Stanley Eugene Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), and Kevin Sharpe, Reading Revolutions: The Politics of Reading in Early Modern England, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000, p. 340.
40. I find Madigan’s The Qur’an’s Self-Image very persuasive on this topic.
41. See Esin Atil, “The Art of the Book,” in Esin Atil (ed.), Turkish Art, Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1980, pp. 138–238. This remains an essential introduction, but much work has been done in the last twenty years. Many of these books were state art, and the collective volume The Sultan’s Portrait: Picturing the House of Osman (Istanbul: Isbank, 2000) has contributions by all the main specialists in the field.
42. See The Rescue of Nigbolu by Sultan Bayezid, in Lokman, Hunername, vol. 1, 1584–85, Istanbul: Topkapi Saray H. 1523. fol. 108b.
43. Private citizens also commissioned pictorial art but, like the ruler, kept it out of sight.
44. De Hamel, The Book.
45. See Manguel, History, p. 95.
46. For “vectors and forces,” see Kress and Van Leeuwen, Reading Images. For “icontexts,” see Alain Montandon (ed.), Icontextes (Paris: Ophrys, 1990), and Peter Wagner, Reading Icontexts.
47. James Elkins writes of a Renaissance engraving that it “evokes writing, it has the feeling of writing, or language, not because of some nebulous or unrecognised habits of seeing, but on account of a
dozen or so specific qualities that are also shared by writing.” The engraving (from a picture by Mantegna) “is an image that evokes pictures as it evokes writing … Whatever narrative we might want to see here will be the result of a certain reading of the relation of signs.” See Elkins, On Pictures, pp. 160–61.
48. See Gilbert, Reading Images.
49. On the use of images in Protestant propaganda, the work of R. W. Scribner is the basic source. See, especially, Scribner, For the Sake.
50. See Madigan, The Qur’an’s Self-Image.
51. A very good description of this process of learning a language of faith, Arabic, in a culture where the national script is Roman, can be found in Baker, “Presence,” pp. 102–22.
52. See Fabian, Time and the Other.
53. See Gerhard Dohrn-van Rossum, History of the Hour: Clocks and Modern Temporal Order, trans. Thomas Dunlap, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996, pp. 251–8.
54. See Henry C. Barkley, Bulgaria Before the War During Seven Years’ Experience of European Turkey and Its Inhabitants, London: John Murray, 1877, p. 181.
CHAPTER 14: MALEDICTA: WORDS OF HATE
1. David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Language, 2nd ed., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, p. 145.
2. Ivo Andrić, Bosnian Chronicle, or The Days of the Consuls, trans. Celia Hawkesworth, London: Harvill Press, 1996, pp. 20–21.
3. The act of speaking is described by linguists as possessing three phases. All speech is a dialogue, even if you are listening only with your own interior voice. The first “speech act” is a locution: something is being said. The second is the intention that may be embedded in the utterance. This is described as the illocution. The third is the consequence that the locution has on the hearer, or perlocution. So, a statement like “Go to the devil” has a clear illocutionary force; it is unlikely that the listener will oblige. The perlocutionary outcome might more likely be anger, contempt, or amusement. The relationship between illocution and perlocution is uncertain and unstable. Moreover, even if the exact verbal content of the speech act is not understood, the same process of communication applies.
4. The Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin (writing with V. N. Volosinov) described “spreading ripples of verbal responses and resonances around each and every ideological sign.” See Pam Morris (ed.), The Bakhtin Reader: Selected Writings of Bakhtin, Medvedev, Volosinov, London: Arnold, 1994, p. 52. There is an animated debate as to whether Bakhtin or Volosinov wrote this, or whether both were involved. For the sake of clarity, I have put Bakhtin’s role first.
5. The italics are my addition, for clarity. See Michael Holquist’s paraphrase of Bakhtin in Dialogism: Bakhtin and His World, 2nd ed., London: Routledge, 2002, pp. 21–2. The fable is explained at greater length in Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist, Mikhail Bakhtin, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984, pp. 68–9.
6. Bakhtin, despite his preoccupation with Dostoyevsky and Rabelais, always regarded himself not as a literary critic but following a line of thought in Kant, as a “philosophical anthropologist.” This seems to me to express very well his preoccupation with the world as perceived, and not the remote fastnesses of theory. See Clark and Holquist, Mikhail Bakhtin, pp. 277–8. “Enemies in the mirror” is the central theme of Ron Barkai’s remarkable Cristianos y Musulmanes en la España medieval: El enemigo en el espejo, Madrid: Rialp, 1984.
7. This “never-meeting” is also a central theme of both E. M. Forster’s novel A Passage to India (1924) and of Paul Scott’s novel sequence The Raj Quartet (1966–74). But both suggest that “never-meeting,” although replete with dangers of violence, does not inevitably lead to hatred.
8. Morris, The Bakhtin Reader, pp. 86–9, quoting Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, ed. V. W. McGee, trans. C. Emerson and M. Holquist, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1986.
9. This is the subtitle of a valuable study by Keith Allen and Kate Burridge, Euphemism and Dysphemism: Language Used as Shield and Weapon, New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. I am grateful to Dr. Judy Delin for drawing my attention to this approach.
10. These are terms used in the contemporary Middle East. In 1983 Israeli general Rafael Eitan famously described the Palestinians as drugged cockroaches. More recently another senior figure, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, called Palestinians snakes. More recently still (1997) a senior Palestinian mufti, Ikrama Sabri, described Israeli settlers in the West Bank lands as sons of monkeys and pigs. An Iraqi official, Izzat Ibrahim, used the same terminology in August 2001. For Eitan and Yosef, see American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, news update, message ID mvki2$jkv$1atnnrpl.deja.com, August 11, 2001. For Sabri, see Jay Bushinsky, Jerusalem Post, July 14, 1997. For Ibrahim, see Irish Times, April 2, 2002. For pariah communalism, see Ernest Gellner, Language and Solitude: Wittgenstein, Malinowski and the Habsburg Dilemma, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. 100–106.
11. We should not forget that in Rwanda (central Africa) it was Radio and Television of the Thousand Hills (Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines)—RTLM—that promoted the idea that the Tutsi caste were “cockroaches” (inyenzi). This message contributed powerfully to the subsequent genocide, the most disgusting of the twentieth century, post 1945. See Linda Malvern, A People Betrayed: The Role of the West in Rwanda’s genocide, London: Zed, 2000.
12. Speech, Reichstag, December 5, 1876.
13. The genesis of this book lay in three lectures given in Vienna in 1999, and other material dating from 1995, 1992, 1980, and 1998. This perhaps accounts for the slightly dated nature of much of the material. Of 116 references, fewer than five date from work published later than the mid-1990s, at a time when there has been intense and productive scholarly activity, illuminating many of the areas with which Lewis concerns himself.
This is a short book—the text no more than 157 pages—but its influence has been out of all proportion to its length. Its propositions are often bizarrely idiosyncratic. Lengthy examples of what went wrong include the Middle East’s failure to adopt Western music, highly significant to Lewis because it required combined and unified action by different performers. This produced a “result that is greater than the sum of the parts.” From this, he says much follows. “With a little imagination one may discern the same feature in other aspects of Western culture—in democratic politics, and in team games, both of which require the cooperation, in harmony if not in unison, of different performers playing different parts for a common purpose. In parliamentary politics and team games, there is a further cooperation in conflict—rival teams striving to defeat their opponents but nevertheless acting under an agreed set of rules, and in an agreed interval of time. One may also detect the same feature in two distinctly Western literary creations, the novel and the theatre.”
The nub of the issue is that “polyphony, in whatever form, requires exact synchronisation. The ability to synchronise, to match times exactly, and for this purpose to measure times exactly, is an essential feature of modernity and therefore a requirement of modernisation.” Unpunctuality has nullified many of the bright prospects in the East. What Went Wrong, pp. 128–9.
There are examples of a Middle Eastern “faltering of cultural self-confidence” in admitting Western innovations into the centrality of Islamic culture. However, his fundamental premises keep shifting back and forth. Where on page 136 the East has failed to adopt the novel and theater, eleven pages on we learn that “the European forms of literature—the novel, the short story, the play and the rest—are now completely adopted and absorbed. Great numbers of original writings of this type are being produced in all these countries and more than that, become the normal forms of self expression.” But unexpectedly this is not evidence of progress and modernization, but of a further “faltering of cultural self confidence.” “Some modern writing in Middle-eastern languages … reads like a literal translation from English or French.” In sports, too, the Arab Middle East falters. “It was the English who invented football and it
s analogue—parliamentary politics.” There are, he tells us, “remarkable resemblances between the two and both stem come from the same national genius” (p. 150).
14. John Adamson, Sunday Telegraph, May 25, 2003. His review concluded: “President Bush may let slip the C-word in his press conferences, but what is at stake in the current conflict is something far more pervasive in its implications than the religious feuds that fed the binary hatreds of old.”
15. One of the first books printed by Ibrahim Müteferrika in Constantinople was entitled Rational Bases for the Polities of Nations (1731). It described the various forms of government practiced in Europe, and in particular the popular representation that underpinned the Dutch and English polities. Yet Müteferrika held the common view that the success of the Western nations lay in their military strength: it answered his question “Why do Christian nations, which were so weak in the past compared with Muslim nations, begin to dominate so many lands in modern times and even defeat the once victorious Ottoman armies?” Cited in Niyazi Berkes, The Development of Secularism in Turkey, New York: Routledge, 1998, pp. 42–3. The Ottomans engaged in what Dankwart Rustow neatly terms “defensive modernization”: see Rustow in P. M. Holt, Ann K. S. Lambton, and Bernard Lewis, The Cambridge History of Islam, vol. 1, Cambridge, 1970, pp. 676–86.
Infidels: A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam Page 53
