Infidels: A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam

by Andrew Wheatcroft

  But their Eastern world was no more completely static than the West was rootless and in perpetual flux. An important distinction concerns the printing press. The reasons that the Eastern world did not adopt the printing press when it first became available in the fifteenth century were neither to do with willful obscurantism nor with a naïve fear of the printed word. There were other, more mundane reasons. Over many centuries, the Arabic script had proved extraordinarily successful in the East. It was used for writing Arabic, Turkish, Persian, and Hebrew. It was not, however, necessarily very well adapted to transmuting the spoken form of any of these languages into printed form. There are twenty-eight phonemes in spoken Arabic, represented by eighteen written characters. Dots were marked over and under some letters, inflecting and altering their sounds, while vowels were often not written down at all. Even when speaking in Arabic, let alone in the other tongues for which the script was used, an oral source rather than a written text was often the more reliable, especially if the speaker had memorized the words which he (or she) had heard.

  The development of the manuscript tradition in the West throughout the Middle Ages led to a certain codification of practices by scribes, but there were many variants and irregularities, and in certain areas, like the courtroom, the spoken record remained the true and accurate text. (Under some circumstances the written text is still considered to be secondary.)19 The superiority of the spoken form was acknowledged but its status was diminishing even before the age of print. With printing, conventions were gradually standardized, and variants were discarded. In fifteenth-century England, the leading printer William Caxton did much to fix the London dialect as the form for the printed book. Through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries printers progressively dropped the accidentals and variant letter forms when they could, because more letters just increased their costs, both in buying type characters and by slowing the work of the typesetters. The same processes of “refinement” took place in both French and German.

  Typesetting in Arabic posed unique problems. As Volney first observed, printing was not easy in Arabic. Jonathan Bloom has analyzed why. Arabic is essentially a cursive written language, whereas all European languages are made up of individual letters that adapted readily to typesetting words letter by letter. Also the Arabic letter forms change, depending on where in the word they appear. The creation and use of Arabic fonts in the West was not something that most commercial printers would sensibly undertake: they would need a minimum of 500 different pieces of type. The font used by Napoleon to print documents in Arabic during his invasion of Egypt in 1798 had 700 different characters. As a rough comparison, a European “Roman” typeface might contain about 250 different variants of type (uppercase, lowercase, punctuation symbols, and so on). All the early Western ventures in Italy and elsewhere to create Arabic-type fonts usually needed the support by a patron with deep pockets (such as Cardinal Ferdinando de’ Medici in 1585) who supported the venture for ideological motives or for reasons of prestige.20 One of the immediate objectives was to provide liturgical material for Eastern Christians whose language was Arabic. Rome feared they might otherwise be won over to Protestantism through printed texts in Arabic or Ottoman Turkish supplied by heretics from the Netherlands, England, Sweden, or Germany.21

  Not many books in Arabic script were produced in Europe and none could accommodate all the subtleties and flourishes of the calligraphic Arabic texts. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, they compared unfavorably with the work of a skilled copyist in the Ottoman domains. There was no shortage of those willing to enter this profession. Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli suggested that there were more than 80,000 scribes working in Constantinople in the 1680s, although his figure must have included all the numerous letter writers as well as the book copyists. It was a common saying that “the Qur’an was revealed in Mecca, recited in Egypt, and written in Istanbul.” The manner of book production in the East was normally oral: a scholar would dictate from memory to a battery of scribes. In Christendom, St. Thomas Aquinas had been renowned for dictating four books in the same session to four different secretaries, switching back and forth from secretary to secretary to keep up the pace of work.

  For the Muslim world the process was more mechanical. Perhaps a dozen copyists would inscribe the same text from a single dictation. Once it was completed, each scribe would read back what he had written down to ensure accuracy, and the scholar would certify the copy as correct. Very quickly more than a hundred copies could be produced by systematic copying and verification.22 There was also a great number of libraries in the Muslim world, initially on a far larger scale than those in the West. Many were part of mosque complexes and most of their texts were religious in nature.23 But there was also a tradition of private book collections being open to the public. There were large public libraries in the capital, but in many smaller places as well. In Jerusalem, the Khalili collection had more than 7,000 manuscripts in Arabic, while the Ragib al-Khalidi collection contained more than 10,000 works in Arabic, Turkish, and Persian when it opened to the public as the Maktubat al-Halidja early in the twentieth century.24

  In the first two centuries after Gutenberg, the benefits of print must have seemed questionable within an Eastern world that used the Arabic script. But by the end of the seventeenth century it was evident that for anything of a technical nature, the printed text had great advantages. However, the introduction of this Western innovation would trample on several powerful vested interests. The first was the scribes and clerks upon whom the entire Ottoman administration depended; and the second was the religious class, ulema, who controlled the mosques, where much of the book copying was carried out, and the majority of publicly accessible texts in their libraries. The advocates of printing were careful to take account of the objections of the ulema. The document submitted by a Transylvanian convert to Islam named Ibrahim Müteferrika in 1726 to the grand vizier stressed the many benefits of the new technique, but especially “the publication of dictionaries, histories, medical texts and science books, philosophy and astronomy books, and information about nature, geography and travelogues.” Just as telling, and despite an assertion that the “illustrious Ottoman state possesses thunderous cannons, fierce incendiaries and powerful muskets” and thus had nothing to learn from the West in the art of war, military technology was uppermost in the minds of the Ottoman government.25 For thirty years after the failure to take Vienna in 1683, the Ottomans had consistently been beaten by the Habsburg armies. They hoped to learn the military mysteries of the West out of books.

  The sultan’s permission to introduce printing in Ottoman Turkish was carefully circumscribed. It excluded all books concerning religion and law (which was part of the religious domain). These remained firmly part of the manuscript tradition. The key figure in the introduction of the Western innovation was not the humble Ibrahim Müteferrika, but a much more prominent man of the Ottoman establishment. The order was granted to the printer and to Mehmed Said Pasha, who had accompanied his father, Mehmed Pasha, on an Ottoman embassy to France. The decree was formally endorsed by the religious authorities in Constantinople, in Galata (across the Golden Horn), and Salonika, as well as by the Shaikh ul-Islam, the senior religious figure in the empire. Said Pasha financed the whole operation, importing the press itself from France, paying the skilled printers from Vienna, and acting as the patron and protector for the fledgling venture. Appropriately, Said’s portrait, painted by Jacques Aved in 1742, shows him with his hand resting on a book, in European art traditionally signifying his commitment to literature and culture.26

  Yet this first press, active for eighteen years, succeeded in printing only twenty-three books. Only one of these, the first, an Arabic dictionary translated into Ottoman Turkish, was ever reprinted. This failure was in part because the grand vizier Ibrahim, who had supported the press, was killed by the janissaries at the deposition of Sultan Ahmed III in 1730, ending the Tulip Era. A suspicion of European innovations reemerged. But the g
reater reality was that there was little demand.

  The reasons become a little clearer if we consider the matter not so much in terms of prejudice against print as in terms of permissible topics. The Ottoman administration defined these very tightly. As Volney indicated, somewhat to his disgust, religion and law were already the subject matter of the majority of manuscript books. In fifteenth-century Europe, likewise, religion and law were the most popular and successful categories in early printing, covering more than 80 percent of all titles published.27 So the Turkish printing press, producing texts in Ottoman Turkish, was left with a small segment of the market, and an insufficient volume of publications to develop the necessary network of distribution and publicity. Add to that the fact that the first books were not very appealing by contrast with the finer handwritten products. Not only were the letters relatively crude, but they were often based on North African or Levantine styles of writing that looked odd to many Turkish readers, rather as the German Gothic script looked strange and was hard to read for Westerners used to the Roman fonts. Consider these factors and the reasons for the initial failure of printing acquire a far less ideological cast.

  But was it for reasons of religious scruple that the administration prohibited the printing of religious books? I believe this too needs to be seen in a broader context. The Ottomans were not ignorant of the divisions in Europe caused by religious schism; indeed, they benefited from it in both political and economic terms. They were also aware that the printed word had been a powerful force in causing that fracture. Printing was allowed in the Christian and Jewish minorities, in their own languages, and also in Arabic script (but not in the Ottoman language). However, these were books that served the needs of their own communities and had almost no dissemination beyond them. Books in Arabic were imported from Italy, France, and the Habsburg lands, although there had been severe restraints on the trade in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The response to the printed word, even in Arabic script, was not uniform: sometimes printed books were allowed, at other times they were not permitted. The main political concern of the government seems to have been books printed in Ottoman Turkish, which was the lingua franca of the empire.

  The essence of the Ottoman Empire was control, but policy on how best to exercise this was always in a state of flux. In theory the sultan’s government controlled everything; in practice, in distant provinces, that power might be completely illusory.28 Licensed printing, under strict conditions, with the chief religious authority of the empire as head of the editorial board, was an attempt to allow development and at the same time maintain control.29 Many European governments, notably those in Catholic countries, also constantly adapted and adjusted their systems to achieve the maximum level of protection against undesirable (heretical, politically sensitive, lewd, and pornographic) material. Not, however, with uniform success.30 Governments in the West would have preferred to keep a rein on the printed word rather than allow its headlong, unfettered development. The history of the post-Reformation period contains countless examples of their attempts to tame it through censorship, persecution, or the scaffold.31

  Perhaps if printers had been allowed to produce religious and legal books in the Ottoman Empire, the industry there might have grown more rapidly. But that is not certain, given the fragility of any market for books and the lack of a system for distribution. It has been estimated that in the century between the foundation of Müteferrika’s press and the death of the great reforming sultan Mahmud II, in 1839, no more than 439 titles were published in Ottoman Turkish.32 Production increased dramatically during the nineteenth century, but ultimately no more than 20,000 titles were published before 1928, when a new, Roman alphabet was adopted by the Turkish Republic. The same tardy development of the market for books affected all areas of the Ottoman domain in Europe, and indeed the Slav and Hellenic communities on its fringes.33

  Müteferrika’s first titles had been strange hybrids. They imitated the binding and appearance of the Islamic manuscript tradition, but unlike most Muslim books, some of them were illustrated. The second publication, an account translated from a Jesuit’s text about a bloody revolt in Afghanistan, had engravings, and the third, a history of the West Indies and a collection of fables, was fully illustrated. One of the stories had a picture of a tree that bore women as its fruit, who fell to the ground as they ripened, shouting “wak wak.” According to Abbé Giambattista Toderini, who published his huge history of Turkish literature and music in 1787, these figures became so popular that they were copied and displayed in official festivals, as the spectators shouted “wak wak.” Yet despite this suggestion of public interest, it is impossible to consider the venture successful. One thousand copies was an average print run and the volumes were expensive.

  It was not Gutenberg’s type but Alois Senefelder’s invention of lithography in 1798 that made possible a mass market for the printed word in Arabic script.34 Letterpress had improved as new Arabic fonts were produced. A large printing works was set up by Mehmed Ali Pasha, the ruler of Egypt, at Bulaq in the suburbs of Cairo in 1815.35 Other printers were established in Constantinople, and on the Asian shore at Uskudar (Scutari). But the basic problems of Arabic typesetting had not altered. It was only with lithography that the limitations inherent in Gutenberg’s type vanished. With lithographic printing, instead of laboriously assembling type, a calligrapher’s handwritten text could be printed exactly as written. Illustrations could be drawn on transfer sheets or directly onto the surface of the carefully ground printing stones. The resulting quality was impressive, and even a selection of colors could be used. The first lithographic book in Ottoman Turkish was printed not in Istanbul but in Paris, by T. X. Bianchi in 1817. The first lithographic press in the Ottoman Empire arrived in Constantinople about 1830. It was set up in the grounds of the Ministry of War, under the patronage of Khusrev Pasha, by two well-known French printers from Marseilles, Henri and Jacques Cayol. Their patron’s own book, complete with seventy-nine images, was their first publication in 1831.36

  By the mid–nineteenth century the lithographic process, which had in the early days required considerable skill to prepare the stones and to print accurately, was mechanized, and zinc plates rather than lithographic stones were increasingly used. An Ottoman magazine industry flourished from the late 1860s with a circulation throughout the empire. Thus, by the accession of Sultan Abdul Hamid II in 1876, the Ottoman world possessed newspapers, magazines, printing, and photography, different only in their extent from the Western world. These were the emblems of modernity and of the city, in a society that remained largely rural, illiterate, conservative, and resolutely resistant to change.37

  so THE “BLACK ART”—LETTERPRESS PRINTING—CAME LATE TO THE Ottoman world. In the West it had gained this nickname because printing was a grimy business and printers were always spattered with ink. But the phrase means something else as well. In the West, with rare and precious exceptions, a printed book would be printed in black ink on white paper or on parchment. Images too would normally be printed in black. In certain books, such as Bibles or service books, some letters or sentences might be printed in red, “rubricated.” The English phrase “a red-letter day” comes from the practice of highlighting church feasts and holidays in red print in the Book of Common Prayer. But until the general use of color in printing late in the nineteenth century, even prestigious and costly printed books were more usually a monochrome experience. In the older manuscript tradition, of course, a book might include illuminations and decorations in a multitude of colors, but the domain of color after the “Gutenberg revolution” had been yielded to painters and miniaturists. In the East, by contrast, books continued to be embellished. Book decorators and illuminators were prized at the Ottoman, Persian, and Moghul courts, and it was almost unthinkable for a fine book not to be enriched with color. Many were enhanced with the depiction of human and animal forms, supposed by Westerners to be universally anathematized within the world of Mediterranean Isla
m.

  But it is also true that nowhere in the Ottoman domains—not even in Mehmed Ali’s aggressively modernizing Cairo—was there anything similar to the slow percolation of the printed image into a largely preliterate society that took place in the West. In the “well-protected domain” of the Ottomans, until the mid–nineteenth century, in the cities and towns there were no religious pictures, few portraits or cartoons, and, in fact, a paucity of secular images of any sort. In the countryside, among the poor and illiterate, there were none at all.

  For many Muslims, a visual image made by a human hand was something completely abstract and unknown. A picture was simply a category of evil like the devil himself. It was irreligious, an innovation, to be shunned and avoided. Culture formed around the spoken word, which translated the glories of nature not into an image but into poetry. The world of Islam did not share the iconic awareness common throughout the West, where images were part of the culture that developed in every European nation. Even those ascetic Protestants who defaced sculptures in churches, and ground the images of saints, martyrs, and the holy Virgin underfoot, usually accepted pictures in the secular domain. At the very least, they knew what images were. The situation in the Muslim East was quite different. Brinkley Messick has coined the redolent phrase “the calligraphic state” to describe a society (in Yemen) that existed without images and was ruled by the written word.38 His concept was founded on the power and importance of script in the Arabic tradition. But the written word in that tradition was itself but a shadow of the spoken word. The human voice was more potent than any form of writing, extended as it was by body language, vocal tone and inflection, and even by an audience’s energizing presence.39 The essence of Islam was a recitation (qur’an), carried over into a book (kitab). And that book might not even be a physical text, but a book that existed only in the mind.40 Texts written in Arabic were suffused with something of this divine book, but even a sacralized script could only imperfectly express its ineffable oral grandeur.