1. The Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin, writing with V. N. Volosinov in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution of 1917, looked at the emblems of their own day. A hammer and a sickle were just tools. But put them together, and they become a symbol, the insignia of the nascent Soviet Union. “Any consumer good,” Bakhtin and Volosinov observed, “can likewise be made into an ideological sign. For instance, bread and wine become religious symbols in the Christian sacrament.” There is a long-running debate as to whether this was written by Volosinov or by Mikhail Bakhtin under Volosinov’s name, or by them jointly. I have given them both credit. See Morris (ed.), Bakhtin Reader, p. 50.
2. It was first published in a large Latin folio at Basel in 1559, and in English in 1563. It went through four editions in Foxe’s lifetime: there was a corrected edition in 1570 and two more in 1576 and 1583. Six further editions appeared in 1596, 1610, 1632, 1641, 1684, and 1784. Further versions came out in 1837–41 and 1877, growing larger and more weighty. The edition of 1684 was published in three folio volumes of 895, 682, and 863 pages.
3. Impalement was a significant and evolving trope in Western depictions of the Muslim East. Impalement is a dominant visual element in Lamenta et ultima disperatione di Selim Gran Turco … Venice, 1575: see “Ahmad I and the Allegories of Tyranny in the Frontispiece to George Sandy’s Relation of a Journey Anno. Dom. 1610,” in Muqarnas: An Annual on the Visual Culture of the Islamic World, ed. Gülrü Necipoğlu, Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2001, p. 208. Later, in Jean de Thévenot, Voyages de M. de Thévenot tant en Europe qu’en Asie et en Afrique (Paris: Charles Angot, 1689), vol. 2, there is an image of impalement in Ottoman Egypt. It depicts an Arab on a camel with burning brands strapped to his arms (so that boiling fat would drip down and burn his skin). In the background are two pyramids, and in front of these two impaled men, one smoking a pipe. The text in chapter LXXIX, “The Punishments,” criticized Egypt. However, in the Dutch edition of 1723, illustrated by Jan Luyken, the image is changed. It now depicts a European or Anatolian setting (the dominant camel has vanished and the extraordinarily brutal visual details of the impalement appear in the foreground). See Alle de gedenkwaardige en zeer naauwkeurige reizen van den heere de Thevenot, trans. G. van Broekhuizen, 2nd impression, Amsterdam: N. ten Hoorn, 1723, p. 441.
4. The image is in Les chroniques de France ou de St. Denis, British Library, MS Roy, 16 G VI. f. 412.
5. See the cartouche in window 11, of the Saracens climbing the walls of Assisi, reproduced in Marcel Beck, Peter Felder, Emil Maurer, and Dietrich Schearz, Königsfelden: Geschichte, Bauten, Glasgemälde, Kunstschätze, Freiburg im Breisgau: Walter-Verlag, 1983.
6. A fifteenth-century French image distinguished Arabs from Crusaders by presenting the former as half-naked savages. The image is in Les chroniques de France ou de St. Denis, British Library, MS Add. 21143. f. 90.
7. As can be seen in the crest of the medieval Lords Audley, whose ancestors came to England with William the Conqueror in 1066. Their arms, in the quaint language of heraldry, consisted of an arm couped at the shoulder, embowed, and resting the elbow on the wreath, holding a sword in pale, enfiled with a Saracen’s head. The crest depicts a hand holding a sword on which is spiked the head of a bearded man of “Eastern” appearance. The motto given below the crest, Mors ad inimicum (death to the oppressor), makes the point clear.
8. A. W. Kinglake, Eothen, London: J. Ollivier, 1847, p. 180.
9. For the range, and significance of early images, see Debra Higgs Strickland, Saracens, Demons, and Jews: Making Monsters in Medieval Art, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003. The interrelationship between the image and text is not generally well covered: Hélène Desmet-Grégoire’s study of eighteenth-century French images of the East is a notable exception. See Hélène Desmet-Grégoire, Divan magique.
10. The OED gives the first usage as Edward Hall’s in The Union of the Two Noble and Illustrate Famelies of Lancastre and Yorke, published in 1548: “Aparaled after Turkey fashion … girded with two swords called cimitaries.” It cites Christophorus Richerius, De rebus Turcarum, published in Paris in 1540, for the statement that the janissaries called their swords “cymitharra.” Adolphe Hatzfeld and Arsène Darmesteter in their Dictionnaire général de la langue Française du commencement du XVIIe siècle jusqu’à nos jours, précédé d’un traité de la formation de la langue (Paris: Librairie Delagrave, 1890–1900) say it has a fifteenth-century origin but are not specific.
11. The Turkish incident was inserted at the personal insistence of Louis XIV, who had become entranced with the Ottomans after an embassy to Paris in 1669. See Fatma Müge Göçek, East Encounters West: France and the Ottoman Empire in the Eighteenth Century, New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1987, pp. 72–3. Göçek gives a full account of the mutual effects of the links between France and the Ottoman Empire.
12. G. Horton, The Blight of Asia, 1922, chapter 19, www.hri.org/docs/Horton/hb-29.html.
13. “Outlandish” moved from its late medieval usage—meaning “external”—to the later use, which had become a term of abuse. See OED.
14. That is, it seemed to represent the stereotypical medieval Christian view of the Jew.
15. These included an edition printed by Mikulas Bakalar in Pilsen; a Lyons edition of 1488 printed by Martin Huss (freely adapted with new illustrations); another by Anton Sorg in Augsburg, also in 1488; another brought out by Pablo Hurus as Viaje de la Tierra Sancta in Saragossa in 1498; see Clair, History, and Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing 1450–1800, trans. David Gerard, London: Verso, 1976.
16. Samuel Purchas, Purchas His Pilgrimes in Five Books, London: William Stainsby for Henry Fetherstone, 1625. The copy I have used is British Library BL 984 h. 5.
17. One, Lithgow, opined that “the nature of the Arabs was not unlike the jackals,” decried the “villainy of the Armenians” while noting “the constancy of the Turks,” ibid., p. 1846. “Sir John Mandeville” was the author of the most famous (and widely read) medieval travel narrative. Mandeville—supposedly an English knight, but this was probably a pseudonym—made his “travels” in the first half of the fourteenth century. He plainly did go east, but much of his book is the purest fantasy.
18. Othello, act 5, scene 2, lines 357–61.
In Aleppo once,
Where a malignant and a turbaned Turk
Beat a Venetian and traduced the state,
I took by the throat the circumcised dog
And smote him thus.
19. On Beham, see M. Geisberg, The German Single-Leaf Woodcut: 1500–1550, vol. 1, New York: Hacker Art Books, 1974, pp. 268–75.
20. Türcken Biechlin, which is written in a south German dialect; see Bohnstedt, “The Infidel Scourge,” pp. 10–11.
21. This topic is not well covered, but I have found useful elements in the chapter “Towards an Emblematic Rhetoric” in Manning, The Emblem, pp. 85–109.
22. See Certeau, Writing, p. 94: “We admit as historiographical discourse that which can ‘include’ its other—chronicle, archive, document—in other words, discourse that is organised in a laminated text in which one continuous half is based on another disseminated half.” The “dissemination” of an image is implicit in the multiplicity and coordination of its visual elements, arranged in predetermined order.
23. See Anna Pavord, The Tulip, London: Bloomsbury, 1999, p. 80.
24. Ibid., pp. 48–52.
25. See Dufrenoy, L’Orient romanesque, vol. 3, p. 687.
26. See Marquis de Sade, 120 days of Sodom, London: Arena, 1989, pp. 263 sqq.
27. The figure was given in a paper by Professor Gary Schwarz at a colloquium led by Professor John Brewer at the European University Institute, Florence. More recently, Schwarz has extended these impromptu remarks. See Gary Schwarz, “The Shape, Size and Destiny of the Dutch Market for Paintings at the End of the Eighty Years War,” in Klaus Bussmann and Heinz Schilling (eds.), 1648: War and Peace in Europe, vol. 2, Art and Culture, Münster: Veranstaltungsgesellschaft 350 Jahre Westfälische Friede mbh., 1998, pp. 240–42.
28. The text volumes, with their 72,000 articles by 140 contributors, were often held up by censorship. But the plates did not seem to interest the censors and were published at the rate of about one volume a year from 1761. Many of the 2,569 pages of plates showed images on a double-page spread.
29. The 1783 Amsterdam and Paris edition was enlarged to eleven volumes, in a “Nouvelle édition, enrichie de toutes les figures comprises dans l’ancienne édition en sept volumes, & dans les quatre publiés par forme de supplément par une société des gens de lettres [a new edition, enriched with all the images in the old edition in seven volumes and the additional four published in the form of supplements by a group of literary gentlemen].”
30. “Let the Protestant burin of Bernard Picard exert itself as it will in tracing to us hideous representations of real or imaginary tortures inflicted by the judges of the Inquisition; it signifies nothing, or can only be addressed to the king of Spain.” Cited in Richard Lebrun, “Joseph de Maistre’s Defence of the Spanish Inquisition,” www.umanitoba.ca/faculties/arts/history/spanishinquisition.html.
31. On the development of the frontispiece see Corbett and Lightbown, Comely Frontispiece, pp. 1–47.
32. Part of the caption reads: the “successor of Mahomet, Ali, explained the Alcoran to the many people who make up the Mahometan Religion,” translated from “Le tableau des principales religions du monde,” in Bernard Picard, Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peuples du monde, représentées par des figures dessinées de la main de Bernard Picard avec une explication historique, et quelques dissertations curieuses, Amsterdam: J. F. Bernard, 1733–43.
33. He went back in 1691–92.
34. Marsigli had created his own institute in Bologna and a printing house to prepare his published works. However, he had a number of them published in Amsterdam. See Stoye, Marsigli’s Europe, p. 309.
35. Copy in the Library of Congress listed as Voennoe sostianie Ottomanskiia Imperii s eia prirascheniem I ipadkom. Vse ukrasheno grydorovanrlistami, St. Petersburg: Imp. Akademii nauk, 1737. I have not yet seen this text.
36. Ogier Ghislain de Busbecq, Travels into Turkey … Containing the Most Accurate Account of the Turks, and Neighbouring Nations, Translated from the Original Latin of the Learned A. G. Busbequius, London: J. Robinson and W. Payne, 1744. This was successful enough to reissue in 1774. The first edition of Busbecq in English had been edited by Nahum Tate and printed by J. Taylor and F. Wyat in London in 1694. It was published as “The four epistles of A. G. Busbequius concerning his embassy into Turkey; being remarks upon the religion, customs, riches, strength and government of that people. As also as a description of their chief cities and places of trade and commerce. To which is added his advice how to manage war against the Turks. Done into English Epistolae quatuor.” However, Latin editions of Busbecq were also still being published—for example an Oxford edition of 1771.
37. Cited and translated in Findley, “Ebu Bekir Ratib,” p. 48.
38. The page size of an elephant folio volume is twenty-three by fourteen inches.
39. My historical data on d’Ohsson is taken from the extended version of Findley’s paper “A Quixotic Author.” I am extremely grateful to Carter Findley for letting me use his impressive work, which deserves a much wider audience.
40. Çirakman, “From Tyranny to Despotism,” p. 58. Dominique Carnoy presents a rather different picture in her study of French images in Représentations.
41. Gladstone, Bulgarian Horrors, pp. 12–13. By his second pamphlet of the following year, Gladstone was less violent and more circumspect in his utterances. See Lessons in Massacre or, The Conduct of the Turkish Government in and About Bulgaria Since May 1876, London: John Murray, 1877.
42. And as Joseph Conrad observed at the beginning of his Eastern novel Under Western Eyes (1911), “This is not a story of the West of Europe.”
1. The history of print is in a state of rapid transformation. New theories and objectives have become dominant. In my view, apart from key texts such as those of Elizabeth Eisenstein, Lucien Febvre, and Henri-Jean Martin, Robert Darnton, Rudolf Hirsch, and most recently Adrian Johns, the most helpful restatement has come from Gérard Genette in his construct of the “paratexte.” This connects the physical forms of the text to its audiences, potential and actual. However, even Genette himself gracefully demurred from discussing the issue which concerns me here—the role and effect of images. “I have likewise left out three practices whose paratextual relevance seems to me undeniable, but investigating each one might demand as much work as was required here in treating this subject as a whole … [the third] constitutes an immense continent: that of illustration.” I can here only allude to the issues involved but I am taking the topic up in more detail in a forthcoming work. See Genette, Paratexts, pp. 405–6.
2. This appears in “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”; see William Blake, Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. Geoffrey Keynes, London: The Nonesuch Library, 1961, p. 187.
3. See Çirakman, “From the ‘Terror of the World.’ ”
4. Volney, Travels, vol. 2, pp. 177–9. Volney is in error in one small particular: Arabic letters change in terms of where they come in the word rather than in the sentence.
5. He wrote On the Simplification of Oriental Languages in 1795, and The European Alphabet Applied to the Languages of Asia in 1819.
6. See C. F. de Volney, The Ruins, or, Meditations on the Revolutions of Empire and the Law of Nature, rep. New York: Twentieth Century Publishing Company, 1890, p. 81.
7. Ibid., p. 76.
8. I find the whole idea of counterfactual history, of which Simon Schama’s Dead Certainties (1991) was a pioneering approach (and unjustly criticized when it first appeared), an invaluable critical tool. The collection edited by Niall Ferguson, Virtual History (1997), makes the case for the approach, especially Ferguson’s long introduction, pp. 1–91.
9. Jonathan Bloom in his sparkling survey of paper in the Islamic world (Paper Before Print) can cite only one book: Dard Hunter’s Papermaking: The History and Technique of an Ancient Craft, first published by Knopf in 1943, revised and republished in 1947, and reissued in 1978. Hunter’s is still the sole general overview available in English.
10. A short-lived mill was set up in France at Troyes a little earlier.
11. Little is known of this first paper mill, while much more is known of the eighteenth-century mill set up at Yalova, on the southern (Asian) side of the Sea of Marmara in 1744. This spa town has a constant supply of high-quality water necessary for any volume of production. See Fatma Müge Göçek, East Encounters West: France and the Ottoman Empire in the Eighteenth Century, New York: Oxford University Press, 1987, pp. 114–15.
12. Most of the Ottoman sources are not contemporary with the first fifteenth- and sixteenth-century prohibitions. See ibid., pp. 110–11.
13. Thevet’s life of Gutenberg, in Histoire des plus illustres et savans hommes de leurs siècles (Paris: Manger, 1671), vol. VII, p. 111, cited by Gdoura, Début, pp. 86–7.
14. The Taliban’s and the “Islamic Emirate” of Afghanistan’s attitude toward images was aniconistic. Comparisons have been drawn with Byzantine iconoclasm as state policy, and it is hard to find so radical and coordinated an Islamic equivalent in modern times. Even the murderous excesses of the Ikhwan in the capture of Mecca and Medina (and the destruction of tombs and images) were not acts of state. The Taliban’s policy plainly was. The supreme leader Mullah Mohammed Omar ordered the destruction of all statues in the country, which resulted in the notorious and highly public blowing-up of the ancient Buddhist statues at Bamiyan. The official statement made through the AP agency stated that “in view of the fatwa [religious edict] of prominent Afghan scholars and the verdict of the Afghan Supreme Court it has been decided to break down all statues/idols present in different parts of the country. This is because these idols have been gods of the infidels, who worshipped them, and these are respected even now and perhaps may be turned into gods again. The real God is only Allah, and all other false gods should be removed.” It was also asserted that photographs and electronic images were likewise forbidden, but Taliban officials themselves photographed the destruction of the statues. Many Taliban leaders allowed their photographs to be taken, and it has been suggested that their “image policy” was religious in theory but selectively political in practice.
15. See David Talbot Rice, Islamic Painting: A Survey, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1971, pp. 21–6. For the Abbasids, see Richard Ettinghausen, Arab Painting, New York: Rizzoli, 1977, pp. 41–53. The classic statement is Arnold, Painting in Islam.
16. Iconoclasm in Reformation Europe was directed not so much at images but at art used in a religious context. See, for example, Philips, Reformation.
17. See Goffman, Ottoman Empire, p. 91. This short book, which is innovative both in its structure and in its insights, is a mature and compelling correction to a long tradition of misrepresentation. I am extremely grateful to Virginia Aksan for drawing it to my attention.
18. See Lewis, Discovery, especially his account of the Egyptian scholar Sheikh Rifaa Rafi al-Tahtawi’s five-year stay in Paris.
19. The stage of final reading, when a written text is read out loud, is still an essential part of the legislative process in the United States and the United Kingdom.
20. Cardinal Ferdinando de’ Medici financed the establishment of the Typographia Medicea Linguarum Externarum by Raimondi in 1585.
21. The first book to be printed in Ottoman Turkish was George Seaman’s translation of the New Testament. He was the interpreter to Sir Peter Wyche, English ambassador to Constantinople, and the book was printed at Oxford in 1606. In 1734 William Caslon was commissioned by the Society for the Promotion of Christian Literature to cut an Arabic font for a New Testament to be used in missionary work.
22. See Bloom, Paper, p. 116.
23. For the prevalence (and design) of libraries, see Godfrey Goodwin, A History of Ottoman Architecture, London: Thames and Hudson, 1971.
24. See Dov Shidorsky, “Libraries in Late Ottoman Palestine Between the Orient and the Occident,” Libraries & Culture 33, 3 (summer 1998), pp. 260–76. See also Hitzel (ed.), Livres.
25. Müteferrika had already begun to print by 1719. He sent a map of the Sea of Marmara to the grand vizier Damad Ibrahim Pasha, with a note to the effect that “if your Excellency so commands, larger ones can be produced.” For the document from the Sultan setting up the printing press in Constantinople, see “The Firman of Ahmed III, Given in 1727 Authorizing Said Effendi and Ibrahim Müteferrika to Open a Printing House Using Arabic Script,” trans. Christopher Murphy, in Atiyah (ed.), Book, pp. 284–92.
26. He was by then himself the ambassador to the court of France.
27. It has been estimated that from 1455 to 1500 between 6 and 20 million copies of publications were printed in Europe. Six million is a very cautious estimate, and probably about 12–15 million might be a good working figure. Between 30,000 and 35,000 separate editions of books from this half century still survive, representing various versions and reprints of some 10,000 to 15,000 different texts. See the estimates for editions in Europe and the useful analyses of content in southern and northern Europe in Gerulaitis, Printing, pp. 17–18 and 57–129. Hirsch, Printing, pp. 133–5, uses J. M. Lenart’s figures from Pre-Reformation Printed Books (New York: 1935). Assuming that about 500 copies (on average) of each edition were produced, then printing in aggregate 15 million copies is reasonable. So who read or bought all these books? This question has never been answered satisfactorily. The calculations of copies printed are of necessity approximate, hence the wild discrepancies. See also Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing 1450–1800, trans. David Gerard, London: Verso, 1976, p. 248.
28. There had been several attempts to set up printers’ workshops in the Balkan lands, all of which failed. In the centuries of Ottoman rule, only a handful of books were produced in the southern Slav lands. The first were printed in Cetinje in Montenegro in the 1490s by a monk named Makarije. Eight other short-lived presses were later set up, but their total output was eleven slender titles. From the sixteenth century Slavic books were produced in other lands and brought across the frontier. Many were printed by a succession of specialist printers in Venice, beginning with the Vuković family from Montenegro in the early sixteenth century. Another major center developed at the same time in Wallachia; but it was not until the 1770s, when recognizing the demand for texts for the Serbian market, that printers in Vienna, St. Petersburg, and Leipzig competed to supply Serbs both in the Vojvodina and in the lands under Ottoman rule. However, supplies were irregular and many printers could not be bothered with the effort of sending them south of the Danube, where trade was erratic and often risky. See Michel Lassithiotakis, “Le rôle du livre imprimé dans la formation et le développement de la littérature en Grec vulgaire XVIe–XVIIe siècles,” and Nathalie Clayer, “Le goût de fruit défendu ou, La lecture de l’Albanais dans l’empire Ottoman finissant,” both in Hitzel (ed.), Livres.
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.
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 its 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.
16. There existed a clear parallel in Western society. The religious transformation of Western Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was still perceived in two quite distinct ways three centuries later, depending entirely upon whether you were a Catholic or a Protestant. For a Protestant, winning the liberation of human souls from the antique shackles of a tyrannical, decrepit papacy was a war worth fighting. For a Catholic, the negative consequences of this sundering of Christendom far outweighed any benefits. This unbridgeable void continued through the nineteenth century, and on into the twentieth. The Catholic Church eventually evolved its own response to modernity and democracy. In sanctioning popular Catholic action (Christian democracy) Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum novarum of 1891 (on the right and duties of labor and capital), declared: “It will be easy for Christian working men to solve it aright if they will form associations, choose wise guides, and follow on the path which with so much advantage to themselves and the common weal was trodden by their fathers before them.” In accommodating to modernity, the church assimilated what it needed, and then ignored the rest.
17. Professor Carol B. Stapp first drew my attention to the long persistence of non-Darwinian science teaching in Tennessee. “The Butler Act forbidding the teaching of evolution in Tennessee schools was not repealed until 1967 … The issue was not long dormant, however. In 1973 the state legislature passed an ‘equal time’ law which legitimised the use of the bible as a scientific reference. The law was challenged in state and federal courts by civil liberties and teachers groups, and was overturned by the Federal Court of Appeals.” See “The History of Evolution in Tennessee,” http://fp.bio.utk.edu/darwin/essays/history.html (November 9, 2003). In the U.S. Supreme Court the case of Loving v. the State of Virginia of 1967 overturned the conviction of Richard and Mildred Loving under a 1922 Virginia statute that “if any white person intermarry with a colored person or any colored person intermarry with a white person, he shall be guilty of a felony.” The Lovings were sentenced to a year in prison, suspended provided they left the state. Thirty states had passed similar laws, and sixteen were still in force at the time of the Supreme Court decision.
18. David Kelley suggests how this sometimes persists into the twenty-first century in the United States. See “The Party of Modernity,” Cato Policy Report XXV, no. 3 (May-June 2003).
19. Conversely, those who did not turned to social resistance. The rural minority adopted anarchism in Andalucia, vagabondage and armed resistance in southern Italy. See T. Kaplan, Anarchists of Andalusia 1868–1903, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977; Stuart Woolf, A History of Italy 1700–1860: The Social Constraints of Political Change, London: Methuen, 1979; John Dickie, Darkest Italy: The Nation and Stereotypes of the Mezzogiorno, 1860–1900, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1999.
20. Charles Kurzman depicts modernism as “the imperialist expansion of Christian Europe, which threatened Islam in at least five registers,” that is, militarily, economically, cognitively, politically, culturally. See Charles Kurzman (ed.), Modernist Islam 1840–1940: A Sourcebook, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002, pp. 6–7. His introduction (pp. 3–27) to the collection of texts is an excellent, succinct statement of the issues.
21. The Islamic modernists used lectures, newspapers, and the burgeoning periodical press to publicize their ideas, rather than the scholarly texts, replete with citations and authorities of the traditional literature of argument and dispute. See ibid., pp. 14–16.
22. Hodgson, Venture, 3:274–5. For another view, see Elie Kedourie’s sardonic squib Afghani and ‘Abduh: An Essay on Religious Unbelief and Political Activism in Modern Islam, London: Frank Cass, 1966, reissued 1997.
23. The most readable source remains Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age: 1798–1939, Cambridge, 1970. Two valuable collections of material in translation by a wide range of thinkers are edited by Charles Kurzman. Liberal Islam: A Sourcebook, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. On an earlier period, Modernist Islam: A Sourcebook 1840–1940, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
24. For a brief statement of these ideas, see Understanding the Evil of Innovation: Bid’ah, Riyadh: International Islamic Publishing House, 1997.
25. This was much more akin to Christian traditions of disputation and argument, as in the Spanish debates over the Moriscos in the sixteenth century.
26. See Edward Mortimer, Faith and Power: The Politics of Islam, London: Faber, 1982, pp. 113–7.
27. See Emad Eldin Shahin, Through Muslim Eyes: M. Rashid Rida and the West, Herndon, VA: International Institute of Islamic Thought, 1993.
28. See Dilip Hiro, Holy Wars: The Rise of Islamic Fundamentalism, London: Routledge, 1989, pp. 60–87.
29. Cited in John L. Esposito, The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality? Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995, p. 135.
30. See Johannes Jansen, The Neglected Duty: The Creed of Sadat’s Assassins and Islamic Resurgence in the Middle East, New York: Macmillan, 1986, p. 193.
31. Johannes J. G. Jansen, “Tafsir, Ijma and Modern Muslim Extremism,” Orient 27, no. 4 (1986).
32. Jansen stated in an interview: “I don’t know when it was written: probably in the spring preceding the murder of Sadat. Five hundred copies were printed. The group started to distribute and sell the book, but then realized that the Egyptian secret police would be able to locate the group by tracing these copies. So they burned 450 copies. Fifty copies survived, and photocopies of these are bound in libraries all over the world. After the murder of Sadat, the prosecutor added the document to the case file, so the lawyer of the accused also got a copy. He gave it away to an Egyptian newspaper, Al Ahram, which printed it. The article appeared in December 1981. It was sold out within hours and was never reprinted in that form. If people are sentenced to death, the Egyptian State Mufti has to condone the sentence. The Mufti gave a long fatwa explaining why the murderers of Sadat were wrong. But as a footnote to this fatwa, he added the full text of the document The Neglected Duty. That appeared in a series of thousands of pages, but the fascicule in which that document was reprinted sold out quicker than the rest of the volume. Then there was a third edition which was made probably in Jordan or Israel: it made use of the newspaper text, but left out a number of things that may have seen sensitive in the context of an Islamic kingdom, as Jordan is.” Religioscope, P.O. Box 83, 1705 Fribourg, Switzerland, February 8, 2002.
33. Osama bin Laden extended the doctrine still further in his pronouncement of February 1998. “These crimes and sins committed by the Americans are a clear declaration of war on God, his messenger and Muslims. And ulema [Muslim scholars] have throughout Islamic history unanimously agreed that the jihad [holy war] is an individual duty if the enemy destroys the Muslim countries.
“On that basis, and in compliance with God’s order, we issue the following fatwa to all Muslims.
“The ruling is to kill the Americans and their allies is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it, in order to liberate the Al Aqsa mosque [Jerusalem] and the Holy Mosque [Mecca] … This is in accordance with the words of Almighty God … We call on every Muslim who believes in God and wished to be rewarded to comply with God’s order to kill the Americans and plunder their money wherever and whenever they find it.”
Bin Laden’s interpretation is false and misleading. The tradition of jihad is as a collective and not an individual duty, to be imposed only through proper authority. Even then it has to be carried out within limits so as to be lawful. His interpretation sets aside all limits and constraints.
34. For a thoughtful (but controversial) view of “Islamism” see Francis Fukuyama and Nadav Samin, “Can Any Good Come of Radical Islam? A Modernizing Force? Wall Street Journal, September 12, 2002.
35. December 8, 1986.
36. “Satan” and Shaitan sound the same but their meaning is not identical. See The Light of Islam: The Infallibles, chapter 4, at http://home.swipnet.se/islam/imamsajjad.htm (November 9, 2003).
37. Khomeini had always viewed his revolution as pan-Islamic, transcending Sunni-Shi’i historical divergences, directed against the common enemy—namely, the twin forces of modernity and secularization and their nominally Muslim admirers, the “Westoxicated” (gharbzada in Persian; mustaghribun in Arabic). Hopes for such a pan-Islamic revolution were high in Tehran at the beginning of the 1980s. See Emmanuel Sivan, “The Holy War Tradition in Islam,” Orbis, spring 1998.
38. English, German, Hebrew, Italian, French, Spanish, Turkish, and Russian.
39. See MEMRI Special Dispatch Series no. 486, March 25, 2003.
40. See MEMRI Special Report no. 10, September 26, 2002, “Friday Sermons in Saudi Mosques: Review and Analysis.”
41. To say nothing about the vicious insults that, say, militant Protestants use about Catholics, or how mainstream Muslims attack Islam’s schismatics.
42. Jefferson wrote to the Virginian George Wythe, who held the first chair of law in the United States, on August 13, 1786, “Preach, my dear Sir, a crusade against ignorance; establish & improve the law for educating the common people.” See Gordon C. Lee (ed.), Crusade Against Ignorance: Thomas Jefferson on Education, New York: Columbia University Press, 1961.
43. Pastor Dino Andreadis, the senior pastor of Park Road Church, Ontario, at http://www.brokenhearted.org/india.html (November 9, 2003).
44. He is based at the First Church of the Gospel Ministry, Wooster, Ohio.
45. The outreach of the Victory Network may be found at http://www.victorynetwork.org (November 9, 2003).
46. Le Roy Finto on Jerris Bullard’s India. This site has moved and reconstituted. On November 9, 2003, it was to be found at http://www.manassaschurch.org/india_6.htm.
47. I have deliberately chosen examples that related the modern idea of “crusade” to both Hindu and Muslim communities.
48. Bernard Lewis, “Jihad vs. Crusade: A Historian’s Guide to the New War,” Wall Street Journal, September 27, 2001. See http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=95001224 (November 9, 2003). Here, as he often does, Lewis begins with the combative statement, and then goes in a more contemplative vein. However, the printed responses to his piece, which reflected a wide range of differing opinions, did not suggest any acceptance of his view that crusades were now only “a vigorous campaign in a good cause.”
49. At Princeton University in April 1999, the president of the university Christian group, Phil Belin, was widely quoted as saying: “We know the negative connotations associated with crusades turns people away from associating with us and listening to the gospel message.” The context of Belin’s observation was reported in Yale Daily News, April 8, 1999. The Yale chapter of the Campus Crusade for Christ had changed its name to Yale Students for Christ. The reason, as its president, Dave Mung, observed, was “We wanted to have a name that more accurately reflected the nature of our group. Sometimes the CCC name connotes preconceived negative notions.” Belin was commenting on this change.
50. There is good reason for this. In Indonesia and elsewhere, civil strife between Muslims and Christians is often termed a jihad by Muslim groups, even though its causes are largely political and economic.
51. The term “fundamentalism” is often used in a very broad sense, but I believe it should be applied only to those Christian communities and communicators that root their thinking in the literal truth of the Bible. It derives from the twelve short books, collectively entitled The Fundamentals, which were published between 1910 and 1915. Each had a print of 3 million copies, with a free copy sent to every pastor, teacher of Christian religion, and theology student in the United States. Many more were sold to the public. See Nancy T. Ammerman, “North American Protestant Fundamentalism,” in Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby, Fundamentalisms Observed, Fundamentalism Project vol. 1, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1991.
52. In 1919, the World Christian Fundamentals Association was founded to advance the cause of a pure biblical Christianity. One of its progenitors was A. C. Dixon, an editor of The Fundamentals. Like the new jihadists, the Christian fundamentalists (a term which they applied to themselves after 1920) were connected by a chain of personal connections, discipleship, and institutions like Bible colleges, Bible study institutes, seminaries, and “crusades.” The name was coined by Curtis Lee Laws, editor of the Baptist Watchman-Examiner. Details of current crusades may be found via http://www.christianitytoday.com.
53. These details are drawn from the Faith Defenders Web site at http://www.faithdefenders.com (November 9, 2003).
54. It still has a modern resonance. Recently the curse was turned into an art object. It was carved on a large stone and placed in the center of Carlisle, the last city in England before the Scottish border. In the foot and mouth outbreak of 2001, it was publicly suggested that the disease was a result of the ancient curse, and the current archbishop was asked to lift it. The whole curse extends to some 1,500 words. The powerful General Commination remains in the repertoire of the Church of England and is still occasionally pronounced. See http://www.cathtelecom.com/news/111/29.php (November 9, 2003). For the text, see http://www.geocities.com/~betapisces/academy/glasgow.htm (November 9, 2003).
55. In 1989 Monsignor Philip Reilly set up his movement Helpers of God’s Precious Infants, based on peaceful prayerful public witness at the abortion sites—or “Calvary” sites as he calls them. See http://www.iol.ie/~hlii/helpers_of_infants.html (November 9, 2003). Reilly’s movement was nonviolent but for the wider range of activities, violent and nonviolent see http://www.fyleserva.com/cgnews (November 9, 2003). More recently, the Reverend Alan Perkins’s sermon is a typical example of a traditional Christian discourse. “God is not at peace with your sin. He is at war with your sin. And if you choose to abandon the field of battle; if you refuse to engage the enemy of your soul in mortal combat, then the result will be destruction, and not salvation. Do you think that kind of imagery is exaggerated or overblown? Peter didn’t. Listen: ‘Dear friends, I urge you, as aliens and strangers in the world, to abstain from sinful desires, which war against your soul.’–1 Peter 2:11, NIV. Sin is at war with your soul. That isn’t just rhetoric; it’s reality.” “At War with Sin,” February 9, 2003, http://www.journeychurchonline.org/messages.htm (November 9, 2003).
56. For example Townhall.com, which calls it the Evil Empire speech, but the words were not used in the text. See http://www.townhall.com/hall_of_fame/reagan/speech/empire.html (November 9, 2003).
57. For Ronald W. Reagan speeches see http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/resource/speeches/rrpubpap.asp (November 9, 2003).
58. Reagan did quote Schiller—“The most pious man can’t stay in peace if it doesn’t please his evil neighbor”—in his speech to the Bundestag on June 9, 1982. This appears in a footnote in the Public Papers of Ronald Reagan.
59. Many of his misspeakings related to memory, which may well have been the early manifestations of Alzheimer’s disease. Thus he forgot Princess Diana’s name and called her “Princess David.” But when working from a script, he gave reliable performances.
60. The term was first coined of Reagan.
61. He had some connections. In 1970, five members of the Full Gospel Business Men’s Fellowship prayed with then California governor Reagan at his home in Sacramento. One, a former Lear executive, was overcome with the Spirit and began to speak in the voice of God. He compared Reagan to a king, and prophesied that Reagan would “reside at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue” if he continued to walk in God’s way. It was suggested that Reagan took the prophesy very seriously. See http://www.pir.org/gw/fgbmfi.txt (June 10, 2002). Clinton had his “spiritual advisers” and was rooted in a Southern Baptist heritage. See http://www.llano.net/baptist/presidentsadvisers.htm (November 9, 2003). During the Monica Lewinsky crisis he turned to the Reverend Jesse Jackson for spiritual support.
62. See Religion and Ethics Newsweekly, “The Spirituality of President Bush,” http://www. pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/week421/news.html (November 9, 2003).
63. Bob Woodward, Bush at War, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002, p. 16.
64. Ibid., p. 38.
65. Washington Post, May 31, 2000.
66. This text subsequently was massaged to change the text as delivered. At a commonly used Web site, Quoteworld, the word “crusade” does not appear in the transcript of the speech; http://www.quoteworld.org/docs/gbrem926.php (November 9, 2003).
67. “This President regards words as unusually binding … The President likes a language of very clear moral meaning. He thought the word evil was the word he wanted to use.” Eddie Mair interview with David Frum, BBC Radio 4, Broadcasting House, June 23, 2002.
68. Presidential News and Speeches, September 16, 2001, http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010916-2.a.ram (November 9, 2003).
69. The linguistic technique of conversational analysis (CA) suggests that seeking the word in this way indicates that it is problematical. Nowhere else in the conference does Bush use the same pattern of phrasing. On the practice and potential for CA, see Paul ten Have, Doing Conversational Analysis, London: Sage, 1999, pp. 28–34. I am grateful to Bethan Benwell for introducing me to this form of analysis and for helping me through its complexities.
70. See http://whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/01/20020129–11.html (November 9, 2003).
71. Woodward, Bush, pp. 141–3.
72. Ibid., pp. 52–3.
73. “The Evildoers and the Misled,” December 6, 2001, http://www.ariannaonline.com/columns/files/120601.html (November 9, 2003).
74. Mark 5:9.
75. Bassam Tibi, Islam Between Culture and Politics, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001, p. 6.
76. Charles Kurzman (ed.), Liberal Islam: A Sourcebook, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998, p. 25.
77. Fareed Zakaria spoke in these terms on Start the Week, BBC Radio Four, presented by Andrew Marr, May 16, 2003.
78. And of course Egypt, and some of the states of North Africa.
79. See Hugh Trevor-Roper, “The Invention of Tradition: The Highland Tradition of Scotland,” in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds.), The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Standardized official “national” dress for gulf Arab men has in fact evolved in its current form only in relatively recent times. See Andrew Wheatcroft, Bahrain in Original Photographs: 1880–1961, London: Kegan Paul International, 1988, pp. 72–81. For the issue of dress see Easa Saleh Al-Gurg, The Wells of Memory: An Autobiography, London: John Murray, 1998, p. 54.
80. For the nineteenth-century response to the Ottomans see Reinhold Schiffer, Oriental Panorama: British Travellers in 19th Century Turkey, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999.
81. For example his analysis of General William G Boykin’s “dissembling” in Newsweek, October 27, 2003. He concludes, “Perhaps the most troubling aspect of Boykin’s remark is its utter ignorance.”
82. Fareed Zakaria, Newsweek, April 21, 2003, based on The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad, New York: W. W. Norton, 2003.
83. See Marion Farouk Sluglett and Peter Sluglett, Iraq Since 1958: From Revolution to Dictatorship, rev. ed., London: I. B. Tauris, 2001, pp. 179–80.
84. For a full treatment of the game see http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone,_Paper,_Scissors (November 9, 2003).
85. The reasons for this pattern of misconception are not clear. It is not for lack of high-quality research and study. For example, an informed and carefully analytical approach to the issues in Iraq from a U.S. perspective has been produced by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. A report by project director Frederick Barton and Bathsheba Crocker, “A Wiser Peace: An Action Strategy for Post-Conflict Iraq,” outlines ten key actions that the United States and the United Nations must take to prepare to rebuild Iraq’s security, governance, justice, and economic sectors. The study “Postwar Iraq: Are We Ready?” may also be found at www.csis.org (November 9, 2003).
86. I first heard this in the Texas Panhandle, but this version comes from a Methodist sermon: A Texas farmer had a new mule he needed to have trained; it would not do anything he wanted it to—not even go into its stall in the barn. In exasperation, he hired a muleskinner to come out and break the mule in. The old mule tamer arrived out at the farm and had the owner explain what he wanted done. The old man looked at the mule, then at the farmer, reached down, and picked up a fence post that was lying on the ground, and swinging the post as hard as he could, hit the mule right between the eyes. The mule shook its head, braced its two front legs just as stubbornly as before, and refused to move. The mule tamer swung the post and again hit the mule between the eyes, this time twice as hard as before. The blow knocked the mule to his knees. As it struggled back to its feet, the old man went around to the back of the mule and hit it on the rear with a third blow. He then dropped the post onto the ground, caught the mule by its halter, and calmly led it into the barn. By this time, the farmer was furious; he threw his hat down on the ground, cursed, and yelled at the old man, “What are you doing!? I hired you to come out here and tame my mule, not to kill him!” While he ranted and raved, the old man just stood there. He looked up at the sky, then down at the ground. Finally, he just spat some tobacco juice to the side (he was chewing Red Man), and looked the farmer squarely in the eyes. “It appears to me that you’re a mighty good farmer,” said the skinner. “You got a good stand of cotton in the field out yonder, and your rice paddies look mighty good—but you don’t know nothin’ about taming mules!” “What do you mean?” asked the farmer. The old mule tamer continued, “You see, when I want to teach a mule something, the first thing I do is get his attention.” See http://www.cmpage.org/texasmule.html (November 9, 2003).
87. But of course some viruses, like smallpox, can be prevented by inoculation or vaccination. For a coherent view for the recent evolution of terrorist methods see Laden and Roya Boroumand, “Terror, Islam and Democracy,” Journal of Democracy, April 2002.
88. See United States Institute of Peace, “Special Report: Islamic Perspectives on Peace and Violence,” January 24, 2002. “What is often viewed as a clash of civilizations is really a clash of symbols … The symbols on one side are headscarves, turbans [my italics] and other symbols of Islamic expression that Westerners often find repellent, just as fundamentalist Muslims view much of Western culture as anti-Islamic.” For an elaborate analysis of the clash of civilizations from a highly nuanced radical “Islamic” perspective, see The Inevitability of the Clash of Civilization, London: Al-Khilafah Publications, 2002.
89. See the convenient collection at http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/AmericanIdeal/yardstick/pr8_quotes.html (November 9, 2003) for the debate on the idea of happiness. For example, the “Kings or parliaments could not give the rights essential to happiness … We claim them from a higher source—from the King of kings, and Lord of all the earth. They are not annexed to us by parchments and seals. They are created in us by the decrees of Providence … It would be an insult on the divine Majesty to say, that he has given or allowed any man or body of men a right to make me miserable. If no man or body of men has such a right, I have a right to be happy. If there can be no happiness without freedom, I have a right to be free. If I cannot enjoy freedom without security of property, I have a right to be thus secured.” John Dickinson (Reply to a Committee in Barbadoes, 1766).
90. See http://www.bartleby.com/124/pres16.html (November 9, 2003).
1. It was much more successful than the comparable effort in China.
3. See R. D. Kloian, The Armenian Genocide: News Accounts from the Armenian Press (1915–1922), Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1985, p. 266.
4. It is neither a new Rome nor (even more implausibly) some kind of restoration of Britain’s global sway.
5. Letter to W. S. Smith, November 13, 1787, in Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Julian P. Boyd, vol. 1, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1955, p. 3.
6. See Michael Kammen, Meadows of Memory: Images of Time and Tradition in American Art and Culture, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1992, p. 4. There were several other images of apotheosis for the first president.
7. See “The Apotheosis of George Washington: Brumidi’s Fresco and Beyond,” by Adriana Rissetto et al., http://xroads.virginia.edu/~CAP/gw/gwmain.html (November 9, 2003).
8. On the address and its rhetorical context, see Garry Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America, New York: Touchstone, 1992.
9. See William Lee Miller, Lincoln’s Virtues: An Ethical Biography, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002.
10. Talking to the public in a Fireside Chat on December 9, 1941, FDR called the Japanese “powerful and resourceful gangsters.” See Russell D. Buhite and David W. Levy, FDR’s Fireside Chats, Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992.
11. See John Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War, London: Faber, 1986. As Bakhtin observed, we always have a choice as to which register we use.
12. Morgenthau presidential diary, August 19, 1944, cited in Christopher Thorne, Allies of a Kind: The United States, Britain and the War Against Japan, 1941–5, New York: Oxford University Press, 1978, p. 159.
13. See Morris’s summary prologue to TR at the beginning of his biography, which captures this complexity and his subject’s seeming contradictions. See Edmund Morris, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, New York: Modern Library, 2001, pp. 9–29.
14. Rather arbitrarily, I have classed as substantial works books of more than 176 pages that were not simply reprints of material that had first been printed elsewhere. There are several discordant views on Roosevelt’s literary talents. Unquestionably, his best work is his four-volume study The Winning of the West.
15. See Stephen Ponder, Managing the Press: Origins of the Media Presidency, 1897–1933, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999, p. 18. Ponder begins with the relationship between McKinley and the press; but the arrival of Theodore Roosevelt in the White House provided a complete shift of gear. As one of Roosevelt’s aides said: “He was his own press agent and he had a splendid comprehension of news and its value.”
16. Roosevelt’s “Day of Infamy” speech to Congress available at http://bcn.boulder.co.us/government/national/speeches/spch2.html (November 9, 2003).
17. See Buhite and Levy, Fireside Chats.
18. See http://www.cnn.com/2001/US/09/11/bush.statement (November 9, 2003).
19. I am not thinking here so much of the verbal idiosyncrasies that have occasioned so much innocent humor, but the words that are “wrong,” off-key, for the circumstances in which they are spoken. President George W. Bush is much more prone to this kind of misspeaking than his father.
20. Official transcript. See http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/07/20030702-3.html (November 9, 2003).
21. Ibid. I have changed “them” to “ ’em,” because this clearly is what the audio recording presents rather than the tidied-up version of the transcript. These minor variations in tone are significant.
22. See Mikhail Bakhtin, “Towards a Methodology for the Human Sciences,” in Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. Vern W. McGee, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1986. The whole final section is significant. “There is neither a first or a last word and there are no limits to a dialogic context (it extends into the boundless past and the boundless future). Even ‘past’ meaning, that is, those born in the dialogue of past centuries, can never be stable (finalized, ended once and for all)—they will always change (be renewed, in the process of subsequent, future development of the dialogue). At any moment in the development of the dialogue there are immense boundless masses of forgotten contextual meanings, but at certain moments of a dialogue’s subsequent development along the way they are recalled and invigorated in a new form (in a new context). Nothing is absolutely dead: every meaning will have its homecoming.”
23. See Allen Brill, The Right Christians: “It is time for the Christian Right to meet the right Christians. Prime Minister Mahathir’s main point was a valuable one: Muslims must embrace modernity. That was bitter medicine for fundamentalists who would like to go retreat into some idealized past when Islam was dominant throughout the Mediterranean world, so Mahathir took the seemingly easy course of adding plenty of the ‘sugar’ of old-fashioned anti-Semitism. While the broader world audience would have been ready to applaud him for his condemnation of terrorism, his giving in to the temptation to tell his audience what it wanted to hear—Jews are evil and powerful—made that impossible.” See October 18, 2003, http://www.therightchristians.org.
24. For Mahathir’s full address, see the version reported at Millat Online, October 16, 2003, http://www.millat.com/events/oic/index.htm (November 9, 2003). The whole address totaled some fifty-eight sections, and the three sentences about the Holocaust which principally appalled Western opinion was in section 39 (“We are actually very strong. 1.3 billion people cannot be simply wiped out. The Europeans killed 6 million Jews out of 12 million. But today the Jews rule this world by proxy. They get others to fight and die for them.”) In section 34 he said, “It cannot be that there is no other way. 1.3 billion Muslims cannot be defeated by a few million Jews. There must be a way. And we can only find a way if we stop to think, to assess our weaknesses and our strength, to plan, to strategise and then to counter attack.” But in section 42 he declared: “We also know that not all non-Muslims are against us. Some are well disposed towards us. Some even see our enemies as their enemies. Even among the Jews there are many who do not approve of what the Israelis are doing.”
25. See Jerry Chamkis at http://lists.gp-us.org/pipermail/texgreen/2003-August/002924. html (November 9, 2003).
26. See Brill (note 23): “At the time, what he said produced not criticism but accolades. Now that a broader community has heard what he said while in uniform, it’s a different story.”
27. There is an Encyclopaedia of Dr Mahathir Bin Mohammad, Prime Minister of Malaysia. At the book’s launch “Dr Mahathir in his recorded appreciation speech that was aired to the audience, thanked everyone concerned for their willingness to put together all the important thoughts, ideas and vision in one book. He said the encyclopaedia was a multi-volume work that contained his speeches and ideas during his tenure as the Prime Minister of Malaysia which reflected his views, concerns and ideas on important issues. He also hoped that the encyclopaedia would be one of the important references on the modern Muslim world in the future.” See Barisan Nasional at http://www.bn.org.my/cgi-bin/newsdetail.asp?newsID=989 (November 9, 2003).
28. Allen Brill, October 18, 2003. See http://www.therightchristians.org/archives/week_2003_10_12.html.
29. John Torpey talks—rightly—of a rapidly developing “memory industry”: “Memory emerges with such force on the academic and public agenda today, according to one critic, ‘precisely because it figures as a therapeutic alternative to historical discourse.’ Such discourse is constrained by the unpleasant facts that bestrew the canvas of the past, whereas memory talk allows for a subjective reworking of those events combined with the bland prospect of ‘healing.’ The excavation of memory and its mysteries salves buried yearnings for a presently unreachable future.” See John Torpey, “The Pursuit of the Past: A Polemical Perspective,” in Peter Seixas (ed.), Theorizing Historical Consciousness, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004. John Torpey was kind enough to allow me to quote from a final draft of his chapter. He is citing Kerwin Lee Klein.
30. Understanding how historical memory works—how these ideas of the past are formed—is now becoming imperative. At Harvard, the twentieth-century historian of Europe Charles S. Maier has drawn a useful metaphor from nuclear physics for the way that historical memory functions. He proposes that there are two kinds of memory, hot and cold; some memories are like a “hot” isotope—plutonium—that remains dangerously radioactive for a very long time. He suggests that memories of the Nazi atrocities will remain “hot” for far longer than those of equivalent Soviet crimes against humanity. Cultural or social memories are formed in different circumstances, and it is those circumstances which define whether they are inherently long-lasting. He contrasts the carefully organized and closely targeted terror of the Nazis with the more random—stochastic—murderousness of the purges and deportations in the USSR. The memories from the former, he speculates, will prove “hotter” then those created by the latter. “To borrow a metaphor from nuclear physics, between a traumatic collective memory with a long half-life—a plutonium of history that fouls the landscape with its destructive radiation for centuries—and a much less perduring fall-out from, say, the isotope tritium, which dissipates relatively quickly. This paper is not an argument about which experience was the more atrocious, but about which has remained engraved in memory—historical, personal—more indelibly.” He then distinguishes between the closely planned strategy of “targeted” terror used by the Nazis and the more aleatoric, or “stochastic” terror of Stalinism. Targeted terror, Maier suggests, produced “hot” or long-term memory, stochastic terror created “cold” or short-term memory. See Charles S. Maier, “Hot Memory … Cold Memory: On the Political Half-Life of Fascist and Communist Memory,” Transit Europäische Revue, 2002. This is available online at http://www.iwm.at/t-22txt5.htm (November 9, 2003). But with some of the memories that I have discussed, “a long time” means not decades but centuries. Over that length of time, they have not behaved quite as Maier’s nuclear half-life model would suggest. Over time “hot” memories do not slowly transmute and diminish; rather they become more like an epidemic disease: lying latent for long periods and then, suddenly, when conditions are right, producing a new outbreak. While nuclear half-life represents an inexorable process, a slow and unalterable change, epidemics occur only when the right conditions are present. Nor do epidemic diseases remain static. Influenza, for example, mutates, and each epidemic may result from a different variant of the virus. There is a continuing uncertainty as to how epidemics spread. R. Edgar Hope-Simpson, in The Transmission of Epidemic Influenza (New York: Plenum Press, 1992), effectively transformed the older notions of simple person-to-person transmission into a much broader theory dependent on climate, time of year, and context. See Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe, who, in “The Dilemma of Influenza,” Current Science 78, no. 9 (May 10, 2000), pages 1057–9, suggest it may be related to sunspot activity.
31. David Frum, after quitting as a presidential speechwriter, became a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a prolific columnist. Richard Perle, who chaired the Defense Department’s Defense Policy Board from 2001 to 2003, resigned from the board in February 2004. He too is a resident fellow at the AEI. As the authors say, An End to Evil was “written at high speed through high summer”—presumably 2003. See David Frum and Richard Perle, An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror, New York: Random House, 2003, p. 284.
32. See George Orwell, “Appendix: The Principles of Newspeak,” in Orwell, 1984; http://sami.is.free.fr/Oeuvres/orwell_1984_newspeak.html.
33. Frum and Perle, An End to Evil, p. 9.
34. There is a huge literature on the Holocaust, but on this specific aspect, the most dispassionate work is by Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life, Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1999. But see also Norman Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering, 2nd ed., London: Verso, 2003.
35. Frum and Perle, p. 279.
36. Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger, The Malleus Malleficarum, trans. Montague Summers, London: Pushkin Press, 1948, Part 1, Question 14.
37. Sir Keith Thomas, in Religion and the Decline of Magic (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971), presents a world in which magical cunning was one way to counteract a dangerous and uncertain world. However, a wise or “cunning” woman skilled with herbs and folk medicine could easily be constituted “a witch” by authority, often as a result of jealousy or a local denunciation. Thus it was possible to be a valued member of village society one week, and a witch the next. “Witch” was thus an unstable category, dependent less on what you did and much more on how authority and your neighbors decided to regard it.
38. According to Ian Bostridge, in “Witchcraft Repealed,” the intellectual foundations for the existence of witchcraft had “slipped” by the 1720s. See Jonathan Barry, Marianne Hester, and Gareth Roberts (eds.), Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe: Studies in Culture and Belief, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, p. 316.
39. First, through the inquisitor Alonso de Salazar in 1612. While he had no problem with dispatching heretics, he did not believe in the existence of witches or witchcraft. See Gustav Henningsen, The Witches’ Advocate: Basque Witchcraft and the Spanish Inquisition, 1609–1614, Reno, NV: University of Nevada Press, 1980. Charles Williams in his study of witchcraft honors his “immortal memory.”
40. Chadwick Hansen, Witchcraft at Salem, London: Arrow, 1971, p. 260.
41. Maier, Doing History, Doing Justice, is talking about the Israel-Palestine conflict. He here (274–5) lays out a strong argument for the “historical” narrative in the context of analyzing one recent “rational” attempt to resolve the problems of a malevolent past through truth and reconciliation commissions (TRC). He provides a convincing analysis of both the strengths and weaknesses of this approach. See Robert I. Rotberg and Dennis Thompson, Truth v. Justice: The Morality of Truth Commissions, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000, pp. 261–78. I am grateful for Geoffrey Best’s lead to this material.