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They are not the mild Mahometans of India, nor the chivalrous Saladins of Syria, nor the cultured Moors of Spain. They were, on the whole, from the black day when they first entered Europe, the one great anti-human specimen of humanity … For the guide of this life, they had a relentless fatalism: for its reward hereafter, a sensual paradise.41

Over the centuries, under Western eyes, the Muslim infidel had assumed many different guises.42 They had been Agarenes, Ishmaelites, Saracens, Moors, Turks, Tartars, Bedouins, Arabs. With each iteration the image of the infidel became more precise. Visually speaking, an Agarene or an Ishmaelite or even a Saracen has no particular shape. It is just a name. But Moors, Turks, or Bedouins have a very precise and definite visual image. They have become fixed, in the sense that a photographic image is chemically “fixed” and made permanent, by printed images and by works of art.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The Black Art

A PRINTING PRESS IS A MACHINE.1 IT HAS NO MORALITY. BUT ITS POTENTIAL power is awesome. The visionary poet (and working printer) William Blake imagined that he visited a “printing house in Hell.” There he “saw the method in which knowledge is transmitted from generation to generation” and “printing in the infernal method, by corrosives, which in Hell are salutary and medicinal … displaying the infinite which was hid.” And, as Blake observed, “if the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.”2 He articulated, in an extreme form, his contemporaries’ general confidence in the power of the printing press as a moral agent. This had distant roots, but in the Enlightenment the magical agency of the press to transform society became a near-universal belief. Censorship was the negative recognition of this absolute credence, and the eighteenth-century relaxation of control over the printed word (in the Habsburg domains and in Russia) was a short-lived experiment. But what was the state of those who did not enjoy the benefit of the printed word? They lived in an unimaginable darkness, waiting and longing for the coming of the light. And what of a government that deliberately turned its back upon the printing press? It could only be considered as the epitome of barbarism.

That was precisely the position of the Ottoman Empire and the infidel East. The West believed that the Ottomans “prohibited” the printing press because of their obscurantist faith—Islam. The Turks’ refusal to accept this unique benison from the West was an indication of their deep and fundamental wickedness. By sustaining ignorance they perpetuated the despotism described by Asli Çirakman.3 I believe that the debate over printing was the final formulation of the Western malediction of the Eastern infidel; but it was a condemnation carefully adjusted and attuned to the mores of an Enlightened age. What had begun with the Muslim as “the Abomination of Desolation,” then continued with “the Antichrist,” “the malignant foe,” and all the other epithets, ended with a portrayal of debased ignorance. This is the stereotype that has come through to the present day, and still flourishes in the West, but I believe that the Ottoman “failure” to adopt the printing press was the first point at which this prejudice was systematically articulated.

If I am right, then this obscure issue—whether or not some piece of machinery was or was not used at the far end of the Mediterranean—acquires a much deeper symbolic resonance. The shock of Westerners about the “intellectual desert” in the East was a commonplace observation. The French traveler and savant C. F. Volney wrote a hugely popular account of his travels to Syria and Egypt between 1783 and 1785. He was especially appalled at the lack of books. He portrayed a stark contrast: in France reading was common, but “in the East, nothing is rarer.” Over the space of six months in the Levantine provinces of the empire he found a number of texts, but what books he discovered were mostly ancient works on grammar and eloquence, and interpretations