Infidels_ A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam - Andrew Wheatcroft [168]
He saw relatively little merit in Arabic, which simply rendered printing difficult.
The costs of printing are considerable, especially considering that paper has to be imported from Europe and the hand work is very slow. The former problem could be quite simply resolved, but the latter needs a more radical solution. Arabic characters have to be joined by hand, and to join and align them requires great care, and careful attention to each letter. Moreover, the way the letters join depends on where they come in the sentence, and there are even different varieties of letters at the beginning and end of a word. Finally there are many double letters. These cannot be made by simply doubling the existing letters. A compositor has to walk up and down a table eighteen feet long and find the letters which are contained in nine hundred type boxes. All these time-wasting operations mean that Arabic printers can never achieve the greater perfection of our own presses.4
Volney’s solution was a comprehensive reformation of the inconvenient script.5 He was shrewd enough to recognize that simply introducing the printing press alone was no answer to a much more fundamental problem: what was needed was a wholesale transformation of Eastern society, beginning with its language.
In 1791, he returned to the topic. In his much-translated observations on an apocalyptic “Clash of Civilizations,” which he called The Ruins, or, Meditations on the Revolutions of Empires and the Laws of Nature, he began his journey through the past “in the Ottoman dominions and through those provinces which were anciently the kingdoms of Egypt and Syria.” His dire prediction was based upon what he had seen of these lands under Ottoman rule; in chapter 12, “The Lessons of the Past Repeated on the Present,” he laid out the imminent doom of the Ottoman Empire. “Turkish” became an adjective evidencing contempt and condemnation: so China, where cruelty reigned, had “a truly Turkish government.” Moreover, he was sure that like the Muslim world “as long as the Chinese world shall in writing make use of their present characters, they can be expected to make no progress in civilisation.”6 What did Europe have that the Ottoman and the Chinese empires did not? Volney had no doubts, and expressed an idea that remains as potent in our day, a confident vision fulfilled even more successfully by our electronic media. They lacked “the gift of heavenly Genius, the holy art of printing, having furnished the means of communicating in an instant the same idea to millions of men and of fixing it in a durable manner, beyond the power of tyrants to arrest or annihilate.”7
Given the power that attached to the “holy art,” we need to disentangle the reasons that the infidel East apparently spurned it. The failure to adopt Gutenberg’s new art became a touchstone of the essential backwardness of Muslims. From the eighteenth century, it was a convenient explanation for the growing divergence of the Western and Eastern worlds, with the West looking forward and the East looking backward. It has become part of a historical paradigm, what the historian of science Thomas Kuhn called the “normal” state of understanding. To change or even question that norm is to enter a maelstrom. It is easier to pose the question as a counterfactual, a “what if.”8 What if Mehmed II “the Conqueror,” to cap his victory at Constantinople in 1453, had paid the debts of the floundering Mainz entrepreneur Johann Gutenberg, and shipped his printing press to the Old Palace above the Bosphorus? It is perhaps not such a foolish