Infidels_ A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam - Andrew Wheatcroft [170]
So, the theoretical absolutes crumble and the supposedly immutable mutates. The deeper we dig into the issue of images and of printing, at every point we discover there are unexpected ambiguities. Where the long-established assumptions about the East are tested, anomalies, divergence from the rule, and exceptions immediately emerge. Daniel Goffman has written that the reality of the Ottoman lands was a “world governed by exceptions.”17 This is a striking revision to long-held attitudes. Most writing about the Eastern world has hitherto assumed that the ordering of life as written down in legislation, regulations, and codes of precedence and behavior corresponded precisely to the everyday reality. For this reason Busbecq, writing in the sixteenth century, was still a valued authority in the eighteenth. Many Easterners have also believed in the protective value of a settled order within their world. Those who visited the West often perceived this quality of orderliness to be the best feature of their own world by comparison with what they saw as the turmoil of the West.18
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