Infidels_ A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam - Andrew Wheatcroft [174]
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 Islam.
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