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By Root 1147 0

quite different. Brinkley Messick has coined the redolent phrase “the calligraphic state” to describe a society (in Yemen) that existed without images and was ruled by the written word.38 His concept was founded on the power and importance of script in the Arabic tradition. But the written word in that tradition was itself but a shadow of the spoken word. The human voice was more potent than any form of writing, extended as it was by body language, vocal tone and inflection, and even by an audience’s energizing presence.39 The essence of Islam was a recitation (qur’an), carried over into a book (kitab). And that book might not even be a physical text, but a book that existed only in the mind.40 Texts written in Arabic were suffused with something of this divine book, but even a sacralized script could only imperfectly express its ineffable oral grandeur.

Printed images had no public place in this world. They were at most for private enjoyment by the sophisticated few. Esin Atil has described the evolution of the imperial studio (nakkashane) that produced illustrated books.41 In this studio some artists specialized in calligraphy, especially in the elaborate imperial signatures, or tughra. The portrait painters, because of their skill in depicting the human form, were an essential but more marginal and exclusive group within the studio and among its freelance workers. There were many artists working privately in the capital, but few who declared themselves as painters of portraits, in part certainly because of the opprobrium this activity might attract. What was appropriate for the sultan was more risky for the individual artist or collector. Some sultans from Mehmed the Conqueror onward both commissioned books full of images and amassed other illustrated books from a variety of sources. They were all stored with other treasures for the private use of the sultan in the Inner Treasury of the Topkapi Palace.

The production of these works in the sixteenth century, notably the histories, was an act of state, dramatizing the course of Ottoman history and the successes of Ottoman arms under the sultans. They therefore depicted both Muslims and non-Muslims, but there appears much less of the hostility that dominates many Western images of the infidel. In, for example, Lokman’s Hunername, the Westerners are shown as ordinary human figures. On one page they appear very bored, some playing dice, a few firing their cannon at the Ottoman armies, and one man (improbably) asleep against an artillery piece. None of them are especially vicious images.42 This does not, of course, say anything about popular attitudes, since these images would be seen only by the privileged few.43 But such a presentation in a state document was obviously both appropriate and acceptable to the imperial patron. The Westerners might be ritually reviled in word or in writing, but they were depicted merely as objects of curiosity.

Magnificently decorated Qur’ans are common but it is impossible to conceive of a Qur’an with images in the way that there were numerous pictorial Bibles.44 Images with a human face or an animal form played, at most, a marginal part in the formation of Muslim culture. To the majority of Muslims, beyond the small groups of urban sophisticates, images were incomprehensible. The closest I can come to understanding this experience is the situation described by the writer Albert Manguel in his enticing book A History of Reading. Manguel relates how in 1978 he was working for a publisher in Milan. One day a package arrived.

It contained, instead of a manuscript, a large collection of illustrated pages, depicting a number of strange objects and detailed but bizarre operations each captioned in a script none of the editors recognized … Made entirely of invented words and pictures, the Codex Seraphianus [after its author, Luigi Serafini] must be read without the help of a common language, through signs for which there are no meanings except those furnished by a willing and inventive reader.45

Intrigued, I went to the British Library to see