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By Root 1233 0

away many religious objections. It was argued that creating a photograph was not a human act, but God’s light acting upon an emulsion to make the image. This also opened the way to the acceptance of printed but non-photographic images, for from the mid–nineteenth century photography began to be used for making lithographic plates. By the same logic, etching, aquatint, and mezzotint, all processes that used chemical action to make an image, could also be treated more permissively. Engraving could also be explained away in the same fashion, because blocks were increasingly produced mechanically or chemically.

The same principles of exception later extended to both film and television. By the last decade of the twentieth century the Muslim realm had adapted to a world where depiction and the image of human forms were normal. Only the most purblind, austere, and narrow-minded continued to abominate all visual images, whether made by human art or God’s divine light. In the 1920s King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia had shocked his ikhwan (brotherhood of warriors) by having his photograph taken. This defender of the holy places of Islam, king of the Hijaz and future king of Saudi Arabia, paid no attention to their protestations, any more than to their fevered objections about cars and airplanes. It was relatively easy for a king to follow his own inclinations, but millions of ordinary Muslims did the same.

I HAVE INCREASINGLY COME TO THE CONCLUSION THAT ATTEMPTING codification of the differences between East and West (while they might have the solid sanction of holy writ) cannot correspond to the quotidian realities of life. Very few, in the East or in the West, in the past as in the present, voluntarily lived or live their lives wholly according to the holy books and the laws. Most people spent their days in conformity to the mores of their own group and community.52 At the interface, where the two worlds collide, problems occur. In one particular context, international commerce, you may observe eminent Western visitors to the East becoming frustrated at the different pace at which business is done. But equally, senior figures from the East can feel discomforted by the pell-mell of meetings in some Western countries: that characteristic phrase “cut to the chase,” taken from Western movie culture, dramatizes the difference. For some, what comes before the main event is only an insignificant prelude; for others, the main event is only part of the whole complex of customs and courtesies. This temporal shift, between an event that can be “cut” and one that cannot, I think, begins to get to the heart of difference.

There is clock time and there is human time. Gerhard Dohrn–van Rossum has shown how the West became progressively dominated by clock time. By the nineteenth century, one French minister of education could boast that he knew precisely what any school pupil in France would be studying at any hour of the school day.53 In the East, clock time was more controversial. Sultan Murad III, like his ancestor Mehmed the Conqueror, was curious about Western mechanical clocks. Murad’s astronomer and chief astrologer set up an observatory in the capital and wrote the first handbook on mechanical clocks in the empire. In 1561, he made a clock that showed the times of prayer, an instrument eventually destroyed because it was considered to be an infidel device seeking to replace the muezzin and the power of the human voice. Like the printing press, clock time has had a checkered and complex history in the East.

My great-uncle Otto Veit once had a watch that he had bought in the grand bazaar of Constantinople when he traveled there from Vienna in the years before the First World War. I remember it showed the different times that were used under the Ottoman Empire. One dial showed mosque time (hijri), one dial had time used in government and business offices (mali), and a third showed Western time (alafranga). He told me that he had bought it after he had missed appointments because those he was supposed to meet were using one time and he was