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The time will be given in Turkish fashion, which begins to count at sundown, and goes on for the whole twenty-four hours, so in the middle of the afternoon one may be told it is exactly 17 o’clock. Then as the sun does not have the politeness to set every day at the same time, it is necessary to carry an almanack in one’s head to reduce the Turkish time to English.54

The issues discussed in this chapter all come down to timing. In the twenty-first century, the West and the East now share many of the same goods and commodities, and especially radio, television, movies, and the Internet, as well as books, magazines, and newspapers. But these did not come into use at the same time. There was a lag, with the West developing new modes of communication, and the East adopting them later. It was four centuries before images and the printed word became as common in the Muslim East as they were in the West. With film, radio, and television it was a matter of decades; with the Internet, less than five years. But that long delay in accepting the printing revolution had profound consequences. It meant that Eastern time scales and Western time scales were not identical, and like my great-uncle in need of the watch, we need a means to relate the two.

The argument of this book is that both the Christian infidels and the Muslim infidels have regarded each other with suspicion throughout their long connection. Each routinely cursed and abominated the other, which is only to be expected. But the malediction has not been of quite the same kind. Certainly from the invention of printing, and through the proliferation of images, the West’s maledicta have been infinitely more potent and widespread. But now, as the clock moves on, the East has learned the lesson. “Islam” uses the printing press and visual and electronic media with the same skill and sophistication as the West. And it has also learned how these new techniques can now carry the East’s maledicta, farther and more potently than the scribe’s pen.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Maledicta

WORDS OF HATE

THE TWO OPPOSING SIDES AT LEPANTO IN 1571 SHOUTED TO EACH other from the galley decks. We can deduce a few things about that exchange. Although the crews and soldiers might not have the language spoken by the enemy, provided they could hear the sounds of speech above the din of battle, their minds would have attempted to make what was said intelligible. Human physiology dictates that the brain cannot choose not to process what it hears as sound. David Crystal puts it, “When we hear sounds, we hear them as speech, or non speech: there seems to be no middle ground. No matter how hard we try, we cannot hear speech as a series of acoustic hisses and buzzes, but only as a sequence of speech sounds.”1

Curses, maledictions, insults, and invocations of divine aid against the hated enemy were what both Christians and Muslims would have expected in such an extreme context. But the process of understanding what was being said even in the midst of battle was little different from what happened in the mixed communities around the Mediterranean on a daily basis over many centuries. In everyday encounters, the human brain would process all speech sounds. Face-to-face, gesture and body language could be read even if the words were unintelligible. Mistakes might be made, but it was usually easy to determine from the circumstances whether the speaker’s intention was friendly or hostile. The first channel of understanding—interpreting the sounds—is involuntary; only by physically blocking off the sound can this be prevented. The second channel—attributing meaning to those sounds—is, I suggest, in part a conditioned reflex based on past experience and in part a reasoned assessment of the current situation. For example, an insult or a coarse suggestion shouted across the street is usually clear as to its intention. Such an interchange exists below the level of understanding what the words mean. The hearer does not need to