Infidels_ A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam - Andrew Wheatcroft [179]
Then as soon as they reached the first Turkish houses, they began to hear curious sounds: people calling to one another, slamming their courtyard gates and the shutters of their windows. At the very first doorway a small girl opened one of the double gates a crack, and muttering some incomprehensible words began spitting rapidly, as though she were laying a curse upon them. One after the other, gates opened and shutters were raised to reveal for a moment faces possessed with a fanatical hatred. The women, veiled, spat or cursed, and the boys shouted abuse, accompanied by obscene gestures and unambiguous threats, clapping their buttocks or drawing their hands across their throats … Daville saw them dimly, as though through an unpleasant veil trembling in front of his eyes. No one ceased working or smoking or raised his eyes to honour the unusual figure with so much as a glance … Only Easterners can hate and despise others to such an extent and display their hatred and contempt in such a way.2
Daville knew hate when he heard and saw it. (Would he have been more, or less, affronted had he understood what the women were shouting at him? He might have been able to respond effectively in kind; but on the other hand, the insult might have been even more mordant.) The insults got through, penetrating the armor of incomprehension.
Words of hate, like words of love, have a strong sense of intention.3 The Christian and Muslim worlds have been religious, geographical, political, and economic rivals and competitors since their point of first contact, and it is no wonder that words of hate rather than words of love have predominated when one world evoked the image of the other. But thereafter, the process and consequence of evoking that image diverge. How was hostility formed out of two contrary experiences of life? The first was, and remains in some areas, that of living side by side. The second was when the object of hatred was never experienced directly, but was nonetheless terrifying. This was largely how the image of the lustful Saracen or the terrible Turk was formulated in the West by scholars who never lifted their eyes from the pages of their texts. Living in close proximity might give a human dimension to the Other. Lack of contact might allow the formation of Romantic notions, which infused many genres in literature and the visual arts. But the outcome was not necessarily predetermined by the context.
Maledicta exist everywhere. Many people use them, but normally in a private or restricted context. Their significance is defined by where and to whom they are addressed. Everyone will talk to their friends and peers in a language that they would not use publicly—to their parents, their boss, or other figures of respect. But when private speech becomes public knowledge, its significance shifts.4 The power of curses and abuse is directly related to this resonance and since the invention of print, the boundaries between the private and the public contexts have slowly diminished. There is an important distinction: words spoken inside a family, in an isolated village, are functionally (if not philosophically or theologically) different from the same words published in newspapers or broadcast worldwide on television and radio.
From reading Mikhail Bakhtin, I began to get an insight into this world without fixed meaning or solid structures. Perhaps Bakhtin’s harsh experience of life was reflected in what and how he wrote. He was born in 1895, the second son of a prosperous provincial banker. A golden early career ended when he fell foul of Stalin in 1929. For the whole of his adult life, revolution and the social transformation of Russia distorted Bakhtin’s fate. Instead of falling victim to a bullet in the