Infidels_ A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam - Andrew Wheatcroft [242]
10. A short-lived mill was set up in France at Troyes a little earlier.
11. Little is known of this first paper mill, while much more is known of the eighteenth-century mill set up at Yalova, on the southern (Asian) side of the Sea of Marmara in 1744. This spa town has a constant supply of high-quality water necessary for any volume of production. See Fatma Müge Göçek, East Encounters West: France and the Ottoman Empire in the Eighteenth Century, New York: Oxford University Press, 1987, pp. 114–15.
12. Most of the Ottoman sources are not contemporary with the first fifteenth- and sixteenth-century prohibitions. See ibid., pp. 110–11.
13. Thevet’s life of Gutenberg, in Histoire des plus illustres et savans hommes de leurs siècles (Paris: Manger, 1671), vol. VII, p. 111, cited by Gdoura, Début, pp. 86–7.
14. The Taliban’s and the “Islamic Emirate” of Afghanistan’s attitude toward images was aniconistic. Comparisons have been drawn with Byzantine iconoclasm as state policy, and it is hard to find so radical and coordinated an Islamic equivalent in modern times. Even the murderous excesses of the Ikhwan in the capture of Mecca and Medina (and the destruction of tombs and images) were not acts of state. The Taliban’s policy plainly was. The supreme leader Mullah Mohammed Omar ordered the destruction of all statues in the country, which resulted in the notorious and highly public blowing-up of the ancient Buddhist statues at Bamiyan. The official statement made through the AP agency stated that “in view of the fatwa [religious edict] of prominent Afghan scholars and the verdict of the Afghan Supreme Court it has been decided to break down all statues/idols present in different parts of the country. This is because these idols have been gods of the infidels, who worshipped them, and these are respected even now and perhaps may be turned into gods again. The real God is only Allah, and all other false gods should be removed.” It was also asserted that photographs and electronic images were likewise forbidden, but Taliban officials themselves photographed the destruction of the statues. Many Taliban leaders allowed their photographs to be taken, and it has been suggested that their “image policy” was religious in theory but selectively political in practice.
15. See David Talbot Rice, Islamic Painting: A Survey, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1971, pp. 21–6. For the Abbasids, see Richard Ettinghausen, Arab Painting, New York: Rizzoli, 1977, pp. 41–53. The classic statement is Arnold, Painting in Islam.
16. Iconoclasm in Reformation Europe was directed not so much at images but at art used in a religious context. See, for example, Philips, Reformation.
17. See Goffman, Ottoman Empire, p. 91. This short book, which is innovative both in its structure and in its insights, is a mature and compelling correction to a long tradition of misrepresentation. I am extremely grateful to Virginia Aksan for drawing it to my attention.
18. See Lewis, Discovery, especially his account of the Egyptian scholar Sheikh Rifaa Rafi al-Tahtawi’s five-year stay in Paris.
19. The stage of final reading, when a written text is read out loud, is still an essential part of the legislative process in the United States and the United Kingdom.
20. Cardinal Ferdinando de’ Medici financed the establishment of the Typographia Medicea Linguarum Externarum by Raimondi in 1585.
21. The first book to be printed in Ottoman Turkish was George Seaman’s translation of the New Testament. He was the interpreter to Sir Peter Wyche, English ambassador to Constantinople, and the book was printed at Oxford in 1606. In 1734 William Caslon was commissioned by the Society for the Promotion of Christian Literature to cut an Arabic font for a New Testament to be used in missionary