Infidels_ A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam - Andrew Wheatcroft [245]
35. Mehmed Ali had sent Nikola Masabki to Italy in about 1811 to learn the craft of printing. He set up the new government press at Bulaq, with Arabic and Persian fonts. The development of printing in the Middle East (and Masabki’s visit to Milan) has now been covered comprehensively in an important work of collective scholarship edited by Eva Hanebutt-Benz, Dagmar Glass, and Geoffrey Roper: Middle Eastern Languages and the Print Revolution: A Cross-Cultural Encounter, Westhofen: WVA–Verlag Skulima, 2002.
36. On the Cayols, see Johann Strauss, “Le livre Français d’Istanbul (1730–1908),” in Hitzel (ed.), Livres, pp. 276–301.
37. Women’s magazines were especially successful, and some included engravings and (after 1908) photographs of fashionable women. See Kadin Eserleri Kütuphanesi, Bibliografiya Olushturma Komisyonu, Istanbul; Kütüphanelerindeki eski harfli Türkçe kadin dergileri bibliyografyasi (1869–1927), Istanbul: Metis Yainlari, 1993.
38. See Messick, Calligraphic State.
39. This oral system also constituted a very active (and controlling) form of the interpretative community proposed by Stanley Fish. There was much less of the individual forming his or her own singular ideas, as Kevin Sharpe describes in his study of the reading habits of Sir William Drake in seventeenth-century England. As Sharpe put it, Drake “constituted himself … as a thinking and feeling entity, an ego, a ‘conscious self,’ and as an entity to be so conceived; and he did so through writing and reading.” In the “calligraphic state,” texts were formed communally and more often than not reinforced collective views. Other ways of reading came later, with the greater profusion of printed texts. See Stanley Eugene Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), and Kevin Sharpe, Reading Revolutions: The Politics of Reading in Early Modern England, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000, p. 340.
40. I find Madigan’s The Qur’an’s Self-Image very persuasive on this topic.
41. See Esin Atil, “The Art of the Book,” in Esin Atil (ed.), Turkish Art, Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1980, pp. 138–238. This remains an essential introduction, but much work has been done in the last twenty years. Many of these books were state art, and the collective volume The Sultan’s Portrait: Picturing the House of Osman (Istanbul: Isbank, 2000) has contributions by all the main specialists in the field.
42. See The Rescue of Nigbolu by Sultan Bayezid, in Lokman, Hunername, vol. 1, 1584–85, Istanbul: Topkapi Saray H. 1523. fol. 108b.
43. Private citizens also commissioned pictorial art but, like the ruler, kept it out of sight.
44. De Hamel, The Book.
45. See Manguel, History, p. 95.
46. For “vectors and forces,” see Kress and Van Leeuwen, Reading Images. For “icontexts,” see Alain Montandon (ed.), Icontextes (Paris: Ophrys, 1990), and Peter Wagner, Reading Icontexts.
47. James Elkins writes of a Renaissance engraving that it “evokes writing, it has the feeling of writing, or language, not because of some nebulous or unrecognised habits of seeing, but on account of a dozen or so specific qualities that are also shared by writing.” The engraving (from a picture by Mantegna) “is an image that evokes pictures as it evokes writing … Whatever narrative we might want to see here will be the result of a certain reading of the relation of signs.” See Elkins, On Pictures, pp.