Infidels_ A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam - Andrew Wheatcroft [246]
48. See Gilbert, Reading Images.
49. On the use of images in Protestant propaganda, the work of R. W. Scribner is the basic source. See, especially, Scribner, For the Sake.
50. See Madigan, The Qur’an’s Self-Image.
51. A very good description of this process of learning a language of faith, Arabic, in a culture where the national script is Roman, can be found in Baker, “Presence,” pp. 102–22.
52. See Fabian, Time and the Other.
53. See Gerhard Dohrn-van Rossum, History of the Hour: Clocks and Modern Temporal Order, trans. Thomas Dunlap, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996, pp. 251–8.
54. See Henry C. Barkley, Bulgaria Before the War During Seven Years’ Experience of European Turkey and Its Inhabitants, London: John Murray, 1877, p. 181.
CHAPTER 14: MALEDICTA: WORDS OF HATE
1. David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Language, 2nd ed., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, p. 145.
2. Ivo Andrić, Bosnian Chronicle, or The Days of the Consuls, trans. Celia Hawkesworth, London: Harvill Press, 1996, pp. 20–21.
3. The act of speaking is described by linguists as possessing three phases. All speech is a dialogue, even if you are listening only with your own interior voice. The first “speech act” is a locution: something is being said. The second is the intention that may be embedded in the utterance. This is described as the illocution. The third is the consequence that the locution has on the hearer, or perlocution. So, a statement like “Go to the devil” has a clear illocutionary force; it is unlikely that the listener will oblige. The perlocutionary outcome might more likely be anger, contempt, or amusement. The relationship between illocution and perlocution is uncertain and unstable. Moreover, even if the exact verbal content of the speech act is not understood, the same process of communication applies.
4. The Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin (writing with V. N. Volosinov) described “spreading ripples of verbal responses and resonances around each and every ideological sign.” See Pam Morris (ed.), The Bakhtin Reader: Selected Writings of Bakhtin, Medvedev, Volosinov, London: Arnold, 1994, p. 52. There is an animated debate as to whether Bakhtin or Volosinov wrote this, or whether both were involved. For the sake of clarity, I have put Bakhtin’s role first.
5. The italics are my addition, for clarity. See Michael Holquist’s paraphrase of Bakhtin in Dialogism: Bakhtin and His World, 2nd ed., London: Routledge, 2002, pp. 21–2. The fable is explained at greater length in Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist, Mikhail Bakhtin, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984, pp. 68–9.
6. Bakhtin, despite his preoccupation with Dostoyevsky and Rabelais, always regarded himself not as a literary critic but following a line of thought in Kant, as a “philosophical anthropologist.” This seems to me to express very well his preoccupation with the world as perceived, and not the remote fastnesses of theory. See Clark and Holquist, Mikhail Bakhtin, pp. 277–8. “Enemies in the mirror” is the central theme of Ron Barkai’s remarkable Cristianos y Musulmanes en la España medieval: El enemigo en el espejo, Madrid: Rialp, 1984.
7. This “never-meeting” is also a central theme of both E. M. Forster’s novel A Passage to India (1924) and of Paul Scott’s novel sequence The Raj Quartet (1966–74). But both suggest that “never-meeting,” although replete with dangers of violence, does not inevitably lead to hatred.
8. Morris, The Bakhtin Reader, pp. 86–9, quoting Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, ed. V. W. McGee, trans. C. Emerson and M. Holquist, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1986.
9. This is the subtitle of a valuable study by Keith Allen and Kate Burridge, Euphemism and Dysphemism: Language Used as Shield and Weapon, New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. I am grateful to Dr. Judy Delin for drawing my attention to this approach.
10. These are terms used in the contemporary Middle East. In 1983 Israeli general Rafael Eitan famously described the Palestinians as drugged cockroaches. More recently