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By Root 1190 0

Over time new forms of condemnation proliferated, but they were all raised upon a framework initially elaborated within a few decades of first contact. From this point, “Islam” was assimilated to existing examples of evil and ruin in the Old and New Testaments. These primordial ascriptions were repeated in later scholarly discourse and went unchallenged for centuries. They also leaked out beyond the community of scholars into the minds—or mouths—of ordinary people. Thereafter the words of the scholars acquired new meanings, but this process was resisted. Alcuin, the most renowned Anglo-Saxon scholar of the eighth century and founder of the academy in Charlemagne’s palace at Aachen, wrote: “Those people should not be listened to who say that the voice of the people is the voice of God, since the riotous tumult of the crowd is always very close to madness.”41 How ideas embodied in a few scholarly works were implanted within a much larger (and illiterate) population is still under debate.

Communicating ideas of the Muslim infidel depended on the way that language functions.42 There are many theories of how language works, but in the 1950s the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan provided a useful explanation of how language bears the traces of its use. He took the model first articulated by the father of linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure, and refined it to fit what he saw as the reality of human relationships. Saussure had defined communication as a pure and comprehensive system of signs, with each sign consisting of two elements.43 The first was what was described, or “signified,” from the French signifié. The second element was the “signifier,” the means by which its meaning was communicated, by spoken sound or by visible marks, such as writing.

Communication would be impossible if there were no common understanding about how signifier and signified were linked. The same object has to be named in the same way. But as a psychologist, Lacan saw among his patients that in practice no one-to-one relationship existed between the two elements. They were already part of a chain of mental connections, and carried internally the residue of those connections. Applied to curses and imprecations, Lacan’s theory of linguistic practice means that any insult has to be contextualized, because it carries inside it imperceptible traces of similar insults that have gone before. In the case of Christianity and Islam that context would encompass a history extending back over many centuries. If we accept this notion, then very few statements within that history can safely be taken at face value. Their meaning derives in part from the extended skein of fear and hatred. We lack the information in the patchy early records to see the full implications of this idea. But, stepping outside the chronological flow for a moment, there is an instance from the second half of the nineteenth century that suggests how hostility can fabricate and sustain such a tissue of meaning.

THIS EXAMPLE APPEARS IN THE BRITISH CONSULAR RECORDS FOR June 1860, at a time when there were savage attacks on Christians in the Levant, which will figure again later in this book. The British government asked its consuls in the Ottoman Empire to write a short overall impression of how Christians were living under a Muslim government. The various officials interpreted their open-ended instructions in different ways. Consul Blunt at Pristina in the Balkans remarked that Christians were “decidedly” better off than they had been ten years before. In those days “one can judge the measure of Turkish toleration practised at that time by having had to creep under doors scarcely four feet high.”44 The inference here was unambiguous. The Turks compelled Christians to make their church doors so low that worshipers had to bend to enter, and hence humiliate themselves. But as I read this, I wondered whether this seasoned consular official was interpreting the situation correctly. There was another explanation for these low doors that I had picked up elsewhere. This suggested that it was the