Infidels: A history of the conflict between Christendom and Islam

by Andrew Wheatcroft

Remember the old story: no point in worrying about the bullet that has your name on it, but be very worried about the one inscribed ‘to whom it may concern’.

The communities belonged to distinct and separate castes. The word ‘caste’ is nowadays associated with Indian Hinduism. It was taken by the Portuguese to India in the sixteenth century and they used it to communicate – imperfectly – the complex social structure that they found there.

The Angel of God had told his mother, Hagar, ‘Call his name Ishmael; because the Lord hath heard thy affliction. And he will be a wild man; his hand will be against every man; and every man’s hand shall be against him.’[42] Wildness, violence, lack of self-control and unbridled passion were the fundamental critiques that the Christian world had made of the Sons of Ishmael from the earliest days.

For many Muslims, a visual image made by a human hand was something completely abstract and unknown. A picture was simply a category of evil like the Devil himself. It was irreligious, an innovation, to be shunned and avoided. Culture formed around the spoken word, which translated the glories of nature not into an image but into poetry. The world of Islam did not share the iconic awareness common throughout the West, where images were part of the culture that developed in every European nation. Even those ascetic Protestants who defaced sculptures in churches, and ground the images of saints, martyrs and the Holy Virgin underfoot, usually accepted pictures in the secular domain. At the very least, they knew what images were.

There is clock time and there is human time.