"We are all steeped in weaknesses and errors," says Voltaire in his Philosophical Dictionary. "Let us forgive one another's follies - it is the first law of nature. The Parsee, the Hindu, the Jew, the Mohammedan, the Chinese deist, the Brahman, the Greek Christian, the Roman Christian, the Protestant Christian, the Quaker Christian trade with each other in the stock exchanges of Amsterdam, London, Surat or Basra: they do not raise their daggers..." It is significant that Voltaire uses the image of the marketplace. Trade brought Europeans face to face with the inhabitants of remote elsewhere. The British believed it was universal human nature. Commerce with the Ottoman empire was one of the prime ways in which Europeans came into contact with Islam. Gibbon poured cold water on western images of the Turkish conquest of Constantinople in 1453 as a one-sided tragedy, and argued that the transformation of Haghia Sophia from a church to a mosque freed the late-Roman architectural masterpiece of Christian clutter. When Lord Elgin was sent as ambassador extraordinary to Constantinople in the early 19th century, Lady Elgin wrote home about the splendors of the Topkapi Serai: "In a window there were two turbans covered with diamonds. You can conceive nothing in the Arabian Nights equal to that room." The objects that came from other places unsettled prejudices, although not perhaps those of Samuel Johnson. When the great lexicographer called East Indians "barbarians", his biographer Boswell

objected. "'You will except the Chinese, sir?' Johnson: 'No, sir.' Boswell: 'Have they not arts?' Johnson: 'They have pottery.'" But it is Boswell who speaks for mainstream 18th-century opinion: he tolerates Johnson's philistinism as he tolerates (as a Scot) Johnson's asinine remarks .

 

THE SPLENDORS OF TOPKAPI SERAI AND HAGHIA SOPHIA

You enter the King's Library from the white contemporary space of the Great Court and are immediately in another time.

It is significant that Voltaire uses the image of the marketplace. Trade brought Europeans face to face with the inhabitants of remote elsewhere. The British believed it was universal human nature. Commerce with the Ottoman empire was one of the prime ways in which Europeans came into contact with Islam. Gibbon poured cold water on western images of the Turkish conquest of Constantinople in 1453 as a one-sided tragedy, and argued that the transformation of Haghia Sophia from a church to a mosque freed the late-Roman architectural masterpiece of Christian clutter.

 

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