Full of Eastern promise


Ottomania: the Romantics and the


myth of the Islamic Orient Roderick Cavaliero I.B. TAURIS, 252PP, £49.50 ■ Tablet Bookshop price £44.55


20 years earlier, he would have “gone to Constantinople to study Arabicke, like Pococke”. In his broad-ranging study of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Orientalist writers, painters and composers, Roderick Cavaliero mentions the now forgotten Revd Richard Pococke. He was an Anglican clergyman whose travel book Description of the East & Other Countries was widely read in its day, evidently seducing even Dr Samuel Johnson. During the eighteenth century, the Orient became increasingly fashionable in the West – carpets and coffee, baths and tulips – and with this modishness developed the lurid, highly wrought romantic Eastern tale, mixing cruelty, magic and sensuality in harem and bagnio. Shelley and Byron, Disraeli and Tennyson, Rossini and Mozart, Walter Scott, Coleridge and many another wrote, painted or composed on Oriental themes. First Edward Lane then Richard Burton translated the Arabian Nights, and travellers brought back accounts of Turkey and the Levant, Egypt, North Africa, Persia and Kashmir. Best-sellers followed: Lord Byron’s long


D


poem The Corsair sold 10,000 copies on the day of publication, and Thomas Moore’s hugely popular “Lalla Rookh” introduced a swooning Victorian public to the wonders of the Shalimar gardens, where the rose bloomed, the bulbul sang, and dolorous ladies languished unseen. Cavaliero points out that this fascination with a mythologised East had nothing to do with any genuine interest in or admiration for Islam, as a religion or as a way of life – rather the reverse. Western authors and public alike disapproved of perceived Islamic cruelty and absolutism, as well as the repression of women inside the harem and the sordid trade of slavery carried out by piracy.


OUR REVIEWERS


Brian Morton writes about the arts for The Tablet.


Robert Carver is the author of The Accursed Mountains: travels in Albania.


Isabel Quigly’s most recent book is A Portrait of the Royal Society of Literature.


Jane O’Gradyteaches philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London.


20 | THE TABLET | 5 February 2011 01420 592974


r Johnson remarked to Boswell that, had he been granted his royal pension


Maria Callas as Fiorilla and Nicolai Rossi-Lemeni as Selim in the 1955 revival of Rossini’s Il Turco in Italia at La Scala in Milan


Moore’s “Larry O’Rourke” but didn’t like Irish tales. Thomas Moore, the Irishman, had indeed used “Lalla Rookh” to draw an analogy with English oppression


However, the gaudy oriental


property-box full of turbans, Turkish delight and danseuses à ventre was always there to dip into for those bored with the likes of Mrs Gaskell and her novels of English social realism. The Terrible Turk, the lustful Pasha, monstrous black eunuchs, beautiful odalisques reclining naked around a marble bath, the shimmering desert beyond, a swashbuckling pirates’ lair on a rocky Aegean isle – all were available in verse or prose from the highly respectable Mudie’s Library in Charing Cross Road: shivers of fear and frissons of forbidden passions, all for a few pennies a week. This was “the East as barbarism cloaked in cloth of gold”, sipped safely at home. Cavaliero treats the whole phenomenon as a series of myths: the myth of the despot, the myth of the Arabian Nights, of Lord Byron, Egypt, Bonaparte, Persia, the Crusades and so on. For myth was what the Orientalists were interested in, rather than reality. Gradually the whole genre developed into comic opera and the Abominable Turk of Gladstone’s thundering denunciations over the Bulgarian Massacres became an object of fun rather than fear, the farcical stage-Turk of Rossini’s L’italiana in Algeri. In 1685, a Turkish army was at the gates of Vienna; by 1820, Greece was struggling successfully to free itself from the Islamic yoke; by 1920, Constantinople and Jerusalem had both been occupied by British troops, and the Ottoman Empire was no more. Cavaliero concludes with John Buchan’s Greenmantle, a failed-jihadi espionage thriller set in the dissolving Turkish Empire of 1916: after that, the threat had evaporated completely, the myth exploded. The Oriental tale was also used to disguise criticism closer to home. Lady Holland remarked that she had read


in Ireland, just as Byron and Shelley used the Christian Levantines’ struggle for freedom in more wide-ranging sermons on universal human rights and opposition to tyranny. Clearly and attractively written, with a thankfully complete absence of academic jargon, this deeply researched and stimulating blend of cultural history and literary interpretation makes good sense for most of the time, though occasionally the boundaries between myth and reality become blurred. Twice Cavaliero questions the Ottoman drowning of erring wives, stating: “Muslim law has never permitted the drowning in a sack for marital infidelity.” Well, no – but nor has it sanctioned female circumcision, the chador, eye make-up for Taliban males, suicide bombing and many other customs now considered by some of their apologists to be “Islamic”. Sometimes Cavaliero seems to slide right off the rails: “The harem was a society as disciplined and hierarchical as the Christian nunnery,” he asserts boldly, proffering no evidence whatsoever. How many Christian nunneries has he ever studied, one


Myth was what the Orientalists were interested in, rather than reality


wonders? Or harems, for that matter? At least he does not fall into the posture of maximising supposed Oriental virtues and minimising those of


the Occident. The cruelties of the Barbary pirates, the arbitrary terror of absolute rule and the complete lack of security or real justice in the Orient get full and honest coverage. In the end, he judges that the Islamic East was, for most of the Romantics, as it was for Lord Byron, “a place of dereliction and oppression”. Behind the seductive robes that cloaked the myth, the reality was then, as indeed it still is today, often frightening and sometimes cruelly barbarous. Robert Carver


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