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Islam and paper by Louis Proyect 23 February 2002 14:44 UTC |
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In "Paper Before Print: The History and Impact of Paper in the Islamic World" (Yale University Press, $45), Jonathan M. Bloom traces the history of paper, as well as of writing itself. Any such account involves the cultures that use paper, what they used it for, and how paper so shaped history that it can seem to be identical with civilization. Paper is vegetable fiber soaked to a pulp and dried in thin sheets. Its origins in China go back so far that they have become lost in myth. It was invented as wrapping (the paper bag precedes the New York Times, Chinese Kleenex precedes the Analects of Confucius, and fastidious Chinese aristocrats had toilet paper in 600 A.D.). For the first 3,000 years of writing, clay tablets, bamboo strips, and papyrus (a kind of paper) served for letters, government documents, and drawing. The craft of papermaking spread from China along the Great Trade Route. This diffusion was the work of western Islam, in Persia and Afghanistan. Although the Koran was piously transcribed only onto parchment (usually sheepskin), it was eventually written on paper as copies to be memorized by students. For centuries the Koran could not be printed, partly because the calligraphy in which it is written is an integral part of its beauty. Gibbon laments that we got gunpowder from China when we could have had paper and printing. When Gutenberg invented movable type, paper was still considered a tacky surface for writing. The hand-copied manuscript book on vellum was what the Middle Ages considered "a book." The Medicis would not allow a printed book into their libraries, even when Venetian, Dutch, and German presses were printing the most beautiful books the world has ever seen. Professor Bloom's study is focused on Islamic writing, as that is where paper evolved a culture of all but unimaginable splendor in calligraphy and the illuminated manuscript. Baghdad was the center of civilized writing: poetry, theology, science, history, cartography, medicine, and narrative prose—the Thousand and One Nights, for example. Paper Before Print is a sumptuous book: 8K by 11 inches, beautifully illustrated, lucidly written, and meticulously researched: its bibliography runs to thirteen pages. There are sidebars in the margins that go into erudite technologies. This is a book to put on your shelf beside Jean Seznec's The Survival of the Pagan Gods (1940 in French; 1953, English) and George Sarton's magisterial Introduction to the History of Science (1927). These three studies rectify our traditional notion that Western civilization jumped from Greece and Rome into the Renaissance and modern times. It was, rather, passed on to us by Islam, enriched and sophisticated, and on paper. (from a review in the March 2002 Harper's) -- Louis Proyect, lnp3@panix.com on 02/23/2002 Marxism list: http://www.marxmail.org
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