European captivity narratives abounded while Muslim ones went unwritten and unread

Evidence

A striking difference is that while we have many accounts written by Chris­ tians who escaped or were redeemed from Muslim captivity, we have hardly any accounts written by Muslims returning from Christian captivity. … The other was an Ottoman inter­ preter, Osman Aga, who was captured by the Habsburg forces and held prisoner for some time; he could speak German and therefore was able to communicate with his captors. He was taken around to various places and eventually released. Exceptionally, in 1724–5 he wrote two accounts of his adventures among the infidels. Clearly, they did not evoke much interest. Each survives in a single manuscript. Both are in European collections, and seem to be totally unknown in the east. The same is true of the Qadi’s account of his travels and misadven­ tures. Obviously there was a great curiosity on the one side; there seems to have been no corresponding curiosity on the other. The captives would surely have told their story if there had been anyone interested, but it seems that there was none. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 750

Categorization

• XREF: Directly corroborates core Said-adjacent claims that knowledge production about the region was one-directional — the West produced the archive while the East produced almost none of it.
• SEED: An essay angle on how archival absence itself functions as evidence: the non-existence of Muslim captivity narratives shows curiosity itself was unevenly distributed, not just power.
• QUESTION: Why did the two Muslim accounts end up only in European collections and unknown in the East — was this editorial curation, travelers’ own lack of circulation, or lost Ottoman readership?