Muslim captives of Christians wrote almost no captivity accounts, revealing one-sided cultural curiosity.
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. There were many who either escaped or were redeemed or were exchanged, but I am aware of only two who wrote about it. One was a Turkish Qadi who in April 1597 was on his way to take up an appointment in Cyprus, and was captured by the Knights of St. John and taken to Malta. Two years later he was released, and wrote a short account of his misadventures. 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
- QUESTION: What explains the one-sided curiosity — differing literary traditions, religious attitudes toward captivity narratives, or simply differing rates of literacy and publication?
- XREF: Echoes the asymmetry themes in Bernard Lewis’s work on how the Islamic world and Europe studied each other — one side curious, the other indifferent.
- SEED: An essay on how the asymmetry of captivity narratives reveals which civilizations thought the other worth understanding — a mirror test for intellectual openness.