Communication in Middle East and Abroad

The culturewide significance of media of communication can be appreciated from the example of paper. Paper reached the Arabs in 751 C.E. when they conquered Turkistan and found Chinese papermakers there: "It is stated that craftsmen from China made [paper] in Khurasan like the form of Chinese paper" (Ibn al-Nadim, I, 39–40). The technique reached Iraq in the precise moment that the Abbasids were consolidating power, with administrative as well as cultural consequences. The caliph Harun al-Rashid (r. 786–809 C.E.) instituted the first of several bureaucratic reforms based on the use of paper. The chemistry associated with the fabrication and use of paper and inks reflects a characteristic mix of Indian, Persian, Greek, and Babylonian elements that appears in the movement of translation, especially early Arab alchemy. With an administrative reform of the early tenth century, all Abbasid edicts had to be copied on paper for provincial governors and for preservation in registers. Thus, paper was crucial to administrative expansion and bureaucratic consolidation, giving the Abbasids an augmented capacity for governing far-flung provinces effectively.

Paper was associated with a vertical mill, whereby a water wheel turns a horizontal axis fitted with hammers. Paper was one element in a unified set of Chinese technologies that diffused simultaneously westward along with the mill type: preparation of different kinds of oil, paper, sugar, indigo, lacquer, and tea—all of which require pounding or maceration (Daniels, pp. 30–39)—bringing the paper and sugar industries to the Middle East simultaneously. The names al-Warraq (papermaker) and al-Sukkari (sugar maker) appear in ninth-century Iraq.

It is thought that, because of the democratizing effect of paper, literacy was more widespread in the Islamic world than in medieval Europe, where both writing (on parchment) and reading were the province of a small, mainly clerical elite. But the definition of literacy has recently broadened somewhat: a person may well have a piece of paper (a deed, a horoscope, a prescription) that cannot be completely read, but the contents are generally understood. There was a great deal of what might be called partial literacy, and many people who could read (at whatever level) could not write. The two skills were not as tightly linked as they have been in recent centuries. Among Muslims and Jews, reading in particular and, to a lesser degree, writing, were skills that were required for an ordinary religious life, dependent on mastery of scriptural and other religious texts (hadith, Talmud). The Cairo Geniza (a repository of tenth-century documents written in Hebrew and Judeo-Arabic) shows a certain democratization of ideas: almanacs, amulets, horoscopes, prescriptions, and other such quasi-scientific paraphernalia were widely circulated.

Sacred objects were visualized in different ways. Judaism and Islam were iconoclastic, the Persians less so, thus human figures adorn their manuscripts. But the Muslims liked other kinds of representations such as huge, ornately lettered Korans.