From the Ottoman influence on Shakespearean characters to the secrets of symmetry coded within Arabesques, award-winning writers and historians took to the stage at the third day of the Hay Festival Abu Dhabi to highlight a few of the region’s contributions to western art, science and literature.
For starters, Elizabethan England was a lot closer to the Middle East than a lot of us might think. Speaking about the Arabic connection to the Elizabethan West was Jerry Brotton, historian and author of This Orient Isle: Elizabethan England and the Islamic World.
The reign of Queen Elizabeth I, which lasted until her death in 1603, is often described as the Golden Age. And it is easy to see why. England enjoyed a time of extravagance under her rule, and pop culture flourished, as expressed through writers such as William Shakespeare.
But when Elizabeth took over the crown in 1558, she found herself and her Protestant kingdom isolated from the neighboring Catholic states. Elizabeth reached out to Suleiman the Magnificent, who ruled the Ottoman Empire at the time, for help.
“The Catholic Pope had deemed Protestants as heretics,” Brotton says. “Queen Elizabeth then reaches out to the Islamic world and an alliance between the Protestants and the Sunni Muslims were formed.”
During the next ten years, England starts exporting scrap metals to the Ottoman Empire, namely tin and lead, which the Ottomans used to make guns and fight the Spanish and the Catholics.
This newly-established trade route inspired travel between the two countries. “However, there were less people travelling from the Ottoman Empire to England than the other way round. Many who lived in the Ottoman territories weren’t interested in going to England.”
Brotton explains that, at the time, there was risk of Protestants being snuffed out by Catholic forces. “A lot of them stayed in the Ottoman territories. In fact, it was safer for a protestant to be in the Ottoman Empire than it was for them to be in a Catholic country. A lot of them even converted to Islam.”
Brotton says that the back and forth between the two countries inspired the artists and the playwrights of that time. There were numerous references to the Muslim world in the writers of that time including Christopher Marlowe and Shakespeare. Othello, Brotton says, was likely inspired by Muhammad Al Annuri, a dignitary from the Barbary coast who had come to England to try and strike an alliance with Elizabeth.
"We see mentions of the Muslim world across a number of Shakespeare's writings from Henry VI to the Merchant of Venice to Othello. And Shakespeare was the kind of writer to take in mind the events and fashion of his time. So his audience understood his references thoroughly."
Marcus du Sautoy, a mathematician and author of Finding Moonshine and The Music of the Primes, then set the spotlight on Andalusia and its contribution to the mesmerising world of symmetry. Symmetry, he points out, is found everywhere from flowers and the molecular shape of viruses to the music of Bach.
“Symmetry is everywhere in nature. Bumblebees, for instance, who can’t see distances well, are attracted to the symmetry of flowers, which in turn need bees to distribute its genetic codes.”
Du Sautoy began delineating the human attempts at symmetry by giving the example of dice. For his session A Mathmatician's Journey through Symmetry, he brought with him a large triangular pyramid with four faces, known as a tetrahedron shape. This, he says, was one of the earliest conceptions of a symmetrical object, constructed out of sheep ankle bones in 2,500BC and used in games such as the Royal Game of Ur.
“Soon, other dice shapes came about. All of whom were perfectly symmetrical and indivisible. From the traditional cube dice to the dodecahedron with four faces. They are all in use today from games like backgammon to Dungeons and Dragons.”
Du Sautoy points out that the Greeks adopted the five dice shapes as symbolic representations of the four elements. The fifth die – the 12-faced dodecahedron – was a representation of the shape of the universe.
“The Islamic world adopted the elements of symmetry in their designs. It was forbidden to portray anything with a soul, such as humans or animals, in religious sites so artists found other ways to express the infinity of God.”
He provided the Alhambra as an example, displaying various symmetrical designs that are found on the walls of the 13th century Granada palace. Du Sautoy says that the patterns used in Alhambra and the rest of the Islamic world has long fascinated and inspired mathematicians and artists alike.
“Symmetry is not only reflection of the right and left,” he says. “But also movement. They can be rotated a number of times, or even half rotations, and they will end up looking exactly like if you hadn’t moved it at all.”
Du Sautoy says there are 17 possible arrangements for symmetrical designs. “They are like games. Two different patterns can still fall under the same symmetrical formula. And 16 of these were discovered and used in the Arab world. They came really close to the 17th as well.”
