Istanbul

Istanbul is presented as a historical counterexample to the claim that religious tolerance belongs uniquely to modern Europe. A report by an Italian visitor in 1788 describes a city where different faiths shared public space and ordinary social life; in Slavoj Žižek’s argument, that scene exposes how European observers could encounter tolerance outside Europe yet explain it away as cultural degeneration.

Istanbul in the European account of religious difference

Istanbul enters a discussion of how the Balkans acquired their place in the European imagination. The book locates the emergence of the ideological category “Balkan” in the middle of the nineteenth century, when the region became fully exposed to European political, economic, military, and ideological modernization. Against that later image of the region as inherently intolerant and violent, Istanbul supplies an earlier example of religious coexistence under Muslim rule.

The example also sits within a wider history of refuge. After Spain expelled the Jews in 1492, many found asylum in Muslim countries and were permitted to practice their religion. Their visible presence in large Turkish cities unsettled some Western travelers, making Istanbul and its social world evidence not simply of difference, but of European discomfort with forms of coexistence that contradicted its self-image.

A visitor’s account from 1788

N. Bisani, an Italian visitor to Istanbul in 1788, described a church standing between a mosque and a synagogue, and a dervish beside a Capuchin friar. He reported that Turks, Jews, Catholics, Armenians, Greeks, and Protestants conversed about business or pleasure with harmony and goodwill, as though they belonged to one country and religion. His account presents tolerance not as an abstract doctrine but as a visible arrangement of institutions and everyday encounters.

Bisani found this coexistence astonishing, especially in comparison with what he regarded as the intolerance of London and Paris. Yet he explained the contrast by attributing it to the degeneration of Islam. The explanation reverses the apparent lesson of his own testimony: although the practices he observed demonstrated broad religious accommodation, his interpretive framework made them evidence of decline rather than achievement.

The city as a challenge to European self-image

The account makes Istanbul part of a critique of European claims to cultural superiority. The very practice later celebrated as a defining European virtue—multicultural tolerance—is treated by Bisani as a symptom of Muslim degeneration when encountered in a Muslim-governed city. The contradiction reveals how a judgment about another society can preserve the observer’s hierarchy even when the observed facts unsettle it.

In this reading, Istanbul is not merely a picturesque setting for religious plurality. Its reported coexistence helps expose the historical production of Europe’s contrast between its own modernity and an allegedly backward, intolerant East. The city’s place in the argument is therefore evidentiary and critical: it shows how Western perceptions can turn a counterexample into confirmation of the very prejudice that the counterexample calls into question.