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I'm only a third in and I agree with the "challenging" label. At this point I'm a bit confused as to what the message is in this book. I've come across the following:
1) The Venetian does what he needs to to survive - even exaggerate/lie about what he can do, but he draws the line at abandoning his religious ideals. He did confess that he might have changed his mind with more thought, but otherwise he stood firm.
2) The nature of scientific truth gets quite a beating as we progress with the Turk having some initial ideals that suffer in the face of "fools" and then he seems to abandon those ideals to pander to the whims of the Sultan - with predictions and with bizarre fictions on the animal kingdom.
3) The similarity in appearance between the two has a significance I can't put my finger on. Does it emphasise, perhaps, the struggle of a man of science when confronted by mysticism and superstition? Do we look at the struggle of the Turk and remember that Italians suffered from their own similar problem when Ptolemy's geocentric theories were challenged by Gallileo? Is this the connection? Our Venetian looks on with some superiority as a representative of the "they" - the Western scientific thought of which the Turk wants to gain approval. However, interestingly, Western scientific thought had its own mysticism vs science battle with the scientific revolution.
Hopefully, as I continue to read the story, I will have more to add/discuss.
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