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I was thinking about the two main characters in two lights:
1) That Hoja was actually the Italian man who did actually throw away his faith at the decisive moment and from that point forward lives as two personalities: Hoja and the Venetian. I know that's a bit problematic for various reasons, but it interests me to think of it in that way.
2) That the Venetian represents a Western ideal or vision that was enviously stolen by the Turkish to push themselves forward and that the Turkish empire struggled between the more mystical nature of its past and the new rationalism/science that they wanted to adopt. Looking at it this way explains a few things to me:
- The way that public opinion never quite damned Hoja, but only the influence on him - the Western influence.
- The fact that that the characters became almost as one which told me that they were possibly more about halves of a whole, each half battling for supremacy.
- The strange envy/inferiority complex of Hoja towards the Venetian
- The odd and incomplete way that the Venetian's methods were adopted making a statement of how various ideas were adopted without changing the basic way of thinking to make them productive (the machine of war being a great example)
- The fact that rational thinking had to bend to adapt to mysticism - becoming an astrologer instead of an astronomer and all that comes with it
- The eagerness and passion with which the initial adoption took place reminded me of an empire eager to quickly gain the advantages of an enemy it secretly admires
- The obsession with the difference in the Western man when exploring sin and the discovery and conscious rejection that all men sin the same seemed to also have a national rather than character-based feeling to it.
There's just so much more to this story, but the above were two things I was thinking about the further I read.
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