DURING my recent brief visit to Istanbul, I spent some time at a couple of new museums. One of them, the Pera Museum, has been set up in the heart of the city by the Koch Group, a giant Turkish conglomerate. Pakistan has no such corporate ethos, alas, and our cultural life is the poorer for it.

In the museum, one area contained an exhibition of portraits of Turkish nobility as well as European diplomats and their wives who lived in the Ottoman capital. Painted in the western style in the 19th and 18th centuries, these portraits would have been unremarkable had it not been for the fact that most of them had been painted by European artists who had travelled to Constantinople. The remainder were done by local painters who had mastered the western technique.

Apart from the exotic Turkish clothes the subjects wore, thousands of similar formal portraits adorn the walls of galleries around the world. The difference lies in the fact that hardly any portraits exist of eastern diplomats and noblemen who travelled to the West in that period. The point I am trying to make is that for centuries, most of the interaction between East and West was one-way.

From Herodotus to Vasco da Gama, European explorers, adventurers, traders, priests and soldiers went east to make their fortunes and their reputations. There was little or no corresponding westward traffic throughout this period. As a result, western chancelleries and libraries built up a sizeable amount of information on the vast regions stretching east of the Bosphorus. And in time, their diplomats and generals were able to convert this knowledge into political power.

By contrast, Europe was terra incognita to the rulers of the East. Even at the height of their glory, the emperors of Constantinople, Delhi, Isfahan, Beijing and Tokyo knew of the West only though rumours and myths. Hardly any educated men from the East ever set foot in Rome, Paris or London. The only recorded expedition to explore the West set off from China in 1421. This fleet took two years to return with precious knowledge of faraway places. During this brief period, China was transformed into an insular, inward-looking nation. The ships were allowed to rot, and all records of the amazing journey destroyed.

Apart from this expedition, there were few other systematic efforts to find out about the lands and the people of Europe. Although the Ottomans ruled much of eastern Europe for centuries, their knowledge of western methodology and society remained sketchy at best.

One reason for this one-way traffic was that until the Industrial Revolution, the West produced very little that the East wanted or needed. Trade has always been the driving force behind exploration, with entrepreneurs financing expeditions to seek out exotic goods that fetched astronomical prices from Venice to Amsterdam. In fact, it was the insatiable search for spices like nutmeg and peppercorns that sent Vasco da Gama and Christopher Columbus to the ends of the known world.

Once trading outposts had been established, soldiers were needed to guard the ports and the depots, while priests were sent to administer to the spiritual needs of the traders and sailors. Soon, their missions expanded to save “heathen” souls. Trading colonies expanded, and the rest is history: the colonial era had arrived.

This creeping colonisation had no equivalent in the other direction. Even that intrepid traveller, Ibn-e-Batuta, went east from Morocco to India, and neighbouring areas. Another reason for this apparent lack of curiosity was the widespread notion that living with infidels in their lands would weaken the faith of the believers who undertook such spiritually hazardous journeys.

This belief was reinforced by the hygienic norms prevalent in Europe in that period. Given the lack of piped hot water, and the expense involved in heating water for most people, baths were considered a wicked luxury. According to one school of thought, a person was only bathed at birth and at death. Clothes that needed to be bleached were immersed in urine for its ammonia. One result of these practices was the regular outbreak of plague during the Middle Ages.

Of course, Arabs and Turks both conquered and ruled swathes of Europe by force of arms. But beyond the territories they controlled, there was little curiosity to learn more about the lands that lay across their borders. The knowledge that did exist normally came with western travellers, scholars and diplomats.

Thus when the western ascendancy began with the Industrial Revolution in the 18th century, the East was ill-prepared to counter it. The rise of rationalism and democracy also bypassed the East, with despotism and an archaic educational system being the norm. The shift in the balance of power may have seemed imperceptible in Constantinople and Delhi, but it was inexorable once it gained momentum.

Traders began to dictate terms to Mughal and Ottoman potentates. The East India Company played off one effete Indian prince against another, gaining a vast empire in the process. From Shanghai to Algiers, western powers either controlled huge colonies directly, or ruled through local proxies. By the early 20th century, few non-western countries could claim to be truly independent.

Even the post-colonial era has brought little real autonomy for most of them. By and large, the West has retained the commanding heights. Many developing countries are not developing at all, but remain mired in their poverty and ignorance, with growing populations and falling standards of living. This economic reality has forced inefficient and usually corrupt rulers to approach western financial institutions with their begging bowls.

Looking ahead, the only hopeful signs appear in those emerging economies that have adopted reason as the basis of education. China’s and India’s dramatic growth can be traced directly to their educated workforce. Neither has been reluctant to borrow from the West when it comes to setting up educational institutions. Both have jettisoned ideological baggage that might have handicapped their absorption of knowledge. Indeed, both have learned from their colonial past, and repudiated the complacency of their past rulers.

This, then, is the lesson we must all learn: knowledge is universal and has no frontier. When elected members of the Pakistani parliament demand that students should not be taught the pre-Islamic past of their country, they are only exhibiting the kind of thinking that allowed foreigners to rule us so easily. Until we can shed this kind of mediaeval, irrational mindset, we are doomed to stand in queue outside the IMF and the World Bank.