by Jared Rubin
The Ottomans’ failure to adopt the printing press is one of the great missed opportunities of economic and technological history. In Western Europe, the press provided a host of new economic and educational opportunities that were simply unthinkable prior to the press. So why did the Ottomans ban this technology? Two possibilities are immediately discountable as the driving force behind the ban. First, the absence of printed works was not simply a reflection of the peculiarities of the Arabic script. While it is certain that the Arabic script presents greater challenges than the Latin script, Europeans quickly overcame any impediments. By 1530, Venetian printers printed the Qur’an in Arabic, and Italians and Parisians established numerous presses that were capable of printing in Arabic characters long before the Ottomans finally sanctioned the press. Pope Julius II (r. 1503–1513) had a book printed in Arabic on Christian prayer in 1514, and Genoese printers produced an Arabic edition of the Psalms of David in 1516. Both editions were presumably for Arabic-speaking Christian communities. Three noted Arabic publishing houses resided in Italy throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; one was the Medici press, which published Gospels and grammar books in Arabic.24 All three of these publishing houses produced works meant for Ottoman consumers. Indeed, until the nineteenth century, most printed works in Arabic were bibles or other Christian literature.25 In short, it did not take long following the spread of the press in Europe for enterprising printers to overcome any technical difficulties associated with printing in the Arabic script.
Second, it is also untenable that the absence of the Ottoman press was simply due to little demand for printed materials in the Ottoman Empire. It is likely true that the demand for books and pamphlets was smaller in the Ottoman Empire than in Western Europe, and it is quite possible that weak demand dampened incentives for prospective publishers to establish a press. Although there are no reliable estimates, historians generally agree that Ottoman literacy rates were very low in the early modern period: even as late as the early nineteenth century, Ottoman literacy rates were around 2–3 percent, while literacy rates were twice or thrice as high in many parts of Europe as early as 1500.26 Meanwhile, real wages for both skilled and unskilled workers in Istanbul were only slightly more than half of those for workers in the major European cities in the century following the invention of the press.27 Since books were a luxury good, lower wages in combination with lower literacy rates must have dampened the demand for books.
But it is simply untenable that demand for printed works in Arabic was so negligible as to make printing unprofitable in the absence of restrictions imposed by the sultan. The European experience suggested that demand for religious texts, especially the bible, was high regardless of the literacy rate or the language of publication. In Western Europe, even illiterates desired owning a bible. The same was almost certainly true for part of the Ottoman population regarding the Qur’an, even those who did not speak or read Arabic. Moreover, Muslim libraries were widespread well before the invention of the press. In the first four Islamic centuries, the Middle East housed some of the world’s great libraries. After paper was introduced to the Islamic world in Samarkand in the mid-eighth century (approximately five centuries prior to its introduction in Western Europe), paper mills spread rapidly throughout the Middle East and North Africa, and publishing via handwritten copy became an important industry. Copyists doubled as booksellers, and up to at least the thirteenth century, huge bookshops existed in Baghdad, Damascus, Cairo, Granada, and Fez.28 As a result, mosque libraries grew in cities large and small, and both private and public libraries were widespread. In the thirteenth century, large libraries existed in Baghdad, Damascus, Cairo, Shiraz, Fez, Samarkand, Bukhara, and Cordoba.29 Although the Mongol invasions destroyed some of these libraries, and it is possible that others fell into disuse as Middle Eastern economies stagnated, it is unfathomable that the printing press would have been unprofitable to an enterprising printer in such a culture. Indeed, Ziauddin Sardar (1993, p. 51) claims that “for over 800 years [prior to the invention of the printing press], Muslim civilization was genuinely a civilization of the book: founded by a book (the Qur’an) … its main preoccupation – while not defending or extending its borders – was the production and distribution of books.” True, by the late fifteenth century, the Ottoman and Egyptian Mamluk Empires had different intellectual environments than those present at the heights of the Abbasid Empire, but the importance of books in Islamic culture suggests that there must have been some latent demand for books at the time the Ottomans first heard of Gutenberg’s invention.
It is more likely that the relatively low demand for printed works combined with restrictions on the press to tilt the prospective printer’s cost-benefit calculation away from establishing a press that printed in Arabic. If there were indeed low demand for books, the benefits of establishing a press would have been low enough – although far from zero – to outweigh the potentially large costs of breaking an edict of the sultan. Combined, these forces created a “no printing in the Arabic script equilibrium”: demand was positive, but not high enough for any potential printer to take on the large costs of printing.
This insight can also help explain why there is little direct evidence of the ban’s enforcement in the 242 years between the enactment of the original edict in 1485 and the ultimate permission in 1727. The secondary literature by and large mentions the original edicts in 1485 and 1515 and then skips two centuries to Ibrahim Müteferrika’s press. This literature has not dug up any direct evidence of the Ottoman government denying Muslims trying to establish a press printing in the Arabic script in the intervening period. But this is exactly what one would expect. If the sultan is unlikely to accept a press printing in the Arabic script and demand is low anyway, there is little incentive for an entrepreneur to open a press in the first place. This is an equilibrium action. Sometimes, equilibrium actions are difficult to discern in economic history because the action is one of inaction: if no incentive exists to set up a press printing in the Arabic script, we should not see many (if any) edicts explicitly forbidding the press, because such an edict would have been unnecessary. All we have to go by is the language of the 1727 edict that did eventually permit the printing press, which made it appear that this was a major change in Ottoman policy.
Unfortunately for the Ottoman economy, this “no-print” equilibrium carried important dynamic consequences. It is not too much of a stretch to imagine how the introduction of the press could have facilitated a “virtuous cycle” – as it did in Europe – whereby increased literacy resulting from the press would have increased demand for books, which would have caused a supply response, which would have further increased literacy, and so on. As long as there was some initial demand for books, it would have been profitable for at least one firm to enter the printing industry and start the virtuous cycle. But the virtuous cycle could have only commenced if at least one individual had incentive to establish a press. The combination of weak demand and heavy restrictions against printing meant that incentives for any one individual to set such a process in motion were absent.
An important feature of this history is that the Ottoman sultan was not against printing per se, but only against printing in the Arabic script. This gives a clue as to where to look for the reasons for the restrictions on printing. The key is to answer the following questions: To whom was widespread printing in the Arabic script a threat? Was this individual or group powerful enough to convince the sultan to block the spread of printing despite the fact that the sultan was missing out on tax revenue and economic development by blocking this new and important technology?
Why the Ottomans Blocked the Printing Press
In order to uncover why the Ottoman sultans blocked a technology that had such obvious benefits, Metin Coşgel, Thomas Miceli, and I dug into the history of the period. Our main goal was to discover who the press would have hurt and whether they had the power to encourage the sultan to block it. The logic espoused in Chapter 2 sug
gests that a good place to start looking is the individuals or groups that propagated the sultan’s rule.
Like their Muslim predecessors, the Ottomans relied heavily on religious legitimacy to propagate their rule. Although the Ottomans could not claim a bloodline to the Prophet – indeed, they were not even Arab – the legitimizing benefits associated with “acting Islamic” were simply too great for them to dismiss. This was especially true after Mehmed II conquered Constantinople in 1453, an event that reverberated around the entire Muslim world. Halil İnalcık (1973, p. 56) claims:
With the conquest of Constantinople, Mehmed II became the most prestigious Muslim ruler. The Ottomans regarded him as the greatest Islamic sovereign since the first four caliphs, and the Islamic world came to regard Holy War as the greatest source of power and influence. Mehmed the Conqueror saw himself as fighting on behalf of all the Muslims: “These tribulations are for God’s sake. The sword of Islam is in our hands. If we had not chosen to endure these tribulations, we would not be worthy to be called gazis (holy warrior). We would be ashamed to stand in God’s presence on the Day of Resurrection.”
Later, Selim I (r. 1512–1520) conquered the Egyptian Mamluk Empire, which reigned over the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. This further raised the status of the Ottoman sultan as the protector of Islam. These events increased the value of religious legitimacy, which the religious establishment could confer so long as the sultan acted in accordance with Islam. As a result, while Ottoman sultans were often not too pious in their personal lives – many enjoyed alcohol despite its prohibition in Islamic law – they never shied from making overtly religious gestures to give the appearance of acting Islamic. Acts such as attending Friday mosque, punishing those who broke the Ramadan fast, closing taverns and brothels, building madrasas and mosques, and sending yearly gifts of gold to Mecca and Medina were common for fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Ottoman sultans.30 They were especially prone to emphasizing their religious credentials during times of war against non-Sunnis in order to gain popular support, weaken potential sources of opposition, and curry favor with orthodox clerics. For instance, in the sixteenth-century battles against the (Persian) Shi’i Safavid Empire, the sultan co-opted the religious establishment in order to provide religious justification for a war against other Muslims while portraying the Ottomans as protectors of the orthodox Islamic faith.31
The framework established in this book suggests that the religious establishment was therefore in an excellent bargaining position vis-à-vis the sultan. As the sultan’s primary source of inexpensive yet highly effective legitimacy, Ottoman clerics had the power to encourage the sultan to block the press should they have desired. But did the religious establishment have any desire to see the printing press blocked? After all, the European experience suggests that the Church was one of the earliest users of the new technology. If the Ottoman religious establishment faced different incentives than the Church, what were they and why?
Even a cursory reading of the relevant history suggests that the Ottoman religious establishment had significant incentive to encourage the sultan to block the printing press – at least those presses printing in the Arabic script. The introduction of the press would have caused it to lose one of its most important sources of influence over the Muslim population: its monopoly over the transmission of religious knowledge. Prior to the introduction of the printing press, the transmission of religious knowledge in the Muslim world was largely an oral process dominated by religious authorities. This was especially true in the Ottoman Empire, where many of the inhabitants – and even the sultans themselves – were not native speakers of Arabic and thus had to rely on others’ interpretation of the Qur’an and great Arabic texts.
In the early Islamic centuries, the process of publishing a book was a laborious one controlled by the religious establishment teaching in mosques or madrasas. Clerics produced books in the following manner. First, a well-known religious scholar dictated a book to a scribe, from memory or his own writing, over several weeks or months. Then, the scholar would listen to a public reading of what the scribe had written or he would read it himself, making amendments during the rereading. He would then authenticate it with an ijaza (the legal requirement necessary to transmit works), which made it lawful. Once the scholar copied a book, he had the authority to place it in the madrasa curriculum and give others the opportunity to copy it. More often his pupils would commit it to memory; many scholars wrote Islamic texts in rhyme to help facilitate this process. The scholars, in turn, perceived these books as transmitted from him and his predecessors. The ijaza document lists the names of all of those who transmitted the book in the past so that the transmission was traceable back to the original author. This created an established line of transmission and authority that only highly trained religious scholars were capable of achieving.32 Scholars published countless books in this manner, with the oldest existing manuscript published in 874.33
The importance of oral transmission in Islam far preceded the Ottomans. Muhammad’s companions orally transmitted the hadith, the most important corpus of early Islamic doctrine after the Qur’an. After the companions, an unbroken chain of scholars transmitted the hadith. There is a huge corpus of hadith literature, but only the most trustworthy hadith have become part of the Islamic tradition. A hadith gained trustworthiness only when transmitted by trustworthy individuals – those known for accuracy, dependability, morality, and independence from politics.34 Hence, in-person, oral transmission played a key role in the development of early Islamic doctrine.
Many of the great pre-Ottoman Muslim scholars traveled across the Muslim world to receive knowledge in person. There are well-known cases of writers traveling around North Africa, Spain, Anatolia, and the Middle East in search of ijaza. For instance, the Spanish mystic Ibn Arabi (b. 1165) traveled in search of personal, reliable transmission of Islamic knowledge in modern-day Spain (Murcia, Seville, Almeria, Cordoba), Tunisia (Tunis), Morocco (Fez), Egypt (Cairo), Israel (Jerusalem), Saudi Arabia (Mecca), Iraq (Baghdad, Mosul), Turkey (Malatya, Sivas, Aksaray, Konya), and Syria (Damascus).35 The importance of the in-person nature of the ijaza is clear in the following tenth-century ijaza: “I entrust my book to you with my writing from my hand to yours. I give you authorization for the poem and you may transmit it from me. It has been produced after having been heard and read.”36
As the proliferation of written texts in the century or two prior to the press threatened to undermine the authority of clerics over the masses, they slowly changed what it meant to communicate and transmit knowledge faithfully to the public. In order to be a legitimate transmitter of knowledge, one had to know the following: the Qur’an (by heart), a vast amount of Arabic literature, the connections of these works to the life of Muhammad (sunnah), the interpretations of the Qur’an given by classical jurists, perfect recall from memory of thousands of hadith, and deep knowledge of the science of Islamic law.37 This helped keep interpretation of religious doctrine solely within the realm of religious jurists – only one who spent a lifetime studying Islamic law and doctrine could hope to qualify as a jurist – while having the negative side effect of making new interpretation (ijtihad) difficult to accomplish.38
The religious establishment was also able to control information by checking the information of books disseminated in libraries. Although they did not intervene in private libraries, religious authorities scrutinized the contents of libraries the minute one endowed them for public use. The sultan only permitted public dissemination of proper religious books that passed muster with religious authorities. The state sold off all other books to private collectors.39
The printing press threatened the religious establishment’s intellectual monopoly. Under the pre-printing regime, the only people who had access to Islamic knowledge were those who undertook significant costs – a lifetime of training – to learn and memorize the most important religious works. Any works on nonreligious topics had to make it through the watchful eye of the
religious establishment. The ijaza was yet another barrier to entry that protected the intellectual monopoly from outside intrusion. Individuals who did not receive an ijaza were not legally entitled to teach the text in question. The printing press would have fundamentally altered this dynamic. The press would have substantially reduced the barriers to entry to the intellectual world of Islam. If the press were available, the written word would have been available to the public quickly and cheaply.
Religious authorities were a valuable source of legitimacy precisely because they held control over Islamic wisdom. This explains why the ban on the printing press was only on those works printed in the Arabic script – the script of the language of Islam. The religious establishment was much less concerned with works in other languages – even translations of the Qur’an – as these works did not threaten their stranglehold on Islamic wisdom. Their ownership over this valuable good gave them credibility and importance in the community – it was what made them elite. It thus enabled them, and them alone, to support the sultan’s claim to legitimacy by associating his actions with those consistent with Islam. The learned men of the Empire were the only ones who could credibly claim to make such a pronouncement. They dominated the marketplace of ideas, and they had the forum – the Friday sermon – to publicly make these ideas known. This was part of the greater bargain over laws and policies. The sultan gave protections to the religious establishment in return for legitimizing his rule. Both would have lost from anything that threatened to undermine the religious establishment’s intellectual monopoly: the religious establishment would have lost their “elite” position as well as all of its associated benefits, while the sultan would have lost his primary source of inexpensive legitimacy.
