The First Ottoman Printing Press

Printing with movable type had long been known in the Ottoman lands among the Jewish, Armenian and Greek communities, who printed in their own scripts, but books in Arabic script, the script of the Qur'an and of Turkish and Arabic and Persian learning, had continued to be made by the pens of scribes, both out of reverence for the written word and from the interest of the great guild of copyists. In 1726 Ibrahim Muteferrika, a man of Hungarian origin who had entered Ottoman service and risen as a scholar and official, together with Said Efendi, obtained from the sultan Ahmed III and the grand vizier, and with a legal opinion from the chief jurist permitting the printing of books other than the Qur'an and the core religious texts, the licence to establish a printing house for Arabic-script books at Istanbul. The press printed its first book, a great Arabic-Turkish dictionary (the Vankulu Lugati), in 1729, and over the following years issued a series of works of history, geography, language and science, handsomely printed and sometimes illustrated with maps, including Muteferrika's own treatise urging military and political reform. The enterprise printed only seventeen titles before it faltered, and printing in Arabic script did not become general in the empire until much later; but it was a landmark, the beginning of the printed book in the Islamic Ottoman world, and a sign of the cautious openness of the age. This scene depicts Muteferrika's press and workshop at Istanbul, with the wooden press, the cases of Arabic type and the first printed sheets. In keeping with the project's ethics any figure is anonymous and at a distance.