Sunday, January 10, 2010

A Thought About Book Culture in the Former Ottoman Empire

Books and printed matter in Turkish and Arabic were unknown before the end of the 18th century, and even then they were of limited impact because of widespread illiteracy. Jewish refugees from the Spanish Inquisition established a Hebrew printing press about 1494. Armenians had a press in 1567, and Greeks had press in 1627. These presses were no allowed to print in Turkish or in Arabic characters, owing to objections of the religious authorities. One result of this delay was to give Greeks, Armenians and Jews an advantage in literacy, and therefore an advantage in commerce, and in having a means to preserve and propagate their culture, that was denied to Turks and Arabs. The major result was to retard the development of modern literate society, commerce and industry. The first Turkish printing press in the Ottoman Empire was not established until 1729. It was closed in 1742 and reopened in 1784. The press operated under heavy censorship throughout most of the Ottoman era.
It seems to me that the Ottoman Empire that included most of North Africa, the Middle East and some of South Eastern Europe doomed itself to an intellectual gap with the West just as the West was taking off intellectually by this policy of the Ottoman Empire.

I wonder how long it takes to build a literate culture with strong use of written communication and strong use of books in education and professional training. Clearly it requires generations simply to build the human and institutional resources. I suspect that the cultural change may take longer still.

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