Bayezid II

Bayezid II was the Ottoman sultan who, in 1485, issued an edict expressly forbidding Muslims from printing in Arabic. The book presents the prohibition as an early instance of resistance to printing, setting it against the technology’s rapid spread elsewhere and the much later, restricted permission granted to establish a press in Ottoman lands.

The 1485 prohibition

The edict barred Muslims from printing in Arabic. Its significance in the account lies in the specific boundary it drew around the new technology: while printing presses were spreading across Western Europe, Muslim use of Arabic printing was expressly forbidden in the Ottoman realm. The book does not supply Bayezid II’s motives or describe how the rule was enforced, so the prohibition stands as a documented act of restraint rather than evidence for a broader account of his intentions.

A contrast with printing’s spread

The ban appears in a history of printing as a technology that made books more readily available after Johannes Gutenberg introduced movable type in Mainz in 1445. Presses spread through European cities in the following decades; Bayezid II’s 1485 edict marks a contrasting response, restricting a medium that the book associates with the possibility of mass literacy and education.

Reinforcement and delayed permission

The prohibition did not end with Bayezid II. Sultan Selim I reinforced the rule in 1515, and the first press was not allowed in Ottoman lands until 1727, when Sultan Ahmed III authorized İbrahim Müteferrika to establish one. That later permission came with close supervision: a panel of religious and legal scholars, the Kadis, was to vet printed books. The long interval and the conditions attached to Müteferrika’s press show the difference between permitting printing and allowing it to circulate without oversight; the account does not attribute that later policy directly to Bayezid II.