Ottoman Arabic-script printing ban

The Ottoman Arabic-script printing ban made control over the spread of written knowledge a matter of political authority. Issued under Bayezid II in 1485 and reinforced by Selim I in 1515, it barred Muslims from printing in Arabic. Its later relaxation did not amount to an open press: when Ahmed III authorized İbrahim Müteferrika to establish one in 1727, the permission came with religious and legal supervision. The episode illustrates how absolutist institutions could resist a technology whose effects might reach beyond the page, challenging both political control and elite command of knowledge.

The Ban and Its Rationale

In 1485, Bayezid II expressly forbade Muslims to print in Arabic; Selim I reinforced the rule in 1515. The restriction stood in contrast to the rapid spread of printing presses across Western Europe. The book presents the Ottoman prohibition not simply as reluctance to adopt a new technique, but as a choice shaped by the interests of an absolutist and extractive political order.

Books could make ideas more widely available and reduce the difficulty of controlling the population. Some ideas might offer new ways to promote economic growth; others might challenge the prevailing political and social order. Printing also threatened those whose influence rested on controlling oral knowledge: once written knowledge became accessible to anyone able to read, that elite control could weaken. In the book’s account, the sultans and religious establishment feared the creative destruction that might follow, and prohibition was their response.

Permission Under Supervision

The restriction persisted for more than two centuries before Ahmed III issued a decree in 1727 allowing Müteferrika to establish a printing press. The decree described the moment as one when the Western technique would be unveiled like a bride and would not again be hidden. Yet the language of welcome accompanied strict limits: the printed books were to be proofread by a panel of three Kadis, religious and legal scholars.

This oversight made permission conditional rather than unrestricted. The press began operating in 1729, but Müteferrika printed only seventeen books before he stopped working in 1743. His family continued the effort and produced just seven more by the time it gave up in 1797. The narrow output shows how the initial ban’s effects endured even after the authorities permitted printing: the technology was present, but its use remained constrained.

Literacy and the Wider Consequences

Printing’s restriction formed part of a broader contrast between the Ottoman lands and parts of Europe. In 1800, literacy in the Ottoman Empire was estimated at only 2 to 3 percent. In England, the corresponding figures were 60 percent of adult men and 40 percent of adult women; literacy was higher still in the Netherlands and Germany. Even Portugal, among the European countries with the lowest educational attainment, had an estimated adult literacy rate of about 20 percent.

The ban was not the only condition shaping literacy, but the book links opposition to printing with consequences for education and economic success. Well into the second half of the nineteenth century, book production in the Ottoman Empire remained primarily the work of scribes copying existing books. In the early eighteenth century, Istanbul was reputed to have eighty thousand such scribes. The persistence of hand-copying alongside the delayed, tightly supervised press underscores the scale of the institutional divide.

Political Institutions and Technological Change

The printing ban serves as an example of a wider argument about institutions and innovation. Political and economic institutions shape whether societies encourage new technologies or block their spread; those responses can produce divergent economic outcomes. England encouraged commerce, industrialization, and entrepreneurship, while the Ottoman Empire and other absolutist regimes lagged behind by blocking innovation or failing to foster it.

The Ottoman Empire remained absolutist until its collapse at the end of the First World War. In the book’s analysis, that political structure helps explain why the printing press and the creative destruction associated with it could be opposed for so long. The ban therefore signifies more than delayed technological adoption: it shows how rulers and established elites could protect their authority by limiting the circulation of knowledge, while also constraining the conditions for broader literacy and economic change.