Ottoman ban on printing

From Did Ottoman Sultans Ban Print? by Kathryn A. Schwartz back in 2017.  From the Abstract.

Did printing transform the Ottoman Empire? And what took the Ottomans so long to print? Much of the scholarship surrounding the topic of Ottoman printing, or the occurrence of printing within the Ottoman Empire (1453–1922), is structured around these two related frameworks. In this essay, I argue that these frameworks are ahistorical because they predicate Ottoman printing on the European experience of print. To support this point, I examine the disproportionate role played by certain early modern European accounts of Ottoman printing within Western and Arabic historiography. In particular, I examine the life cycle of scholars’ belief that Ottoman sultans banned printing, which I contrast with extant documentation for the imperial Porte’s stance on printing. I argue that the sources available to scholars today do not support the notion that the sultans banned printing. Rather, they demonstrate that this claim arose from early modern European scholars’ search to articulate their sense of Ottoman inadequacy through explanations for why Ottomans did not print. The history of this particular line of inquiry is significant, I argue, because many scholars continue to probe the issue of why Ottomans did not print. In so doing, they maintain the expectation that print would revolutionize society, even though they have begun questioning the existence of the ban.

Hmm.  Ottoman history is not a particular focus of mine but I have read probably approaching a dozen or more Ottoman histories and another dozen or more more focused histories within the Ottoman context.  That printing was banned or discouraged seems a fairly widely received historical fact.  

Schwartz is asserting that there was no ban and that this myth of banning arose from Europeans inappropriately anticipating that printing would have had parallel consequences in the Ottoman Empire as it did in Europe.  

There is a whiff of anti-colonialism, anti-Europeanism to the language but that might be simply the language of the academy.  

So was there a ban or not?  Given the preponderance of respected authorities who have asserted that there was, I am skeptical of Schwartz's argument.

Fortunately, Tyler Cowan posted the piece over at Marginal Revolution.  Marginal Revolution has a pretty high cognitive readership with pretty broad interests.  You get both deep knowledge and integrated knowledge in the comments.  

And they are not especially sympathetic to Schwartz's argument either but with much useful ancillary information.

The first commenter notes from Wikipedia:

The sultans definitely banned printing the Koran, with more rigor than translations.

Wiki provides a nice overview - "Printed copies of the Quran during this period met with strong opposition from Muslim legal scholars: printing anything in Arabic was prohibited in the Ottoman empire between 1483 and 1726—initially, even on penalty of death. The Ottoman ban on printing in Arabic script was lifted in 1726 for non-religious texts only upon the request of Ibrahim Muteferrika, who printed his first book in 1729. Except for books in Hebrew and European languages, which were unrestricted, very few books, and no religious texts, were printed in the Ottoman Empire for another century."

He appears to be quoting from the entry on the Quran.  There is more at the entry Global spread of the printing press.  

The issue of a ban was a bit more nuanced than it is often discussed.  But only a bit.  It was a ban on printing the Quran that was instituted early and lasted one hundred and fifty years.  But apparently the effect lasted much longer than the prohibiting law, such that few books were printed within the Ottoman Empire for domestic consumption right up into the modern era.

The rest of the commenter discussion is broad and interesting.