Studies On Ottoman Science And Culture

Studies on Ottoman Science and Culture brings together eleven articles by distinguished historian Ekmeleddin İhsanoğlu. The book addresses multiple issues related to the histories of science and culture during the Ottoman era. Most of the articles contained in this volume were the first contributions to their respective topics, and they continue to provoke discussion and debate amongst academics to this day. The first volume of the author’s collected papers that appeared in the Variorum Collected Studies (2004) dispelled the negative opinions towards Ottoman science asserted by scholars of the previous generation. In this new volume, the author continues to explore and develop the paradigm of scientific activities and cultural interactions both within and beyond the Ottoman Empire. One of the topics examined is the attitude of Islamic scholars towards revolutionary notions in Western science, including Copernican heliocentrism and Darwin’s theory of evolution. This book will appeal to scholars and students of Ottoman history, as well as those interested in the history of science and cultural history. (CS1098).

The papers and studies collected here relate to the cultural, intellectual and scientific aspects of Ottoman history.

Scholars have long thought that, following the Muslim Golden Age of the medieval era, the Ottoman Empire grew culturally and technologically isolated, losing interest in innovation and placing the empire on a path toward stagnation and decline. Science among the Ottomans challenges this widely accepted Western image of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Ottomans as backward and impoverished. In the first book on this topic in English in over sixty years, Miri Shefer-Mossensohn contends that Ottoman society and culture created a fertile environment that fostered diverse scientific activity. She demonstrates that the Ottomans excelled in adapting the inventions of others to their own needs and improving them. For example, in 1877, the Ottoman Empire boasted the seventh-longest electric telegraph system in the world; indeed, the Ottomans were among the era’s most advanced nations with regard to modern communication infrastructure. To substantiate her claims about science in the empire, Shefer-Mossensohn studies patterns of learning; state involvement in technological activities; and Turkish- and Arabic-speaking Ottomans who produced, consumed, and altered scientific practices. The results reveal Ottoman participation in science to have been a dynamic force that helped sustain the six-hundred-year empire.

The studies presented in this collection are concerned most particularly with the material conditions of life in the mature Ottoman state of the 16th-18th centuries. They range from the evaluation of sources of livelihood and conditions in the workplace on the one hand, to notions of domesticity and organization of the private sphere on the other, and deal with the provinces, in both the Balkans and in Asia, as much as with Istanbul. At the same time the volume aims to illuminate Ottoman imperial institutional forms and norms as they existed in the high imperial era before the rapid change and transformation associated with late imperial times when the empire was more exposed both to global economic forces and external political pressures. This concentration on the relatively stable conditions that prevailed in the empire throughout the bulk of the early modern era (ca. 1450-ca. 1750) provides the reader with an opportunity to assess Ottoman institutional development and observe social and economic organization in their relatively 'pure' state before the double impact of industrialization and increasing Westernization in the late nineteenth century.

Idjmal) register in sixteenth-century Ottoman administrative practice -- Population movements and labor mobility in Balkan contexts : a glance at post-1600 Ottoman social realities -- Silver production in Rumelia according to an official Ottoman report circa 1600 -- Tobacco cultivation in northern Syria and conditions of its marketing and distribution in the late eighteenth century -- The construction of a fortress at Mosul in 1631 : a case study of an important facet of Ottoman military expenditure.

Like many other states, the 19th century was a period of coming to grips with the growing domination of the world by the 'Great Powers' for the Ottoman Empire. Many Muslim Ottoman elites attributed European 'ascendance' to the new sciences that had developed in Europe, and a long and multi-dimensional debate on the nature, benefits, and potential dangers of science ensued. This analysis of this debate is not based on assumptions characteristic of studies on modernisation and Westernisation, arguing that for Muslim Ottomans the debate on science was in essence a debate on the representatives of science.

When the first Balkan War broke out in October 1912, few Ottomans anticipated that it would prove to be a watershed moment for the Empire, ending in ignominy, national catastrophe, and the loss of its remaining provinces in the Balkans. Defeat at the hands of an alliance of Balkan powers comprising Bulgaria, Greece, Serbia and Montenegro set the stage for the Balkan Crisis of 1914 and would serve as a prelude to WWI. It was also a moment of deep national trauma and led to bitter soul-searching, giving rise to a so-called 'Culture of Defeat' in which condemnation and criticism flourished in a way seemingly at odds with the reformist debate which followed the Young Turk Revolution of 1908.Eyal Ginio's clear-eyed and rigorously researched book uncovers the different visual and written products of the defeat, published in Ottoman Turkish, Arabic and Ladino, with the aim of understanding the experience of defeat - how it was perceived, analysed and commemorated by different sectors in Ottoman society - to show that it is key to understanding the actions of the Ottoman political elite during the subsequent World War and the early decades of the Turkish Republic.

Following a string of military defeats at the end of the eighteenth century, Ottoman leaders realized that their classical traditions and institutions could not compete with Russia and the European states' technological and economic superiority.One of a series of nineteenth-century reform initiatives was the creation of a European-style university called darülfünun. From the Arabic words dar, meaning "house," and fünun, meaning "sciences," the darülfünun would incorporate the western sciences into deeply entrenched academic traditions and institutions in an effort to bridge the gap with Europe. The completely new institution, distinct from the existing pre-modern medreses, was modeled after the French educational system and created an infrastructure for national universities in Turkey and some of the Arab-speaking provinces. It also influenced the establishment of universities in Iran and Afghanistan. Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu's study sheds new light on an important and pioneering experiment in East-West relations, tracking the multifaceted transformation at work in Istanbul during the transition from classical to modern modes of scientific education. Out of this intellectual ferment, a new Ottoman Turkish scientific language developed, the terminology of which served as a convenient vehicle for expressing and teaching modern science throughout the Empire.