Science, Technology and Learning in the Ottoman Empire

  • Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu
Ashgate: 2004. 338 pp. £59.50 0860789241 | ISBN: 0-860-78924-1
Taqi al-Din saw a golden age of astronomy in the Ottoman Empire, as this sixteenth-century miniature shows. Credit: ART ARCHIVE/DAGLI ORTI

Conventional history tells us that science was banned from Turkey during the sixteenth century. The ruling Ottomans, too conscious of their military power, were not interested in making contact with Europe or learning from its scientific advances. Consequently, science and learning went rapidly downhill in the Ottoman Empire. The blame for this has been placed squarely on Ottoman educational institutions and traditional religious scholars.

Over the past three decades, Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu has been painstakingly turning this accepted view upside-down. In study after study, he has shown that the picture was much more complex. Here, some of his key papers, which have been published in journals and academic works since 1987, are brought together in one volume. They show just how original and monumental is his contribution to our understanding of science in the Ottoman Empire.

The Ottomans ruled a vast empire that once stretched from the far shores of the Black Sea and the Persian Gulf in the east to Budapest in the north and Algiers in the west. They inherited, and were inspired by, developments in science and learning that took place in Muslim civilization during its zenith, and looked towards this rich tradition for solutions to their intellectual and technical problems. And because they considered their own research and education systems to be self-sufficient, they were initially not keen to import science from Europe. This made sense because at the time science was at a similar level in Europe and the Ottoman Empire.

The Ottoman chief astronomer in the sixteenth century, Taqi al-Din, illustrates this rather well. The observatory he built in Istanbul during the reign of Sultan Murad III (1574–95) was one of the largest observatories in the Islamic world and was equipped with the best instruments of the time. The elaborate structure included, besides the observatory itself, residential quarters, offices for the astronomers and a library. It was comparable to Tycho Brahe's Uraniborg Observatory, built off the coast of Denmark in 1576, and some of Taqi al-Din's instruments, in particular his sextant, bore striking similarities to those later invented by Brahe.

During this period, the Ottomans followed developments in the West with particular interest. They were quite adept at identifying new European technology that they needed. So they freely borrowed war technology and mining techniques, and absorbed new geographical knowledge and medical advances. When they did reject a particular Western development, it was nearly always for specific reasons. For example, mechanical clocks, which had been constructed in Europe since the beginning of the fourteenth century, were of little interest to the Ottomans. This was not because they had no interest in clocks or time-keeping, but because European clocks had such a large margin of error (as much as half an hour) that they were not much use for calculating times for the five daily prayers.

A seminal paper in Ihsanoglu's collection describes the introduction of copernican astronomy to the Ottoman Empire. The Turks first became aware of Copernicus' heliocentric system through the translation of French astronomer Noel Durret's Nouvelle Theorie des Planetes. It was translated by Tezkireci Kose Ibrahim Efendi, a Hungarian who settled in Istanbul, as The Mirror of the Heavens and the Limits of Perception. In contrast to Europe, where Copernicus caused much dispute, the Ottomans embraced the new theory wholeheartedly. Even the religious scholars, who are traditionally accused of suppressing the transfer of science from Europe to Turkey, accepted it. Whether the centre of the Universe is the Earth or the Sun is irrelevant to Islam, declared Ibrahim Hakki, an influential religious scholar, in his celebrated study Marifetname. In principle, Muslims should believe that the Universe is the work of an exalted Creator, but different theories concerning its shape are strictly a matter for science. Now that Copernicus had laid the foundations of a scientific theory, earlier theories should be dismissed as illogical and unscientific.

It was the defeat of the Ottoman army at Vienna in July 1683 that changed things radically. From this point, the Ottomans grudgingly began to acknowledge the superiority of Western science and technology. They slowly became convinced that to master the techniques of modern warfare, they needed not just to embrace Western science but speed up the transfer of technology from the West. Modern scientific curricula were introduced in military academies, with the emphasis on applied rather than theoretical science. Ihsanoglu suggests that it is the neglect of theoretical science, in particular physics and chemistry, that eventually thwarted the development of Ottoman science in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Science, Technology and Learning in the Ottoman Empire does not qualify as easy reading. Most of the meticulously researched papers are highly technical. But determined and persistent general readers will reap rich rewards.