The Ottoman Scientific Heritage Ekmeleddin İhsanoğlu (trans. Maryam Patton) Al-Furqān (2023)

Empires have long used science and engineering to power their expansion and survival. Advances in medicine have helped to keep armies in a state of battle readiness. Innovations in navigation have ensured dominance over the seas. Superior weaponry — or the deterrent threat of it — has given and continues to give individual powers the edge in hostile encounters.

Many historians of science have documented the connections between scientific innovation and geopolitical primacy. Perhaps the best example in English is the prodigious book series Science and Civilisation in China, initiated by the UK biochemist, historian, diplomat and Sinophile Joseph Needham in 1954, and still being published today. Its grand themes include China’s early technological superiority compared with the West, and the conundrum, which has come to be known as the Needham question, of why Europe overtook China in scientific and technological development.

Priya Satia, a historian at Stanford University in California, has also been examining the part that military technology played in consolidating British imperial rule in India in Empire of Guns (2018).

Science in the service of the Raj

There’s been comparatively little written on the Ottoman Empire. It was founded around 1300 with Constantinople — officially renamed Istanbul only in 1930 — as its capital from 1453 until the empire’s demise after the First World War. At its peak, the Ottoman Empire held sway over large parts of northern Africa, the Middle East and southeast Europe, from present-day Algeria and Kuwait to the Balkans. This dominion incorporated some of the main centres of Arabic learning. They included Cairo, home to Al-Azhar University, established in the tenth century, and Damascus. Ibn al-Shatir, an astronomer who lived in Damascus during the fourteenth century, used data collected from the city’s Great Mosque to construct planetary models similar to those developed by Nicolaus Copernicus, an astronomer who lived nearly 200 years later in what is now Poland.

The Ottoman Empire’s six centuries of primacy was succeeded by the modern Turkish republic, founded 100 years ago, on 29 October 1923. Much of what we know about Ottoman science has come from a large team of historians and archivists led by the Turkish scholar–diplomat Ekmeleddin İhsanoğlu, founding director of the Research Centre for Islamic History, Art and Culture, based in Istanbul. For almost 40 years, İhsanoğlu and his colleagues, some also from the Turkish Society for the History of Science and the University of Istanbul, have been scouring archives and libraries to piece together a still-emerging foundational resource for historians of Ottoman science.

Eclipsed no more

Historians know much about the role of science in Europe’s imperial heyday, from the late seventeenth century to the twentieth century. This is because they can find official records of key individuals through archives of learned societies and universities; and then grasp the scientists’ role in policymaking through government archives and other public records. Personal papers and diaries, shopping receipts, rent books, building floor plans — all help in tracing people back to their ideas and decisions, but are much less readily available for empires that flourished in earlier periods. Manuscripts and commentaries that can authenticate discoveries and inventions, which help to verify the identities of people and construct records of decision-making, are similarly hard to find.

The results of İhsanoğlu and his colleagues’ study are contained in 18 volumes, published originally in Turkish. Last month, a three-volume summary, The Ottoman Scientific Heritage, rolled off the presses for readers of English, translated by Maryam Patton, a historian at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The complete works identified 4,897 scholars and 20,154 manuscripts, accessed from 527 collections across 52 countries. It is, by any stretch, an extraordinary achievement.

Historical similarities

As İhsanoğlu writes in the first volume, the inspiration for the project came from a visit to Needham and his collaborators in Cambridge, UK, in 1984. The two men, incidentally, share many similarities. Both trained as chemists and spent time in national and international public service. Needham was a British diplomat who focused on science in China during and immediately after the Second World War, and was a guiding light in the development of the United Nations educational, scientific and cultural agency UNESCO. İhsanoğlu was elected in 2004 to head the 57-member Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, a kind of UN for countries with large Muslim populations, a post he held until 2014. That year he ran for the Turkish presidency as a cross-party opposition candidate against the incumbent Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. He was unsuccessful, but was later elected a member of the country’s parliament, the Grand National Assembly.

The centuries when the Ottoman sultans held sway were, in their dominions as elsewhere, a time when science and belief were closely connected. The state had 350 institutions of higher learning, known as medreses. They were similar to academies for the elite, providing training for religious leaders, as well as imperial administrators. Despite objections from some theologians, many medreses offered courses on science, alongside ones in jurisprudence and theology. One such medrese was devoted exclusively to medical education during the reign of the sultan Suleyman, from 1520 to 1566.

Much of İhsanoğlu’s own research is on the later Ottoman period of the mid-to-late nineteenth century, also known as Tanzimat (Reorganization). This was a time in which the empire adopted a more secular system of governance, as well as modernizing the institutions of education and science, among others. This period also saw the adoption of technology from Europe and the subsequent development of specifically Ottoman military technology, in the form of firearms, as well as clockmaking, compasses and cartography, modern medicine, the telegraph and railways — including the famous Hejaz railway, which linked Damascus with Medina, in what is now Saudi Arabia.

The man who unveiled China

The Imperial School of Naval Engineering was established in 1793, as was the War Academy in 1834, the Imperial Medical School in 1827 and an aviation school in 1912. These were clearly intended to serve the empire; except that, by then, the Ottoman Empire was being pulled in different directions. Its constituent states were agitating for independence; its leaders ultimately became part of the alliance with Germany, Austria–Hungary and Bulgaria that lost the First World War — a miscalculation that led to the empire’s break-up.

The Ottoman Scientific Heritage throws up many intriguing questions of the sort that also flowed from Science and Civilisation in China. For example, what part did science and technology play in the empire’s rise, and İhsanoğlu’s equivalent of the Needham question: why was its early scientific advantage not built on? Or, put another way: why did the modern scientific and industrial revolution take place in the age of the empires founded further west in Europe? By painstakingly confirming scientists’ identities and matching them to their published work, İhsanoğlu and his team have, in the four decades it has taken to put together The Ottoman Scientific Heritage, taken the first, and in some ways most difficult, step towards answering such questions. It is up to today’s and future generations to use this knowledge and further assess the role of science in the rise and fall of the Ottoman Empire itself.