Xl. ve XVIII. yüzyıllar Xl. to XVIII. centuries

iSLAM-TÜRK MEDENiYETi VE AVRUPA ISLAMIC-TURKISH CIVILIZATION AND EUROPE

Uluslararası Sempozyum International Symposium

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Xl. ve XVIII. yüzyıllar

islam-Türk Medaniyeti ve Avrupa

ULUSLARARASISEMPOZYUM 24-26 Kas1m, 2006 ·

• Felsefe - Bilim

• Siyaset- Devlet

• Dil - Edebiyat - Sanat

• Askerlik

• Sosyal Hayat

•Imge

Organizasyon: Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı islam Araştırmaları Merkezi (iSAM) T.C. Diyanet işleri Başkanlığı Marmara Üniversitesi ilahiyat Fakültesi

© Kaynak göstermek için henüz hazır değildir. 1 Not for quotation.

1' ,.

Xl. ve XVIII. yüzyıllar

Uluslararası Sempozyum

THE ANXIETY OF SANCT/TY

Malissa TAYLOR*

Historians of early modem Europe have long debated the impact of the printing press upon European society. Did print make texts seem more reliable and authoritative, or did they in fact make all knowledge seem relative and debatable? My paper examines some of the key scholarly contributions to this discussion by way of comparing policies towards the press in the Ottoman Empire and the Papal States. Arguing that the conditional embrace of print technology by the early modem popes and eighteenth-century sultans best reveals the prevailing ambivalence about the positive and deleterious effects of print, I conclude that these concems are extremely similar on both si des of the Mediterranean.

Focusing on papal bulls produced between 1515 and 1758 as well as policies laid downin the sixteenth-century Council of Trent, I explore the ratianale for ecclesiastical censorship and the papacy's shiftingjurisdiction over the domain of knowledge production. Based on documents authored by Ihrahim Muteferrika, high-ranking members of the Ottoman ulema, and the rescript of Sultan Ahmed m, I seek to understand the Ottomans' cautious acceptance of the printing press and their worries about the copious errata in printed books. I emphasize that both in Catholic Europe and the Ottoman Empire, attitudes about the printing press were substantially informed by the belief that scriptures, whether the Bible or the Quran, were not like other books. The way in which these beliefs authorized the printing and circulation of some books but not others illuminates a number of priorities shared across the lines of class and religion.

The pop es of Rome, engrossing w hat they pleased of political rule into their own hands, extended their dominion over men's eyes, as they had before over their

judgments, buming and prohibiting to be read what they fancied not...Which course Leo

the tenth and his successors followed, until the council of Trent and the Spanish inquisition engendering together brought forth or perfected those catalogues and

expurging indexes, that rake through the entrails of many an old good author, with a

violation worse than any could be offered to his tomb. Nor did they stay in matters heretical, but any subject that was not to their palate, they either condemned in a

prohibition, or had it straight into the new Purgatory of an index.

John Milton, Areopagitica, 1644

"No question, but ye Great Turk is an Ennemy to learning in regard of his

subjects, because he finds it his advantage, to have such a people, on whose ignorance

he may impose. Whence it is, yt he will indure no printing, being of this opinion, yt printing and learning, especially such as is found in universiri es, are the chief fewell of

dvision amon~ Christians. Whence he binds his priests to no moree, yn to be able to read ye Alcoran, and to interpret it in Turkish." a lerter from Henry Oldenburg

University ofCalifornia, Berkeley, USA.

282 İs{iim-Türk Medeniyeti ve Avrupa

(Secretary to the English Royal Society) to Samuel Hartlib (an influential English intellectual) dated 1659

Students of the history of the printing press will fınd these views of Milton and Oldenburg to be quite familiar. They will encounter such views not only among early modem Protestant polemics, but also in many modem histarical texts and articles about the printing press indiverse languages. For in the contemporary world, scholars-whose standards of professional rigor are predicated upon :freedom of inquiry and freedom of the press-do largely share Milton' s view that prohibiting books to be printed is a form of oppression. However, it is sametimes forgotten that the people of the past may have seen things differently, precisely because the events that are now in our collective past had not yet happened. John Milton' s indignation over the licensing ofbooks, expressed in 1644, was precocious even by English standards. The idea that freedom of expressian is a right or even a value was :not widely spread across Europe previous to the eighteenth century. Responding to unforeseen consequences that accompanied the invention of the printing press, the Catholic Church formulated i ts policies of restTiction in the fıfteenth and sixteenth centuries, well before the time that Europeans would have been concemed with freedom of thought. Although these policies certainly played an important role in creating a cliı:p.ate where such preoccupations could arise, it is important to remember that they were not present when press censorship fırst appeared. In the case of the Ottoman Empire, things are bit more complicated. Some histories allow that the ban on printing-which lasted until the eighteenth century-was oppressive, but conclude that since Muslims and Orientals are used to despotism in any case and furthermore are prone to follow the conservative indinations of their religious leaders, the general population might indeed have supported this particular form of oppression. The possibility of regarding press restrictions differently is here admitted, but it translates merely into the tired eliche that Muslims have no regard for freedom. What then of the things that Muslims did highly regard?

On both shores of the Mediterranean, one frequently reads that various powerful people or institutions sought to ban print primarily because it threatened their own elevated position within society. In Europe, as we have seen, the protagonists in this narrative are the pope and the Catholic Church. In the Ottoman Empire, that role is not chiefly ascribed to the sultan, as Mr. Oldenburg would have it, but to Islamic scholars. Just as the Catholic Church is supposed to have banned books that might have led Christians to question its doctrines and legitimacy, it is often presumed that the Iate start of Ottoman Muslim printing resulted from the scholars' fears of losing their monopoly over books and scholarship. Even were these entirely safe assumptions, the fact would remain that such explanations are simply not very informative. Where the issue is one of control, it would be far more interesting to know exactly what these people or institutions sought to control and how they sought to control it-the answers to which are often less obvious than is supposed. What arguments did they make to their wider community about why their control is both necessary and valuable? How do they argue that printed texts pose a threat-not to themselves-but to the community? · -

M a l .i s s a T a y 1 o r 283

What is to be gained by examining anxieties about print in Catholic and Islamic

contexts vis-a-vis one another? Despite the testaments of Oldenburg and Milton that characterize the papacy and the sultanate in similar ways, much of the literature on the printing press tends to treat its acceptance or rejection as emblematic of a civilizational

divide between Christendom and the Muslim World. Some elements in the history of

print do at fırst glance seem to enforce the idea of this cultural dichotomy. European

Christians may have debated with one another about the benefits conferred by the

invention of the printing press, but the demand for its products was undeniable. Muslims, on the other hand, long resisted print technology, accepting it only in the eighteenth century, and then with many reservations. The fırst book to be printed in

Christian Europe in the early 1450s was a Bible. In the Ottoman Empire, by contrast, it

was not permissible to print the Quran until the Iate nineteenth century, at least a century after the establishment of the first Islamic press. In effect, the Muslim holy

book was the last widely circulating book in the Ottoman Empire to receive such

permission. These simple facts may suggest that the prevailing attitudes towards the nature of scriptures and the nature of printing in these societies were extremely

disparate. I will argue that in fact, the attitudes and anxieties about reading, printing and

religious authority were quite similar. In both cases the issue had to do with an accurate preservation of truths revealed in a book. What differed were the strategies deemed necessary to deal with this problem.

The intention here is not to smooth over differences between Catholicism and Islam but to understand with greater precision where they overlapped and where they

diverged in the early modem period. By looking at a smail group of documents issued

in the Papal States and the Ottoman Empire, this essay will attempt to understand these similarities and differences as articulated through print policy. In particular, I will be

looking at how these polices placed restrictions on the printing of the Bible in Europe,

and the Quran in the Ottoman Empire. For the Catholic domains, my sources consist of five papal bulls that, except in one case, introduce various editions of the Roman

Indexes (and frequently the national Indexes as well) in the sixteenth through eighteenth

centuries. Built upon a reading of the priorities articulated in these documents, the fırst seetion of my paper deseribes how Catholic policy towards the printing press was

informed primarily by a need to provide guidance for readers. It is in the second seetion

that I examine how the early modem popes justified the necessity of guidance and in what terms they claimed for themselves the ultimate authority of guidance.

For the Ottoman domains, I will examine four documents crucial to the opening

phase of Muslim Ottoman printing in the Iate 1720s: a treatise and petition for permission to print authored by Ihrahim Muteferrika, the man destined to become the fırst Islamic

printer; and the favorable reply given in response by the Ottoman sultan and the chief mufti. As the authors stake their positions in favor of allowing certain books to be printed, I highliglıt how a fixation upon error plays a central role in their considerations. I then

explore the continuing concem about error as it is articulated in subsequent sultanic documents and in the colophons appended to the religious texts that were only printed in

284 i s Z a ^ m - T i i r k M e d e n i y e t i v e A v r u p a

the nineteenth century. Ultimately, my claim is that on both shores of the Mediterranean, protecting the sanctity of sacred texts was paramount, although other serious concerns, such as preventing cultural degeneracy, also seemed to be shared.

The purpose of this paper is limited; when looking at print policy one could examine not only the goals articulated by the policy, but also the apparatus set up for doing so, and the effectiveness of that apparatus. My own agenda has only to do with the first of these things: establishing the immediate goals of the policy as articulated by the documents themselves in order to see what, ideally, should be the result of the policy. The issue under examination here is thus strictly limited to the question, what concerns about printed material-and for that matter, the circulation of knowledge more generally-are addressed in the documents that direct and defend the restrictions on the press? Furthermore, I will not ask whether or not the concerns expressed in the documents can be trusted to state the real reason for the policies. The question is not, do the authors really believe the things they say, but rather, why would these arguments have been credible to contemporaries? Even if their discourse is merely a cloak for motives of selfish gain, what does it take for granted about what knowledge is and what the community's best interests are?

Whether or not the views expressed in these documents were representative of early modern views as a whole, or of 'Catholic' or 'Islamic' views is also not somethmg that I am trying to establish. I believe that they are important to understand because they are given in support of the policy of the papacy and the Ottoman sultanate, however many people agreed or disagreed with them. At various points, I will draw on sources outside the papal and sultanic institutions to show that at least some individuals outside these institutions shared the same views. Ths is not meant to say that agreement was ubiquitous, or that no other opinions existed, but merely to show that the policies of these two institutions did not exist in a vacuum, and that the anxieties about print that they addressed did not exist solely within the confines of the papal and sultanic institutions responsible for press restrictions.

Finally, the principal centuries I am examining in the European context are the sixteenth through seventeenth, whereas my remarks about the Ottomans focus on the eighteenth and nineteenth. I hope that my readers will understand that it is my intention to look at print policy, specifically regarding the Bible and the Quran, in the early years of the press's operations. Since the relevant presses commenced their operations at different times, it is necessary to examine different centuries.

The invention of the printing press was received warmly by the Catholic Church, which saw this 'divine art' both as proof of Christian superiority over the Turks and as a weapon with which to fight them.' Warnings about the Turkish threat were emanating

' Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (New York: University of Chicago . . Press, 1979), 2:303,.317.

Malissa T a y l o r 285

from Gutenberg's press by ı454, and remained a popular topic of pamphlet literature throughout the sixteenth century.2 It was notuntil the sixteenth century that the Church took formal steps to counter what it would term 'abuses' of the divine art. The first such move took place in th-e ı5ı5 bull Inter Sollicitudines, in which Pope Leo X ordered printers to seek ecclesiastical permission for each book they intended to print. Shortly thereafter, as a result of the events of the Reformation, the Church decided it needed to exert tighter control over the press. Created for this purpose, the fırst Index of Forbidden Books was promulgated by the doctors of theology of the Paris Sorbonne in ı 544 for enforcement in France. Concluding that drawing up a defınitive list of banned books was an excellent idea, the General Inquisition of the Church took charge of creating a Roman Index to be universally applied and promoted.

The first Roman Index was promulgated under Pope Paul IV in ı559. Many Catholics complained that this Index was too restrictive, and under the leadership of Pope Pius IV, a new Index was drawn up in ı 564 to conform to the guidelines of censorship that had been recently adopted by the Council ofTrent. In ı571, Pope Pius V created the Congregation of the Index, an assembly of cardinals who would be responsible for the Roman Index henceforward. The Roman Index assumed its authoritative form in the version promulgated in ı596. Combining the Tridentine Rules with a further set of instructions, the so-called Clementine Index (for Pope Clement VIII) simply received periodic updates throughout the seventeenth century without announcing any substantive changes in censorship policy.3 It was notuntil ı 753 that, under the direction of Pope Benedict XIV, an effort was made not only to update the Cl ementine Index, but to revise it. This Index was to be the last of i ts kind:

In ı 758, two centuries after the publication of the Tridentine Index, was issued the Index of Benedict XIV, which was particularly important as representing what may be called the last attempt of the Papacy to maintain any general censorship of the world' s literature. The series of papal Indexes from time to time has been continued, but the compilers of these later Indexes content themselves with repeating the general rules or principles by which the reading of the faithful should be guided, while the lists of current publications are limited almost exclusively to works by Catholic writers, and chiefly to works of a doctrinal character, the teachings of which are found to be in one respect oranother open to condemnation. No attempt is made to condemn the increasing lists of modem Protestant doctrinal books, or to characterize or differentiate the great mass of the world's literature. The printing-press had outgrown the machinery of ecclesiastical censorship.4

2

3

4

John W. Bohnstedt, The Infidel Scourge of God: The Turkish Menace as Seen by German Parnp/eteers of the Reformation Era, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society (Philadelpb!a, 1968), 9-1 O Catholic Encyclopedia, 1906 ed., s.v. "Censorship ofBooks," available from http://www.newadvent. org/cathen/03519d.htm; Internet George Haven Putnam, The Gensorship of the Church of Rome (New York: The Knickerbocker Press, 1907), 1:6

286 İsJiim-Türk Medeniyeti ve Avrupa

Wlıile the Benedietine Index was the last Index to claim an interest in every kind of published work, the Catholic Church di d not acknowledge that she had relinquished authority over secular literature until the nineteenth century, and even then, only indirectly. 5

Largely disinterested in Christian theological debates, the sixteenth-century Ottoman sultans surveyed the tremors that were shaking the Church in Europe and pondered how the Sublime State might take advantage of Christian lack of unity. But the commercial ties existing in the Mediterranean guaranteed that printed materials would soon become the sultan' s concem as well. Italian book printers such as Alessandro Paganini were printing and attempting to sell Qurans in the Ottoman Empire by the mid-sixteenth century, although they did not have much success in this endeavor.6 In 1588, Sultan Murad III officially granted permission to European merchants to sell printed non-religious books in Arabic, Persian and Turkish, and informed imperial officials that merchants who attempted to do so should not be prevented or harassed.7 Printing was notunknown in the Empire itself, as Spanish Jews newly settled in Ottoman domains petitioned for and were granted the right to print books in the Hebrew alplıabet in 1493. Christian communities began to establish presses in the seventeenth century, often asa result ofmissionary activity. However, we know of no Ottoman Muslims who desired to set up a printing enterprise until Ihrahim Muteferrika successfully lobbied the Ottoman govemment to allow him to open a press in 1728.8

Muteferrika's writings claim that in fact other Muslims had been interested in founding a press some years earlier (he is not specific about the date ). He writes that although the issue remained controversial, the proponents of printing had gaiıied the upper hand and were planning to proceed with founding a press, but were prevented either by lack of funds or difficulty acquiring the necessary equipment. 9 Muteferrika himself received permission to print only books that dealt with temporal and rational subjects, however, and religious books remained unprinted into the nineteenth century. By 1823, most religious books could be published, with the exception of the Quran and tefsir. 10 The printing of the Quran in the Ottoman Empire, wlıich dates to 1288 H/1871-2 M, was therefore a truly modem plıenomenon and the result of a long process wherein the growing number of printed materials was intimately tied to· a series of teclınological

5

6

7

9

!O

Catholic Encyclopedia, "Censorship ofBooks" Harmut Bobzin, "From Yenice to Cairo: On the History of Arabic Editions of the Koran," in Sprachen des Nahen Ostens und die Druckrevolution (Middle Eastern Languages and the Print Revolution) (Westhofen: WVA-Verlag Skulima, 2002), 154 Wahid Gdoura, Le Debut de l'Imprimerie Arabe a Istanbul et en Syrie, Publications de l'Institut Superieur de Documentation N. 8 (Tunis, 1985), 85 For further information on the 'unprecedented' aspect of Muteferrika's endeavor see Giambatista Toderini, De la Litterature des Turcs, trans. M.l'Abbe de Cournand (Paris: Poincot, 1789) Ihrahim Muteferrika, "Risale," in Yazmadan Basmaya (Istanbul: Unal Ofset Mathacilik Sanayi ve Ticaret A.S., 1996), 34 The tefsir is a vast corpus of exegetic literature on the Quran.

Mal_issa T a y I o r 287

improvements in the quality of print itself. 11 12 Another result of the increasing varieties of printed literature was the introduction of censorship, which made i ts :first appearance in the press laws of ı 858, ı 864 and ı 867. 13

Northwest Shore

In order to understand what the Index was supposed to do, it is necessary to :first examine the way in which censorship was a part of Catholic culture prior to the early modem period. I do not wish to suggest that censorship was not part of Protestant or other cultures, but rather to examine the particnlar relationship between Catholic practices and belief generally and the issue of censorship. As is commonly known, the history of Catholic censorship predated the printing press and the Reformation. In the fırst Christian centuries books such as the apocrypha were forbidden to Christians by their bishops, who in general urged them to avoid interfacing with heretics or their ideas. In the fourth century the church ceased to be a persecuted sect, and having gained imperial favor and legitimacy began building itself into an institution with an increasingly clear hierarchy of authority. The Council of Nicea set the tone for the new kind of censorship associated with the institutional voice of the church by condemning the ideas of Arius and forbidding his writings to Christians. In this instance, as in those that followed throughout the Middle Ages, the ultimate goal of censorship was to stop the circulation ofheresy and wrong belief.

As regards the kinds and content of writings forbidden in ancient times, we fınd among them, besides apocryphal and heretical books, forged acts of martyrs, spurious penitentials, and superstitious writings. In ancient times, information about

ll

12

13

Tecbnically, the fust Quran printed in the Ottoman domains was that printed in Cairo in 1286 H/1869-70 M. I continue to refer to the 1288 Quran as the fust Ottoman Quran because Egypt was only nominally part of the Ottoman Empire by this time, and print policies were set by the Khedive, the hereditary governor. Reinhard Schulz, "The Birth of Tradition and Modernity in 18Uı and 19Uı Century Islamic Culture­the Case ofPrinting," Culture and History 16 (1997): 8-9, p. 50 asserts that the fust Ottoman Quran was printed in Istanbul in 1830. He refers to a Quran in the possession of Bonn University Library, whose publication date is given as ı246, corresponding to the year 1830. However, based on the date and the number of pages, I surmise that this Quran is identical to Suleymaniye Kutuphanesi M. S. Dugumlu Baba 1. This Quran, a lithograph of a hand written manuscript, is also incorrectly catalogued as dating to 1246 H. The reason for the confusion is that the only date to be found on this Quran is that which the calligrapher mentions in the colophon of the original manuscript, the year '46. The catalogers have assumed this date to be the 46Uı year of the thirteenth Islamic century, but the calligrapher, whose nom de plume was Shekerzade, was dead by 1165 H! ı 752 M and could only have meant the year ı ı 46. The sultan Mahmud that he recounts as his patron is therefore Mahmud I rather than Mahmud ll. While the original dates to the ı8Uı century, Chauvin identifies the lithograph's date of publication only as prior to 1877, and an article in the newspaper Hurriyet claims it was published in ı874. http://ramazan.hurriyet.com.tr/hat.asp: Internet. Reinhard Schulz's contention that a commitlee of censorship was set up by Abdulhamid I in 1784, repeated in' several other works, appears to be based on a misreading of the Abbe Toderini. See Toderini, especially volume two, chapter five, Schulz, and for a reference to ı9Uı century censorship see Neumann, Christoph K., "Buch- und Zeitungsdruck auf Turkisch," in Sprachen des Nahen Ostens und die Druckrevolution (Middle Eastem Languages and the Print Revolution) (Westhofen: WV A-Verlag Skulima, 2002), 239

288 İslam-Türk Medeniyeti ve Avrupa

objectionable books was sent from both East and West to Rame, that they might be

examined, and, if necessary, forbidden by the Apostolic See. Thus at the beginning of the Middle Ages, there existed, in all its essentials, though without specifıed clauses, a prohibition and censorship of books throughout the Catholic Church. Popes as well as

councils, hishaps no less than synods, considered it then, as always, their most sacred

duty to safeguard the purity of faith and to protect the souls of the faithful by condemning and forbidding any dangerous book. 14

In other words, we can see that a policy on censorship began to emerge and gain more coherence with the institutional growth of the church. For the church's leaders,

censorship was a useful tool to stop the circulation of 'harmful' knowledge that threatened the faith and its community. While such observations may seem obvious, it is

necessary to see that the policy of pensorship as it developed was tied to the church' s authority as an institution that set policy for the benefıt of Christians whether or not it

could easily enforce such policies.

How then did print complicate this picture? As all historians are quick to note, the

printing press makes it much more difficult to control the production and circulation of knowledge. While the Catholic Chqrch remained steadfast in its belief that print was a

1

divine art, it w as recognized that w hat it termed 'abus e' of the printing press w as taking place and needed to be systematically halted. On the fourth ofMay, 1515, the fıfth Lateran

Council promulgated the bullInter Sollicitudines, which defıned the problem thus:

While a knowledge of the sciences can be easily obtained through the reading of books, and the art of printing, which through the divine goodness has been invented and

in our own time greatly perfected, has brought untold blessings to mankind, because at a

small cost a large number of books can be procured, by means of which those so disposed may easily dev o te themselves to a study of the sciences, and men versed in the

languages, especially Catholics, of whom we desire an ever increasing number for the Church, may conveniently improve themselves, and which are useful, moreover, for the

instruction of infıdels and for strengthening the faith among those who already possess it, nevertheless, many complaints have come to us and to the Apostolic See that same

masters in the art of printing books in different countries presume to sell books translated from the Greek, Hebrew, Arabic and Chaldaic into .the Latin language and

different vernaculars, which contain errors in matters of faith and teachings contrary to the Christian religion; alsa attacks on persons holding positions of dignity and trust, the

reading of which is not only not conducive to the intellectual well-being of the reader but alsa leads to grave errors in matters of faith and morals, whence have arisen

numerous scandals and daily greater ones are to be fearedY

The solution offered was that no book henceforth could be printed without the

approval of the ordinary or the competent person appointed by him. It is evident that

14

15 Catholic Encyclopedia, "Censorship ofBooks" Rev. H.J. Schroeder, Disciplinary Decrees of the General Councils (St. Louis, Mo.; London: B. Herder, 1937), 504

M a l i. s s a T a y l o r 289

even before the Reformation, the 'mass' element of mass communication challenged the church's ability to monitor cultural production. It also draws our attention to the circulation of numerous texts that were not of Catholic origin and whose content, at least in the Church' s eyes, conflicted with Christian teaching. As in the past, the po int of censoring these books was to keep heretical views out of circulation as much as was possible. From the Church's point ofview their prohibition was justifıed on the basis of their incompatibility with the faith and morals that it was the Church' s mission to protect.

W ith the advent of the Reformation censorship i ts elf underwent something of an upheaval, for the book that was causing schism in Christendom was the Bible, and needless to say the Bible could not be banned per se. Even before Luther began expounding unorthodox ideas about scripture, the Bible had become something of a source of controversy. The biblical scholarship that sought to correct the errors of the Vulgate had grown cantankerous as Greek and Hebrew scholars quarreled with one another over the meanings of words and accurate translations. The result was the increasing emergence of debate on the meaning of the Bible generally and concems that the Word of God had been corrupted.16 Ironically, Luther's peculiar claim of sola

scriptura appeared at a time when leamed Christians were increasingly concemed about the text's reliability and authority. None ofthese academic debates flustered Luther, for whom, as Joseph Koemer has so aptly written, the Bible meant what it meant. 17 Not only was scripture the one sure path pointing to salvation, anyone could follow it because its message was patently clear. One did not need the church's help to understand it.

The Catholic Church was faced with a novel dilemma in that its authority over the Bible had been questioned. The problem could be deseribed as a confluence of two kinds of unprecedented biblical accessibility. Luther had declared the Bible hermeneutically accessible to Christians without guidance from the Church, and the printing press had rendered it physically accessible in a hitherto unseen degree. Thanks to the work begun by Gutenberg, the Bible had become a bestseller and was in the possession of an increasingly wide number of Christians who could, according to Luther, understand it without the Church's help. The Catholic authorities not only disagreed with Luther's doctrinal interpretation of the Bible, they were also forced to draw the opposite conclusion from Luther: that it was quite possible to misunderstand the Bible, or for that matter, to mistake unsound doctrine for sound doctrine. Following a metaphor of Sixtus V, Pope Clement XIII remarked that "error can easily be mistaken for truth because of its appearance of truth and can be distinguished from truth only with difficulty in the darkness."18 The creation of the Index of Forbidden Books

16

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Eisenstein, 2: 337 Joseph Koemer, The Reformation of the Image (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004),150 Clement XIII, In Dominico Agro (Vatican: 1761), translator not credited, available from www.CatholicCulture.org; Internet

290 I s Z d m - T u r k M e d e n i y e t i v e A v r u p a

represents the church's efforts to keep such misunderstandings to a minimum and to .exert its control over access to and meaning of the scripture.

The Council of Trent took the fnst concrete steps towards reasserting Catholic authority over the Bible. In the fourth session that assembled on April 8, 1546 the council announced that the definitive form of the Scripture was the Latin Vulgate. While other versions in other languages were not declared anathema by the council, the Index would, de facto, limit Christian Bible reading to the Vulgate from 1559 to 1757.19 Since all non-Vulgate editions were divested of sacred authority, the Church limited both the range of the text, meaning that any claims about the meaning of the Bible had to be based on the Vulgate, and access to the text-only those schooled in Latin would be able to read it. Additionally, in the period discussed, even Vulgates were banned if they had been edited by someone suspected of heresy or printed by a press suspected of disseminating heretical works. ise en stein finds it particularly striking that before the activities of reformers such as Luther, the Church admitted that the Vulgate contained errors of translation; afterwards however, the church stood on the validity and uncorrupted authenticity of the Vulgate, and refused to have further errors ~orrected.~' Protecting correct use of the Bible, as the Church defined it, translated into measures that created a uniform authorized version of the text, restricted publishing and reading to that text alone, and narrowed the number of individuals to whom the text was linguistically accessible.

Besides its decree concerning the Vulgate, the Church took another action in the fourth session of Trent that was monumental for deflning the role of the Bible in Catholic doctrine. The council opened its session thus:

This Gospel, of old promised through the Prophets in the Holy Scriptures, our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, promulgated first with His own mouth, and then commanded it to be preached by.His Apostles to every creature as the source at once of all saving truth and rules of conduct. [The Council of Trent] also clearly perceives that these truths and rules are contained in the written books and in the unwritten traditions, which, received by the Apostles from the mouth of Christ Himself, or from the Apostles themselves, the Holy Ghost dictating, have come down to us, transmitted as it were from hand to hand."

In th_ls passage, the council can be said to have contextually placed the role of scripture within Christianity as a whole. The Bible was not.the, only source of Christian doctrine, it was a source. The text of the Bible does not stand on its own. Rather, true

There was some back and forth on this issue. The Index of 1559 categorically prohibited vernacular Bibles, but the Council of Trent would later adopt the rule that vernaculars, if approved by an ordinary, were acceptable. The council's rule was adopted by the Index of 1564, but was reversed by the Index of 1593, see Gigliola Fragnito, "The Central and Peripheral Organization of Censorship" in Fragnito ed. Church, censorship, and culture in earZy modem Italy, trans. Adrian Belton (Cambridge, U.K.; New York : Cambridge University Press, 2001), 32

20 Eisenstein, 2:327-329 21 Rev. H.J. Schroeder (trans.), Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent (Rockford,.Ill.: Tan Books

and Publishers, 1978), 17

Mali.ssa T a. y l o r 291

Christian doctrine rests on the sacred content of the Bible existing in tandem with the sacred traditions. If a reading of the Bible contradicts the sacred traditions, then that reading cannot be a correct one. The Bible then, has particnlar interpretational contexts that govem its understahding, and these are preserved in the teachings of the Church. The Church provides, and after Trent sought with greater effort to provide, an authoritative guide to a true understanding of Cbristianity de:fined as a complex of scriptural and oral traditions.

Catholic policy towards the Bible has elicited a great deal of scholarly disapproval. Gigliola Fragnito has called the banuing of vemacular Bibles "a veritab le trauma for the common people." She adds that this trauma was made more pain:ful by the fact that, during the periodic book burnings which lit up the piazzas of Italy with their sinister glare, they were obliged to watch their Bibles fed to the flames ... prohibited and seized because the Holy Office deemed them the source of all heresy, the Holy Scriptures were thus confused in the Italian imagination with the writings of the 'heretics' .Z2

When reading histarical literature about the censorship policy of the Catholic Church, it sametimes seems as though the scholars have picked up where the Protestant polemicists left off. Along similar lines, Eisenstein notes that "Even where vemacular translation was allowed, in lands held by Protestant rulers, Catholic Bibles were marked by Latinate expressions and elaborate glosses ... To regard the plain text as harmful in lay hands [as Catholic Church di d], meant to encourage obfuscation and to deny to laymen the most direct access to the divine W ord.'m It is necessary to recall that, from the theological perspective that guided this policy, direct access to the divine word can only be valuable if it is equally likely or more likely to lead to salvation than an indirect access to the divine word. In the eyes of the Catholic authorities, direct access led more often to error and the prospect of etemal damnation than to the truths that ensured salvation. If salvation is the ultimate goal, then it is at least understandable that the Catholic Church would view direct access to scripture as undesirable. Obfuscation was not at all the goal, quite the opposite; guidance towards the truth was considered key.

While the Index was distinguished from previous censorship by the growing numbers of Bibles that it prohibited, this is not to say that it did not also serve the traditional function of censorship. Continuing to serve the function of protecting the faithful from bad doctrine or corrupt morals, the Index barmed numerous other books and ordered the expurgation of others, in line with the more general thrust of censorship policy as it had existed before the press and Reformation. The Index is infamous for having barmed works of philosophy, the first stirrings of scientific literature, and the Classics. There has been less scholarly concem over its prohibition on magic, manuals for exorcism and unauthorized works on the saints. It should be noted, however, that policy of censoring fuese books was quite erratic. A work by Jean Bodin might appear on one

22

23 Fragnito, 35 Eisenstein, 2:344

292 i s 1 6 m - ~ i i r k M e d e n i y e t i v e A v r u p a

version of the Roman Index, but not on its successor. There were many books, including those by Descartes and Spinoza, that would appear on the Roman Index but not on the Spanish, French, Austrian, Venetian or other national Indexes that governed censorship outside the papal states." Where the Bible was concerned, things were not nearly so fluid. The strict policy on the Bible and the banning of its vernacular editions outlined consistently in the Roman Index since 1593 seemed to be something that all the Catholic states could agree ought to be carried out2' In the seventeenth century, France was the only place where even the mildest amendment to the wholesale ban on vernacular Bibles appeared. However, reading of the Bible in French was an activity particularly associated with the Jansenists, who were excommunicated as heretics in 171 3.

Needless to say, books were not the only issue for the Church. With the schisms of the Reformation, the issue of control over the press became crucial-but it must be seen as an attempt to dominatq the communication of ideas and social mores generally rather than as an isolated phknomenon. As part of the ongoing campaign to keep communication congruent with faith, it was not only the printing press that needed to be censored and corrected, but rather all means of communication. Hence we cannot say that only print as a communicative medium was targeted or affected by Tridentine policy. Recent publications by Fernando Bouza and Roger Chartier have emphasized the importance of non-written forms of cornmunicati~n.~~ Bouza maintains that effective Catholic outreach in diverse communicational media explains the success of Catholic missions in Europe while Calvinists, with their rehsal "to echo the representational tradition so ingrained in European popular culture," lagged behind in winning over rural area^."^ The scholarly literature on the Catholic art of the period, including for instance the work of Victor Stoichita, Yvonne Levy and Anna Knaap, shows how Catholic patrons and artists used painting, sculpture and architecture as a means to persuade or guide (or even coerce) beholders towards the truth. Given the mass communication aspect of print culture, it posed more of a challenge than other media simply because it was harder to control, both in terms of what material was printed and how readers understood it. By waging a multi-media campaign, the Church sought to create a climate that was hostile to wrong belief, in whatever form it occurred.

The Hierarchy of Readers

Restrictions on biblical interpretation were necessary in order not to upset the hierarchy of readership that the Catholic Church was built on. As I try to understand the

24 Putnam, 2: 128 ? Dominique Julia, "Reading and the Counter-Reformation,'' in Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier

ed. A Histoly of Reading in the West, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Amherst : University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), 244-250

26 Fernando Bouza, Communication, Knowledge, and Memoiy in Early Modern Spain, trans. Sonia Lopez and Nichael Agnew, with a foreword by Roger Chartier (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999)

27 Ibid.,30

Malissa T a y l o r 293

bases öfthe Church's authority and why censorship was deemed a necessary part of it, I will try draw in particnlar on the idea of mediation, although the concept of mediation in itself is not entirely adequate for what I wish to convey. While the primary suggestion in mediatian is that the Church or saints or relics, ete. stand between the believer and God, I want to emphasize not the medial aspect, but the patriarchal and hierarchical aspects of God-Church-believer. While the existence of a Catholic patriarchal hierarchy predated the advent of print, the Reformari on and Trent, the policy of Trent was to entrench this notion of hierarchy. The idea of reform adopted at Trent was not that the patriarchal paradigm was wrong, but that it needed to be shored up so as to function properly. There were no efforts to make the Church more egalitarian; the problem was seen as one that could be mended by each person keeping his or her traditional role, but performing it better. Popes and clergy were to be more, rather than less, responsible to their lay congregations, for which good guidance the laity was obliged to respond with more, rather than less, obedience. The policy of the Catholic Church towards books in general but the Bible in particnlar was that not all readers were equal just as not all readings were equal. Some readers are better placed than others to understand God' s will, and hence a chain of hierarchically mediated authority extends from the saints and pop es down the rungs of the church toward the laity. Standing behind this edifice of hierarchy, whose purpose is to guide towards truth, are certain underlying beliefs about the nature of truth and how one gains access to the truth. In a world where Bibles had proliferated as a result of print, Catholic doctrine continued to affırm that the degree of access to the truth of the Bible was stili determined by the status of the reader within that hierarchy. Bibles had become more accessible; the truth had not. Hence, it was advisable to make Bibles less accessible in order to arrest confusion.

All religious authority flows from the message of Christ. Whatever disputes Christians may have entered into about the nature of the message, the fact that Christ had brought a message that was the basis of the Christian religion was common to all. The question was, how was that authority invoked to justify restricting knowledge, especially knowledge of scripture? For the popes, the right and duty to censor was an issue of asserting their rightful role as the heirs of the apostles. In the bull that precedes the Roman Index of 1593, Pope Clement VIII offered the following thoughts:

So that the holy deposit of the Catholic faith, without which it is impossible for anyone to please God or to attain etemal salvation, may be preserved intact in the Church of God and passed on inviolate to later generations, the pastoral vigilance of the Roman pontiffs has labored always with the utmost zeal and effort. For they received it from Christ the Lord, the author of so precious a deposit, and received in the most blessed Peter, the first of the Apostles, the principal care and greatest power of guarding it favhfully . .. 28

( emphasis mine)

28 Clement VIII, "Praefatio" trans. Juliet Schwab from Index librorvm prohibitorvm Alexandri VII (Rom, ex typographiarev. Cam. Apost, 1667), 147

294 I s l a ^ m - T u r k M e d e n i y e t i v e A v r u p a

The popes are the heir of the apostles and hence, explicitly, that of Christ himself. The pope is truly Christ's successor of God on earth, or as the popes themselves put it, His Vicar. It was to this lineage also that Pope Leo X appealed when he issued the bull Exsurge Domini condemning Martin Luther. Addressing Christ he wrote,

When You were about to ascend to Your Father, You committed the care, rule, and administration of the vineyard, an image of the triumphant church, to Peter, as the head and your vicar and his successors. ..we have found that these errors [of Martin Luther] or theses are not Catholic, as mentioned above, and are not to be taught, as such; but rather are against the doctrine and tradition of the Catholic Church, and against the true interpretation of the sacred Scriptures received from the Church. Now Augustine maintained that her authority had to be accepted so completely that he stated he would not have believed the Gospel unless the authority of the Catholic Church had vouched for it. For, according to these errors, or any one or several of them, it clearly follows that the Church which is guided by the Holy Spirit is in error and has always erred. This is against what Christ at his ascension promised to his disciples (as is read in the holy Gospel of Matthew): "I will be with you to the consummation of the world"; it is against the determinations of the holy Fathers, or the express ordinances and canons of the councils and the supreme pontiffs. Failure to comply with these canons, according to the testimony of Cyprian, will be the fuel and cause of all heresy and schism.29

This is a mighty assertion of papal and ecclesiastical authority. In it, we are given no room for doubt that hermeneutics is reserved for the Church, with the pope as ultimate arbitrator. Besides the fact that it is Christ himself who has ordained this state of affairs, it is made clear that its rejection will mark the end of Christian unity: It is the suggestion of unbroken lineage from St. Peter to Leo himself that gives Leo X the authority to claim that he acts as Christ's deputy. What is interesting about this claim is that we know, as did Leo's audience, that arguments could be and were made to the effect that the line was broken. The Western Schism fi-om 1378-1414 and discussions of conciliarism as an alternative to the papacy were indications that the sanctity of the pope's authority could be questioned. By nevertheless stating that it is unbroken, the pope makes a claim for himself as being the person who can make judgements of what readings are compatible with Christ's will and which are not. Because without the apostolic authority and Christ's promise to make His will known through it, the pope's supremacy as the reader whose interpretation cannot be questioned is open to challenge.

These images of authority are likewise complemented by pictures of patriarchal care and affection. Pius N likens himself to a vigilant shepherd tending the Lord's flock, and needless to say he was not the only pope to use such imagery. The metaphors of the post-Tridentine popes in the bulls of censorship often draw attention to their belief that the awesome authority they claim to hold leaves them with equally

29 Leo X, Exsurge Domini (Vatican, 1520), translator not credited,. available &om www.CatholicCulture.org: Internet

Mali-ssa T a y l o r 295

momentous responsibilities towards other Christians. Sixtus V refers to himself as paterfamilias dearing the weeds (books) that are choking the health of the good seed he has sown, the "highest pastor of souls" who must take action against books that make "many men forgetful of tb.eir own salvation. "30 All of these metaphors point at the same canception of papal authority: the actions that the pope takes, even when they appear stern, are taken not for his own benefit, but for those who rely on him. Such is the proper mode ·of Tridentine relationships between the clergy and laity as a who le; obedience is owed not only because of the investment of Apostolic authority, but because the Pope is a caring father who tends to the needs of the laity as though they were his children. Obedience is not only in conformity with the will of God (as Leo X would have it), but in the best interest of the lay believer. The good lay person recognizes the superior knowledge and authority of the pope and does not attempt to supercede the powers of interpretation or access to knowledge that are in accordance with his rank.

If the top of the hierarchy represents the pop e, the bortom is that of lay believers. As for them, the popes and other officials of the Church seem to be in general of the opinion that it would be unfair to expect too much from them, particularly the uneducated. Pope Clement XIII remarks that

The faithful-especially those who are simple or uncultivated-should be kept away from the dangerous and narrow paths upon which they can hardly set foot without faltering. The sheep should not be led to pasture through trackless places. Nor should peculiar ideas--even those of Catholic scholars--be proposed to them. Rather, only those ideas should be communicated which are defınitely marked as Catholic truth by their universality, ambiguity, and harmony. Besides, since the crowd cannot go up to the mountain upon which the glory of the Lord came down, and if whoever crosses the boundaries to see will die, the teachers of the people should establish boundaries around them so that no word strays beyond that which is necessary or useful for salvation. The faithful should obey the apostolic advice not to know more than is necessary, but to know in moderation?1

Such ideas appear to be ubiquitous in the writings of early modern Catholics. Knowledge, even knowledge of the faith, is presented as something of both a privilege and a burden here. It is a temptation that can lead to seduction and from there to damnation. The average believer has no need to seek a subtle or thorough understanding of the faith, and in fact should eschew it. He or she need only o bey their superiors and know enough to resİst efforts by heretics to lead them astray. Obedience was not only a virtue, it is an acknowledgement that one's superiors know better.

30

31

" Sixtus V, "Bulla" trans. Kurt Lampe from Josepho Mendham ed. Index librorom prohibitorom a Si:xto v., papa, confectus et publicatus: et verso a successoribus ejus in sede romana suppressus (Londini: apudJacobumDuncan, 1835), 1-2 Clement XIII, In Dominico Agr.o

296 İslam-Türk Medeniyeti ve Avrupa

However, this does not mean that the popes were only concemed about the adverse effects of knowledge on peasants and the most humble of believers. In the opening bull of the 1564 Index, Pius IV writes, "Since the reading of books published by heretics not only tends to corrupt simple people, but often even leads the leamed and erudite into different errors and seduces them from the truth of the Catholic faith to strange opinions: we think this matter should also be looked after."32 While the truly simple had the most to benefıt from guidance or persuasion, the less humble could benefıt from it as well. The diffıculty of keeping the faithful away from sin meant that prohibited books would be universally barmed rather than barmed to some and allowed to others. However, an individual whose piety could be expected to withstand exposure to impiety could be granted permission to read forbidden books by the ordinary. It was again a s tatement of authority; Catholics of whatever rank had to apply for permission from their superior in the spiritual hierarchy and permission was given on an individual basis. Knowledge could prove to be too overwhelming a responsibility for anyone, and for leamed folk in particular there was the danger that it might incite disobedience.

The Index represented the negative program of Trent: it told Catholics what they were not to do. However, there was also a positive program presented at Trent and much of it had to do with the circulation of ecclesiastically approved knowledge. While the pope and clergy in general were pledged to care for the masses of ordinary believers, the latter became responsible as never before for fulfılling their own obligations. For while many aspects offaith were considered beyond the understanding of the common folk, there emerged a new Tridentine emphasis on basic tenets that ~hould be intemalized by even the most humble. While Bible reading was not encouraged, the Church promoted reading of the Tridentine catechism that enıbodied these basic tenets of Credo, sacraments, Decalogue and Lord's Prayer. Although this catechism was addressed to parish priests rather than the laity when published in 1566, "it was the only text whose trı;ınslation into the vemacular the Tridentine Council expressly mandated."33 In addition to the catechism, a newly standardized Roman Missal and Brevary were promulgated and were in high demand. It is probably true that most of the texts that the Church promoted were for the clergy. If so, then the publishing policy was in complete conformity with Tridentine emphasis on pastoral care. Whatever faith the Church had in books, it emphasized above all that the laity leamed about salvation and what they needed to do to attain it from their parish priests. The guidance in simply written books was all very well, but there was no substitute for the presence of a person who could adıninister the sacraments, hear confession and demonstrate by example how one was to lead a Christian life. One could argue that parish priests and orders such as the Society of Jesus were the most important node in the interpretational hierarchy, being the primary site of mediation between the teachings

32

33

Pius IV, "Praefatio in Indicem," trans. Juliet Schwab from Concilium Tridentinum sub Paulo lll, Julio m et Pio mL pont. max. celebratum (Venetiis: Andreas Muschius excudebat, 1581), no page numbers Julia, 241

Mal.issa T a y 1 o r 297

of the Church and the believer. The results appear to have been favorable. Wlıether they

leamed it from reading or from priests, by the eighteenth century the faithful appeared toknow more about the 'appropriate' articles oftheir faith.34

~

The Church seems to have enjoyed a measure of success in encouraging some

kinds of knowledge and discouraging others. But it is always around the issue of

scripture that the prerogatives of the Catholic hierarchy are most clearly exposed. Given the realities of the hierarchy ofbelievers outlined above, the meaning of the Bible could

only be what the church said it was. The Council of Trent confirmed that the Church's

interpretation of the Bible was to be accepted by the faithful as true, stating,

Furthermore, to check unbridled spirits, it [the council] decrees that no one relying

on his own judgement shall, in matters of faith and morals pertaining to the edification

of Christian doctrine, distorting the Holy Scriptures in accordance with his own conceptions, presume to interpret them contrary to that sense which holy mother

Church, to whom it belongs to judge of their true sense and interpretation, has held and

holds.35

To stubbornly maintain, in defiance of one's ecclesiastical superiors, that the

Bible has a meaning other than what the Church designates was a grave erime of

disobedience. Disobedience was furthermore a rebellion against the whole institutional establishment, defined, as shown above, by proper behaviors of obedience and

authoritative domination. The way in which Pope Leo X deseribes his efforts to convince Martin Luther of his errors is extremely telling. Some passages in Exsurge

Damini carry an air of injured dignity, as though saying, "Who does Martin Luther

think he is to challenge the heir of St. Peter?" In others, the pope strives to show that he

has treated Martin Luther indulgently, like a good paterfamilias struggling with a dear but wayward son. It is, he remarks, with great sadness that he is forced to

excommunicate the lost sheep. The pope's characterization of their conflict is meant to

convey that the pope for his part is carrying out his responsibilities and that out of concem for Luther he has only excommunicated him after exhausting every other

recourse to win Luther' s repentance.

In the discourse of patriarchal hierarchy, the primary sin of the heretic is that of vanity, or pride. The person who insists, willfully, that the Church is in error and that he

knows the truth better than the Church, can only persist in such conduct if he has

succumbed to the height of self-glorification. Leo X, eloquent as ever, writes that

Some, putting aside her [the Church's] true interpretation of Sacred Scripture, are

blinded in mind by the father of lies. Wise in their own eyes, according to the ancient

practice of hereti es, they interpret these same Scriptures otherwise than the Holy Spirit demands, inspired only by their own sense of ambition, and for the sake of popular

34

35

R. Po-Chia Hsia, The World of Catholic Renewal 1540-1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 51 Scbroeder, Council ofTrent, 18-19

298 i s l r i m - T u r k M e d e n i y e t i v e A v r u p a

acclaim, as the Apostle declares. In fact, they twist and adulterate the Scriptures. As a result, according to Jerome, "It is no longer the Gospel of Christ, but a man's, or what is worse, the devil's."36

The goal of the heretic is fame; he leads others astray because of his destructive appetite for earthly glory and renown. Instead of behaving with humility, as becomes a dutiful son, he interprets the Bible either according to his own whimsy or, worse yet, according to the dictates of the devil. There is no doubt in Leo X's bull that Luther's behavior is motivated by the sin of pride and lust for greatness. While Leo is fulfilling h s obligations towards Luther, Luther spitefully refuses to offer Leo the obedience that is the rightful due of the pope, or to admit that ultimately, the truth is not as accessible to him as it is to Leo. Patriarchal hierarchy and its obligation of obedience on the part of the subordinate meant that honest disagreement was not a possibility.

The nature of authority as it had developed in Catholic structure, before but also after Trent, demanded uniformity of belief and submission to the Church as to God. In justifjring their actions of censorship, the papal documents inevitably refer back to this particular notion of hierarchy that bestows specific degrees of interpretational competency on each class of Catholics. While limiting access to any book that could lead a Catholic astray was justified, the limiting of the scripture was of particular importance. Other books could lead Catholics to sin, but misunderstood Bibles could lead even intelligent Christians such as Martin Luther to think that they could redefine the meaning of sin itself The point of the whole apparatus and every part of the censorship policy was to preserve the unity of sacred meaning in Christian doctrine. To allow that the church might be wrong, as Martin Luther maintained, was to open the door to interpretational anarchy that threatened both the unity of meaning and the hierarchy of authority responsible for maintaining unity. Censorship and restriction of access to the Bible was an important means towards this end.

Clearly it is not fair to a s h e that the papal view on censorship was the only Catholic view. What did the laity have to say about the Index and its initiatives? It is important that, as historians, we do not presume that the people of the past shared our contemporary views about censorship. The writings of Vincent de Stochove, who was quoted at the beginning of the paper, seem particularly illuminating here. Stochove indicates that he shares the Egyptian physician's concerns about the damage that bad books can do and takes pains to assure him that censors, whom he calls 'wise men', did an excellent job of preventing such abuses. Again, this is not to say that opposition to censorship did not exist. On the contrary, there were many early modem Catholics who criticized it. The publishers of Venice protested the presence of many items on the Roman Index of 1554 saying that the Index prohibited "works on diverse disciplines which do not pertain to fai &...but only to law, medicine and philosophy."37 Paolo

36 Leo Xy Exsurge Domini 37 Rodolfo Savelli, "The Censoring of Law Books," in Gigliola Fragnito ed. Church, censorship, and

culture in early modem Italy, trans. Adrian Belton (Cambridge, U.K. ; New York : Cambridge . . University Press, 2001), 224

Malissa T a y l o r 299

Sarpi, a famous eritic of the Index, complained bitterly that ecdesiastical authority was overstepping its bounds and attempting to emasculate temporal authority.38 Or perhaps most commonly, the derical rank and file complained to their Cangregation of the Index superiors that the orders they received were simply impossible to carry out due to lack of manpower.39 In other words, none of these early modem Catholics were of the opinion that censorslıip was an oppression in and of itself; rather they thought that the Church was ·going about it the wrong way. While derical and secular authority seemed united in the belief that bad books did exist, were injurious to the faith and should be censured, they had a harder time agreeing on what specific books were harmful. Had the Indexes merely censored Protestant Bibles, no doubt Paolo Sarpi would have been satisfied; the Church had a mandate to censor, his work implies, but for cynical reasons, the Church would attempt to go beyond it. In short, the attitudes toward censorship that I encountered were consistent with the condusion ofEdoardo Barbieri:

The purpose of censorship was to preserve societas christiana from doctrinal and moral deviations. Regardless of any contemporary view of censorship, and independently of disputes on its application, that purpose clıimed more or less explicitly with the mentality of the overwhelming majority, if not the totality, of the members of sixteenth-century society. 40

I do not tlıink that anyone has produced any work to substantially challenge Barbieri on this point, however difficult it may be to decipher majority versus minority vıews.

That the Church's policy on censorship did not outrage Catlıolics reflects the ambivalence of early modem views on print culture. Although Eisenstein writes of the schoJar-printer as a heroic figure, defying the authority of the Church with his independent judgement and deep erudition,41 the church authorities were not the only ones to express doubt about printers and their product. Anxiety over the quality of leamed culture seemed to crystallize around the idea that after the advent of print books were being both produced and consumed by the ignorant. In a society where artisans did not occupy a lıiglı rung on the social ladder, their impact on the process of disseminating knowledge was viewed with some apprehension. Francisco de Quevedo, the seventeenth-century Spanish author, criticizes printers for their vulgarization of the dassics. Tlıeir vemacular translations are now in the hands of fools and stable boys, who, to judge from the subtext, haven't the sense to appreciate them.42 Other criticisms were that the world was filled with books that were superfluous, excessive and not particularly enlightening. A Jesuit named Antonio Vieria remarked that although the

38

39

40

41

42

Ibid., 232 Fragnito, 41-44 Edoardo Ba!bieri, "Tradition and Change in Spiritual Literature," in Gigliola Fragnito ed. Church, censorship, and culture in early modern Jtaly, trans. Adrian Belton (Cambridge, U.K.; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 133 Eisenstein, 2:320 Bouza, 47

300 İ 1s l ti m - Tü r k M e d e n i y e t i v e A v r up a

world was more ever covered with paper it was no wiser as a result.43 In 1633 an anonymous treatise was published in Spain maintaining that the kingdom' s economic situation was threatened by the lıigh number of Spaniards learning to read and write rather than engaging in profıtable activities like trade and farming.44 Fernando Bouza interprets this treatise as exhibiting anxiety over the social changes wrought by rising literacy; he is undoubtedly right, but I am struck by the author's beliefthat the result of literacy will be fınancial ruin of the kingdom. The fear that the author articulates in his defense of a traditional sociallıierarchy is not that he will lose his privilege, but rather that the eradication of that hierarchy will be the end of order itself.

Southeast Shore

There are widely divergent characterizations of Islami c, and specifically Ottoman Islamic, limits on spoken or written expression in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. One may fınd studies that state authoritatively that Ottoman society was utterly repressive on the one hand and those insisting with equal vehemence that it was an extremely tolerant society on the other. It is therefore worth considering carefully what kinds of speech or writinp might bring social or legal condemnation upon the speaker, and what type was countenanced. Speech or writing that tended toward sedition could be punished summarily by the temporal authorities and we hear little of written appeals to insurrection in this era. On the other hand, constructive criticism, whether solicited or unsolicited by the sultan, was welcome in the form of 'advice literature' and was an important part of the court's traditions. Additionally, the satirical mocking that emerged in the famous shadow plays starring the stock character _Karagoz appears to have been widely tolerated into the nineteenth century.45 In such performances, both temporal authority and prevailing morality would be openly mocked in an atmosphere of ribald and;bawdy humor. These contours of tolerated expression may sound quite familiar to the historian of early modern Europe. However, in matters of faith and religious doctrine, the circumstances differed in appreciable ways. While some books and fields of study were regarded with skepticism among Muslim scholars, there were very limited active restrictions on the circulation of knowledge. Book banning was not a part of the Ottoman Islami c cultural milieu, and such would remain the case throughout the eighteenth and well into the nineteenth centuries.

This is not to say that in matters of faith, anytlıing put forward would be tolerated. Rather, the temporal and religious authorities were jointly responsible for punishing heresy when it did emerge, as it was perceived to threaten the civil order. Those found guilty might disavow their errors and escape with their lives, but those who persevered

43 Ibid., 9 44 Ibid., 61-62 45 Dror Zeevi, Producing Desire: Changing Sexual Discourse in the Middle East, 150 -1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006)

Maltssa Taylor 30ı

intheir beliefs were more often than not put to death.46 Although I have not read any apostasy cases under the Ottoman government that involved buming a disgraced scholar' s books, there are a few famous examples of such from medieval Islami c states in present day Spain aıtd Iran.47 The religious authorities competent to identify heresy were drawn from the ranks of Islamic scholars, many of whom held no government position but were authoritative members of their communities because of their outstanding reputations as learned and pious men. Since the collapse of the Abbasid state in 1258, the reigning doctrine among Sunni Muslims48 had been that spiritual authority resided in these religious scholars, the men called the ulema, as a collective body. The ulema were henceforth called the heir of the prophet Muhammad, and the cansensus that emerged among the great minds of every generatian became the most generally applicable and authoritative reading of Islam for the Sunni community. There were no collective bodies of ulema that came together to affirm what was orthodox practice and dogma. Rather, cansensus on issues ranging from the minimum age for marriage to the status of Aristotelian metaphysics only emerged over long intervals, and in some issues, no general cansensus was ever reached.49 Heresy occurred when a clear terret of the faith, recognized as such by broadest consensus, was contravened. The emphasis placed on cansensus meant that in areas where opinion among great minds was divided, differences could and indeed, should, be tolerated. For one thing, it was a very serious matter for those who identified themselves as Muslims to be deemed heretics by other Muslims. Strong traditions, both from scripture and the example of the prophet Muhammad, warned Muslims to exercise the greatest of restraint in the matter. Secondly, the ulema reasoned that only God and his scripture the Quran were infallible. Any efforts of human beings to understand God's will should be based on scripture, but human beings were nevertheless prone to error. However intelligent he was, any interpreter could make a mistake. For that reason, the ulema agreed to tolerate a large degree of disagreement among themselves rather than to enforce uniformity of opinion.5° Compared then to early modern Europe, the Ottoman Empire's subjects found themselves in an intellectual environment more accepting of theological disagreement and disputation, more accommodating within clearly demarcated bounds, and more open to the wide participation of all its suitably knowledgeable members.

46

47

48

49

50

The famous Ottoman chief mufti named Kemalpaslıazade, who served from ı4-ı5, presided at several infamous apostasy cases. See Richard Repp, The Mufti of Istanbul, (London: Itlıaca Press, ı986), 235-6. The most famous such case involved the philosoplıer Ibn Rushd, see "Ibn Ruslıd" in The Encyclopedia of Islam, new edition ed. HAR Gibb and atlıers (Leiden: E.J. Brill, ı960); see also J. A. Boyle (trans.), Rashid al-Din, The Successors to Ghengiz Khan (New York, Columbia University Press, ı 97 ı) Since the Ottoman Empire was a Sunni State with a Sunni majority population, it is outside the purview oftAis paper to discuss the temporal/spiritual philosoplıy of the Shi'a. For information on the evolution of cansensus see Fazlur Rahman, Islam, 2nd edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ı979) or view the article on idjma' in The Encyclopedia of Islam. For information on interpretation see Brinkley Messick, The Calligraphic State (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), chapters 1 and 2

302 İsliim-Türk Medeniyeti ve Avrupa

Ottoman reservations about the press can be sornewhat perplexing, for they do not

primarily stern from a concem about the circulation of bad doctrine, as were those of the Catholic Church authorities. For Muslims, there is no holy spirit necessary to guide a

valid reading of the scripture, and no institutional infrastructure for enforcing conformity

to that one reading.51 Furthermore, the ambivalent attitudes toward knowledge that permeated early modem Christendom identified knowledge as both a blessing and a curse

were entirely absent from Islamic scholarship. The Faculty of the Sorbonne, whose 1551

Index predates all of those issued by Rome, presented the view that.

The greatest of all doctors, even medicine itself, teaches us this above all: God, who formed man and placed him in paradise, having given him the use of the other

trees, warned him to abstain from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Christ himself also taught this, who did not only reveal those things leading to the salvation of souls

but also those which where to be shunned like a death-giving drink.52

It is here that perhaps the most salient difference presents itself. Never have I

encountered a Muslim author, Ottoman or otherwise, who writes of knowledge as anything other than positive and beneficial. The fact that knowledge might be dangerous

in some way simply does not seem to be a view widely held among them. The notion that the availability of knowledge might lead to rebellion by the misguided, and that

simple minds could be led astray was not at all unfamiliar to Muslims. But in general

the solution to such problems was more learning and better leaming rather than restrictions, since it was ultimately the community as a whole, through means of the consensus, that would decide what was permitted and what was forbidden. When an

obscure Arabian scholar named Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab emerged in the mid­eighteenth century with (at that time) extremist views of Islam that went beyônd the

bounds of normal disagreement, he was denounced in ways ringingly familiar from the

Catholic context. He was said to be too ignorant to truly understand Islam and that his interpretations were the product dfvain ambition.53 However, his opponents among the ulema in his home region of Najd did not attempt to suppress his works; rather, they

sent copies of them to ulema across the Muslim world in order that they should become all the more widely known and refuted. If attaining knowledge was unambiguously a

good thing, and lack of print was not a strategy to stamp out the spread of heresy, then what explains the distaste for print?

W e tum now to the figure oflbrahim Muteferrika and.his petition to open the fırst Islamic printing press in 1728. Muteferrika was Hungarian by birth and had embraced

51

52

53

Wbile the Ottoman state could and did limit the rulings that its deputized judges could make in state courts, they could only enforce such limitations on state employees. They did not in any case attempt to convince the ulema that alternative rulings were forbidden by God. Index Librorum Prohibitorum. Catalogi librorvm reprobatorvm & prlegendor--u ex iudicio Academi Louaniensis. Cum edieta Csare Maiestatis euulgati. Pinci, ex officina Francis. Ferdi. Corduben. Anno Domini, MD.Ll. Mandata darninorum de consilio sanct genera/is Inquisitionis, (New York: De Vinne Press, 1896) trans. Tyler Lange Ahmed Cevdet Pasha, Tarih-i Cevdet (Istanbul: Matba'a-i 'Osmaniyeh, 1303[1885. or 1886)), 7: 153, 159

M a l s s a T a y l o r 303

Islam i:i:ı adulthood after having arrived in the Ottoman Empire asa captive ofwar. He is

believed to have been raised a Protestant, of either Calvinist or Vnitarian denomination, and to have received some amount of Protestant education before he became a Muslim

and entered the retinue' of an Ottoman notable.54 Ihrahim Muteferrika was to become one of the leading fıgures in what Ottoman scholars would later call the 'tulip period'­

that is, the reign of Ahmed III from 1703-1730. It was in this time that European

architecturaı- aesthetics and mechanical technology became all the rage among the

Istanbul elite.55 Perhaps emboldened by the love of novelties and European consumer goods that were prevailing at court, Muteferrika wrote a treatise in 1726 entitled "The Usefulness of Print" that formed the basis of a petition that he later submitted to the

sultan formally requesting permission to open a press. In the treatise, he succinctly

presented ten reasons why printing would be benefıcial to the Ottoman Empire and to Muslims generally. He spoke primarily of the preservation of knowledge, and the need

to reproduce important texts, especially those that were rare. Writing at a time when

manuscripts had been forbidden for export abroad because of the dearth of books, Muteferrika wrote of the great number of books that could be produced and of the

benefıt that would accrue to the notables and the masses asa result oftheir circulation.56

Some of the other benefıts he identifıes are the superiority ofprint's resistance to water damage; the affordability of mass produced books; and the ease with which scholars

will make use of them since they will have tables of contents with standardized page

numbers. Additionally, he points to the need to keep the production and revenues of Islamic books in the hands ofMuslims rather than Europeans.57

However, there are several places in the text that strike a defensive note. In recounting the many advantages of printing, Muteferrika appears to be simultaneously providing a rebuttal to at least one or two of his opponents' arguments. There is nothing

that recurs more often in this treatise than the assertian that the books produced will not

be full of errors. In the fırst and second items in the treatise, the verbs 'correct' and 'increase' are presented as the dual result of printing. The use of this coupling in the

second item is of particular interest.

From the earliest appearance of the Islamic state and religion until now, for the purpose of strengthening religion and state and the organization of the community for

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56

57

Niyazi Berkes has made a forceful argument that Muteferrika was Unitarian. See "Ilk Turk Matbaasi kurucusunun dini ve fikri kimligi", Belleten, xxvi/104 (1962), 716-37. See Virginia Aksan, An Ottoman Statesman in War and Peace (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1995) and Ariel Salzmann, "The Age ofTulips: Confluence and Conflict in Early Modern Consumer Culture (1550-1 730)" in Donald Quataert ed. Consumption Studies and the History of the Ottoman Empire (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000) Frederic Hitzel writes that the Ottomans forbade the export ofbooks "under the pretext that they had become rare," yet he also gives ample evidence that the number of manuscripts sold to foreign collectors b~fore the ban was quite large. See Frederic Hitzel, "Manuscrits, livres et culture livresque a Istanbul," Revue des Mandes Musulmanset de la Mediterranee 87-88 (1999): 26 Muteferrika, YDB,34. For a published English translation of the treatise, the writ, and the fetva, see George N. Atiyeh, ed., The Book in the Islamic World: the Written Word and Communication in the Middle East (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 283-292.

304 İ 1sldm-Türk Medeniyeti ve Avrupa

the good of mankind, classiiiers and diligent Muslims have exerted tremendous efforts to compile, compose and transmit books. The printing press is a means of renewing the energies and works of these classiiiers and diligent people because it corrects and increases these great books just as it continually brings out new works and thereby spreads revival together with worldly knowledge to the current people of Islam.58

In other words, the printing press does not threaten to flood the Ottoman domains with corrupted texts, rather it has the capability of ensuring that the books passed from one generation to the next are simultaneously both numerous and correct. Item three strikes this same note even more vociferously by insisting that printed copies will be far more reliable and less prone to error than the works produced by seribal copyists. Printed books will have clearly shaped letters, good legibility and will be free of ink smudges and seribal blunders, Muteferrika asserts.59 Seekers of knowledge will stop wasting their time checking their texts for errors and can rely on the accuracy of the content. This is not the only time that he criticizes the calligraphers and seribes for the quality and quantity of their output, saying in the introduction to the treatise that the current generation of copyists has become lazy and no longer wishes to do the work of copying or writing as in previous generations.60 What Muteferrika's defensiveness suggests is that the issue of accurate production was one at the heart of the debate about print, since a plethora of copies could only be a valuable thing if those copies were

reliable.

As a further indication that procuring accurately printed books was a matter of wide concern, we can see that both Muteferrika and the sultan felt the need to address it ·convincingly. In the petition that he presented to Sultan Ahmed III in 1728, Muteferrika suggested that a small group of highly regarded ulema supervise his printing eiiterprise, in order to insure the accuracy of each printed work. In the margin of the original petition, it appears that Muteferrika wrote in the names of the four individuals that he wished to comprise this committee, perhaps after consultation with the Grand Vezir Damad Ihrahim Pasha, whose scrawl in the space above the petition orders certain other officials to draw up the paperwork to process the request.61 Thus when Sultan Ahmed III issued an imperial writ granting Muteferrika permission to print Turkish, Arabic, and Persian books, he did so explicitly on the condition that each book would be carefully proofread by the committee of ulema, whose names he repeated in the writ. Several other comments reflected the sultan's preoccupation with preventing errors, and in the writ's dosing sentence he solemnly exhorts the supervisiiig ulema to "take the utmost

58

59

60

61

Ibi d. Ibi d. Muteferrika, "Treatise" in Abu Nasr İsmail b. Hammad el-Farabi Cevheri, Lughat-i Vankulu, trans. Vankulu Mehmed Efendi V ani (Qustantaniyah: Dar al-Tibaat al-Mamure, 1141 H/1729 M. These four ulema were the following men: Mevlana Ishale, who had formerly served as the Judge of Istanbul; Mevlana Sahib, who had previously served as the Judge of Selanika, what is today the city of Thessaloniki in Greece; Mevlana Es'ad, who had formerly served as the Judge of Galata, an important sector of the city of Istanbul; and Mevlana Musa, the leader of the order of Mevlevi mystics whose lodge was located in Kasimpasha, a neighborhood of Istan~ul, See Yazmadan Basmaya, 32

M a l .i s s a T a y l o r 305

care [iri. detecting] any errors and the greatest interest in correcting the books that are produced. "62

As was routine in the Ottoman Empire when the sultan was about to make an . order that was controversial or unexpected, the Chief mufti, the highest Ottoman religious official, was asked to give a fetva63 that would remove any doubt that such action was prohibited by Islam. 64 The question that was put to the Chief mufti and his reply are as follows.

Question: A man who claims to be skilled in the craft of printing has designed one by one templates in the likeness of the letters and words of books in the gemes of language, and logic, and philosophy and astronomy and other such kinds of useful sciences. If this man presses (the templates he made) against sheets ofpaper and says "I am going to produce those types ofbooks," is there legal permission for his proceeding to the work of inscription? Please let it be explained.

Answer: God knows best. A person that is skilled in the craft of printing and who, putting presstopaper after correctly designing the template of a correct book's letters and words, would cause numerous copies to be produced in a small amount of time with little trouble and ( would als o ca use) a plethora of books to be cheaply acquired. S ince he (the printer) contains in this way a great value, it is permitted to this person (to print), and if a few ulema are appointed in order to correct the book whose template is to be designed, then it would be of the most commendable of matters. Written by the humble one [chiefmufti Yenishehirli] Abdallah, may he be forgiven.65 (emphasis mine)

The absence of permission to print what we might broadly call religious books­what the Ottomans would have called books of the transmitted sciences, as opposed to those of the rational sciences-has provoked much remark. While the fetva refrains from any mention of religious books, the sultan's writ explicitly states that books dealing with Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh), Quranic exegesis (tefsir), the traditions of the prophet (hadith), and dogmatic theology (kalam) are excluded from the permission granted. However, it is also striking that the word 'correct' appears three times in the relatively briefresponse of the chiefmufti. Why, we might conjecture, was this issue so pressing?

Most histerical accounts that attempt to explain the Iate beginnings of Islamic printing identify concems about error as one factor among others that cumulatively

62

63

64

65

Ahmed III, "Suret-i Hatt-İ Humayun," in Yazmadan Basmaya (Istanbul: Unal Ofset Mathacilik Sanayi ve Ticaret A.S., 1996), 32 A fetva (Turkish) or fatwa (Arabic) isa non-binding legal opinion written by a mufti, or jurisconsult. It can only become legaUy binding through its adoption by someone endowed with temporal authority, most often a judge or the sultan himself. Sametimes mistak en as an Islami c pope, the chief mufti functioned mo re like the attorney general of the United S\ates. His job was to defend the govemment's actions and recommend certain courses of action based on his knowledge of the law. He has no executive authority of any kind, unlike the Po pe. Yenishehirli AbdaUah, "Suret-i Fetva-yi Sherife," in Yazmadan Basmaya (Istanbul: Unal Ofset Mathacilik Sanayi ve Ticaret A.S., 1996), 32

306 İslam-Türk Medeniyeti ve Avrupa i

delayed the acceptance of print and continued to de lay the printing of religious books. 66

It is widely acknowledged that this concern was understandable given that books printed in Europe in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries did contain a great deal of errata. As Muhsin Mahdi and Harmut Bobzin point out, literate Ottomans had a particularly bad impression about the reliability of printing because the first printed books they encountered were those imported to the Ottoman Empire from Italian printing houses, many of which were replete with errors.a Indeed, Muteferrika himself brings up this point and notes that there were few European printers that could read well the Middle Eastern languages they were printing, w hi ch accounted for the large number of errors in their books. He hasterred to add that his own printed books would not suffer the same result given that he had a committee of learned ulema to proofread them.67

However, while many histoncal accounts duly note Ottoman worries about error, their brief ack:nowledgements often whet the appetite more than they satisfy it: why is it error, more than any other concern, that fmds its way into the primary documents about print over and over again for more than a century? Why, in the documents shown above, is the correctness of the books and the establishing of a trustworthy proofreading committee such an overriding concern for the sultan, the chief mufti, and Ihrahim Muterferrika?

For most Ottoman Muslims, the concept oflearning was not exclusively restricted to the faith:ful preservation of the Islami c texts and traditions, but there can be no doubt that such a preoccupation dominafed the majority of scholastic activities. The cornerstone of Muslim learning was accurate knowledge of authoritative texts, some of ~hich, chiefly the Quran, must be memorized and flawlessly recited from memory. Such efforts provided the living link between the community's past, present and future; it assured that the practices approved by the consensus of the community in the past were faithfully observed in the present and transmitted intact from one generation of Muslims to the next. Since alter~tion would mean corruption, maintaining the purity of faith demanded unfaltering accuracy in transmission, especially of the Quran and the traditions ofthe prophet.

In seribal book production, various conventions were in place to guard the accuracy of the work: the colophons of many manuscript works declare that they have not only been checked for error, but that the copyist employed a speci:fic process called collation (muqabalah), wherein the copy was checked word for word against the original text by someone reading aloud from the original while another person followed carefully in the copy. 68 This process, which arose in tandem with the study of the hadith-the sayings of the prophet-in the early Islami c centuries, was in wide use across

66

67

68

c.f. Isınet Binark, Eski Kitapci/ik Sanatiarimiz (Ankara: Kultur Bakanligi, 1977), 58-85; Wahid Gdoura, 80-122; Suraiya Faroqhi, Subjects of the Sultan (London; New York: I.B. Tauris, 2000), 94-96 Muteferrika, YDB, 34 Franz Rosenthal, ''Mukabala" in The Encyclopedia of Islam, new edition ed. ~ Oibb and others (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1960), 490-491

Malissa T a y 1 o r 307

the Islamic world through the middle ages and the Ottoman period and was stili in use

in Yemen at least as Iate the 1970's.69 In other words, the proofreading measures that

Muteferrika proposed were not at all out of step with extant book practices among book

producers. It would appear that the proposed commitlee was an e:ffort to extend these

established conventions to the new technology; however, it should be noted that this

measure was not an exact fit. The language of the writ and the fetva suggests that there

was no expectation that every printed copy was to be inspected, but rather only the text

that formed the prototype. To do otherwise would have been an infeasible task perhaps,

but it is precisely this infeasibility that points to the way that seribal conventions

guaranteeing accuracy could not be made to fit the process of printing in exactly the

same way, despite Muteferrika's e:fforts.

Not all books were subject to the time consuming and meticulous process of

collation. A cursory glance through the catalog of the Koprulu Library will reveal that

collation was generally a technique applied in the religious sciences, and will be found

particularly often in books dealing with the subjects that the imperial writ expressly

forbade to print. With the exception of philosophy, which was not uncommonly

checked by collation, the books that belong to the subjects whose printing was

permitted do not appear to have been checked by collation althouglı they may have been

otherwise corrected and proofread. This is not to say that scholars cared little whether or

not these kinds of books were correct. On the contrary, geometry, astronomy and the

natural sciences were part of the curriculum at the imperial colleges (medreses) in

Istanbul and their students would have needed reliable copies of the relevant texts.70 It is

likely that the standards of copy checking and proofreading were simply more stringent

for the subjects touching on the transmitted knowledge of religion. The measures

presented by Muteferrika in his petition, w hi ch could not o :ffer the amount of protection

from error as the process of collation, were nevertheless pronounced satisfactory for the

production of books in the rational sciences, and in fact the issue of printing such books

never seems to come up again as an object of controversy.

While some histoncal accounts allege that rio ts or the machinations of reactionary

ulema were responsible for the closing of the press shortly after Muteferrika's deathin

1745, there is no evidence that this is the case.71 Rather, the chronicle of the eminent

nineteenth-century histarian Cevdet Pasha recounts that it closed for several years

because of fınancial difficulties and the addirional problem of finding someone with the

requisite skill and interest to take it over. 72 The failure of Muteferrika to create a

booming, lucrative business is often regarded as evidence that Ottoman attitudes were

69

70

71

72

Johannes Pedersen, The Arabic Book, trans. Geoffrey French (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 28, 47; Messick, "On the Question ofLithography", Culture and History 16 (1997): 8-9, 158-176 Ekmeleddiı! Ihsanoglu, "Madrasas of the Ottoman Empire" (Foundation for Science, Technology and Civilization, 2003) http://www.muslirnheritage.com/uploads/madrasas.pdf: Internet, 14-15 Toderini, 2:22 refers to the closing of the press due to a copyists' revolt asa fab1e. Abmet Cevdet Pasha, Cevdet Tarihi (Der al-Saadet [Istanbul]: Matbaa'! Amire, 1309 H/1891 or 2 M), 3: 120-121

308 İsliim-Türk Medeniyeti ve Avrupa

still overwhelmingly ill-disposed towards the printing of any kind of books in the eighteenth century. It is also used as an example of Oriental closed mindedness and failure to appreciate the revival of useful sciences that Muteferrika was attempting to foment. What is rarely noted is that in Europe, the most popular books in both Catholic and Protestant lands were those on religious subjects. It therefore makes more sense to conclude that the prohibition on printing religious books left Muteferrika cut off from the most lucrative part of the book market; his bestselling item was a dictionary.73

Judging from the inscriptions of the former owners of the printed copy of Tuhfetu'l­kibar fi Esfari '1-Bihar that currently resides in the Bancroft Library at Berkeley, the Ottomans who bought Muteferrika's books were the wealthy and educated who could afford manuscript editions as well. The wider audience that Muteferrika wanted to reach was probably interested in the books that he could not print. In short, during the period that printing was limited to the production of books on the rational subjects, Muteferrika' s enterprise may have m et with less opposition than is often thought.

The printing of books dealing more squarely with religion was quite another matter, however, and one that has not had its fair share of scholarly treatment.74 Despite Ahmed III and Abdallah Efendi' s con:fident statements that Muteferrika' s printed books would be correct, they nevertheless forbade the printing of the transmitted sciences, and such remained the status quo throughout ,the eighteenth century. In ı 784, Sultan Abdulhamit I received the petition of Rashid Mehmet Efendi and Vasif Efendi, who desired to buy Muteferrika's press from his family and operate it themselves.75 The sultan granted their request, and expressed his wish that the printers take care to publish historical books, particularly the works of the famous court historians.76 Recognizing the fınancial di:ffıculties involved in operating the press, he bestowed a royal monopoly upon the petitioners and agreed to subsidize their enterprise through the royal endowment. Despite the interest he showed in printing and the favor he showed to the printers, Abdulhamit I reiterated:the ban on printing books that "we have heretofore not thought appropriate to print". 77 The printing of books in the transmitted sciences began incrementally only in ı803, partly due to fınancial pressure. During the reign of Selim III (1789- ı 807), the royal endowments were strained with other expenses, many related to the sultan' s military reforms. The funds that had paid for the salari es and operating costs were withdrawn, and the press' s administration was expressly authorized to produce whatever books consumers might demand-with , the exception of Quranic exegesis and the sayings of the prophet.78 Signifıcantly, th~ology and jurisprudence were no longer among the excluded subjects.

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74

75

76

77

78

Orlin Sabev, "First Ottoman Printing Enterprise: Success or Failure? (A Reassessment)" (paper presented at the conference 'Rethinking Culture in the Ottoman 18th Century,' Princeton University, January 15-16 2005), 9 Two key studies do exist Schulz, 1997 and Bobzin, 2002. Toderini, 2:222-232 Ismail Hakki Uzuncarsili, Osman/i Tarihi (Ankara: Turk Tarih Kurumu Basimevi, 1959), 4(2): 521. Toderini,227 Kemal Beydilli, Turk Bilim ve matbaaci/ik tarihinde, Muhendishane, Muhendi~hane Matbaasi ve Kutuphansie, 1776-1826 (Istanbul: Eren Yayincilik ve Kitapcilik, 1995),136-137

Mal.issa T a y l o r 309

The first of these was a very conservative yet standard work on morals that was used in the Muslim primary schools of Istanbul and must have been in high demand, written by Mehmet Birgivi in the sixteenth century.79 The following year, in 1804, a famous seventeenth-cehtury commentary on the first book was published. Bearing witness to the continuing concem about errors, these early printed religious works stili included notes from the publisher explicitly asserting their correctness and reliability. The colophoiı of the commentary printed in 1804 states that an eminent s ch olar nam ed Abdal-Rahim Muhibb Effendi80 had requested that the book be published because of the dif:ficulties he encountered in trying to attain the amount of accurate copies that he needed:

Despite the effort he incessantly gave to having copies made, in our time the masters of writing are rare. Accordingly, because of their mistakes and errors and defects, its (the copy's) collation and correction was many times impeded, andina year it was possible to obtain merely one or two copies. In the aforementioned situation, with no expectation of making the abundant copies according to his heart' s wish, Abd al­Rahim Muhibb Efendi let it be known to Hafiz Abd al-Rahman Efendi, the head of the printing house, that with the printing and multiplying of this noble copy, the obtaining of many numbers of correct copies would reveal the author' s luminous hidden thought like the unveiling of a bride. Upon which, it advanced to print and multiplication and with the providence of God most high it was stamped with acceptance.81 (emphasis mine)

This text is highly reminiscent of similar comments made by Muteferrika. It again suggests that it is seribes who cannot be trusted to make either copious or accurate copies, and that the printing of this book was at the specific request of an eminent scholar, with his blessing.

Despite the ever-increasing number of religious books that went to the printing press from the early nineteenth century onwards, it was nearly another seventy years before the fırst Quran was printed in Istanbul. This does not seem strange if we allow that general concems about print, including lack of error, are likely to apply in even greater intensity to the Quran. Given that the Quran was a sacred book whose sanctity had to be carefully preserved, the possibility of tinkering with any aspect of its production was sure to rouse great discomfort. As early as the mid-sixteenth century, Charles V' s arnbassader to the Ottomans, Oghier Ghislain de Busbecq commented that

No foreign nation has more easily received the useful inventions of other peoples. Have they [the Ottomans] not adopted the usage of canons and muskets anda thousand other things that were born among us but which have been gloriously cultivated among

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81

Toderini, 2:26 reports that the 'Birghilu risale" is taught in the metebs along with the prayers. Perhaps Abdal-Rahim bin Isınail (Osman/i Muellifleri, I: 374), who served for a time as the Judge oflstanbul, anddiedin 1223 H/1808 M. Beydilli,245

310 İ s, l ii m - T ü r k M e d e n i y e t i v e A v r up a

them? But printing .. .is not approved here. The religion itself is opposed to it, for fear that through printing, their sacred Scripture would cease to be Scripture ... 82

It is diffıcult to imagine exactly what Busbecq means, and he unfortunately declines to elaborate further. It might therefore help us to examine some of the conventions associated with Quran production in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and what set it apart from other books.

To ca11 the Quran 'scripture' or a 'holy book' to some degree obscures the difference between it and sacred texts in other traditions. As J ohannes Pedersen puts it, "every word found 'between the two covers' is literally the word of God: therefore it is etemal and uncreated, and therefore a miraele oflinguistic perfection."83 The doctrine of the uncreatedness of the Quran had been controversial in earlier Islamic centuries, but by the 18th century was thorouglıly entrenched within the consensus. This reverence manifested itself in ways that would have profound consequences for ho w copies of the Quran were produced and handled. "It is one thing to believe that the text contained in a book is sacred and quite another to ascribe such status to the book as a physical object. A Bible is, of course, an object to be treated with some respect, but it is not a sacred object. There were Muslims who saw the Koran [sic] in the same light; but the majority, arguably with Koranic support; came to see the codex itself as sacred."84 The signifıcance of this point cannot be overstated, Since the object of the book itself was sacred, it had to be treated with the utmost respect. Customs observed by Busbecq and other European observers of Ottoman society can still be seen in modem Turkey and the Arab world. Practicing Muslims will touch the Quran only when in a state of ritual purity, and many would not a11ow a non-Muslim to touch it under any circumstances.85

One should never rest anything on top of a Quran, and it should be kept preferably at the highest surface in a house. It should never be laid on the floor, and if the reader sits on the floor, then he or she will put the Quran on a special bookstand that is referred to as a 'chair'. Anyone carrying a Quran should make sure that it is held above the waistline. Wom out Qurans were never thrown out with trash, but rather buried or carefu11y put away in a storeroom. In short, the sanctity of the object itself led to particular habits and behaviors in dealing with copies of the Quran that quite set it apart from any other book.

As we might expect, the producing of an object sacred in its own right was a very serious thing. Mistakes made in copying a Quran, oncy discovered, could not be all o wed to remain uncorrected. 86 In a large number of Qurans, the copyist appended a final note to the text to mark that his labors were now over and that he had completed the text correctly and in its entirety. This colophon, called the qayd al-faragh, often gives thanks to God for allowing the writer to have completed his work, and also for the

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85

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Gdoura, 103 Pedersen, 12 Michael Cook, The Koran a very short introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 54 Ibid., 54-56 Ibid., 63

Mal_issa T a y l o r 311

blessing of the Quran itself. Although the following example is from a Quran printed in

India in 1264 lı/1847-8 m, the sentiments are similar to those expressed in Ottoman Qurans. The writer' s words bear witness to the importance both of writing and reciting the Quran correctly, sgying, "O God, accept the concluding of this Quran and as we

read aloud from it, ignore what there may be in the way of mistakes or forgetfulness or

diversions or words out of place or going forwards or backwards or too much or too little or delaying or laziness or speed or carelessness with the tongue or stopping or

insertions where there should be none or showing something that should not be there, or lengthening of vowels or doubling of consonants or glottal stops or short vowels other than what they should be. I have written it exactly and perfectly."87 Interestingly, these

notes rarely indicate that the Quran just completed has been checked against another

copy to determine its accuracy, although as we will see below, at least one very famous Ottoman Quran does state precisely that. Nevertheless, these notes indicate that the goal

of the copyist was to attempt to match the perleetion of the Quran with a perfectly faith:ful reproduction.

This is not to suggest that the only consideration delaying the printing of the

Quran was concem about error. A great deal of evidence points to the fact that moveable type was considered ugly and difficult to read, and that this was a major

problem rather than a minor irritant. 88 W e should now be ab le to appreciate that this was

more than a matter of established taste and aesthetic preferences, although that was surely part of it. As calligraphers' manuals and licenses from Ottoman times and before

make dear, beauty and darity in writing were highly valued not only by the

calligraphers themselves, but by cultivated and well-educated people generally.89

Ihrahim Muteferrika did daim that he could make an attractive font, but anyone who

has tried to read one of the books he printed might very well disagree with him.

Although his characters were indeed a great improvement over those used by the Italians in previous ventures, they are stili a strain on the eyes. Furthermore, the great

value put on the physical appearance of the writing in a Quran should not be surprising

when we remember that the book itself is not only highly esteemed, but sacred, right

down to the ink used to make the letters. A. Demeerseman quotes Gotthold Weil as daiming that despite the fetva in favor of printing, the mufti Abdallah Efendi beli ev ed

that replacing the writing of the Quran with printing would constitute bid'a, or an

innovation harmful to Muslims. 90 While I have been unable to independently verifY this, it is certainly the case that the calligraphers ascribed a divine lineage to the practice of

writing, which, in their words, has been created by God to teach man what he did not

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89

90

Suleymaniye Kutuphanesi MS Nafiz Pasha 26. Last page. See A. Demeerseman, ''Une etape important de la culture islamique. Une parent meconnue de l'imprimerie arabe et tunisienne: la lithographie," IBLA 16 (64): 347-89, 1953 and ''Une etape decisive de la culture et de la psychologie sociale is1amique. Les donnees de la controverse autour du probleme dJ'l'imprimerie," IBLA 17(65): 1-48; (66): 113-40, 1954; see also Messick 1997. Cf B.N. Zakhoder, Calligraphers and painters: a treatise by Qadi Ahmad Son of Mir Munshi, trans. Vladimir Fedorov Minorsky (Washington: Freer Gallery of Art, 1959) and Hakkakzade Mustafa Hilmi Efendi, Mizanu '1-Hatt, ed. Adbulkadir Dedeoglu (Istanbul: Osmanli Yayinevi, 1986) Demeerseman 1954, 122

:::ı

312 İ s'. l ii m - T ü r k M e d e n i y e t i v e A v r u p a

know.91 It is also worth remembering that not just any kind of attractive writing would do. By the eighteenth century, Ottoman Qurans, as well as those produced in most parts of the Eastem Muslim world, were written in a specific script called naskh, or a related script called thuluth. Each of these had very specific dimensions, both of shape and size, that were taken very seriously. Zakhorler contends that it would have been blasphemous to produce a Quran with any other letters, and again despite my not having found a primary material to corroborate his view, it seems plausible.92

N evertheless, it is perhaps the case that with the introduction of lithography in the nineteenth century, these concerns about the style and appearance of the writing were more easily laid to rest than those about error. There is a great deal of scholarship remarking on the preference for lithography over moveable type in Muslim countries stretching from North Africa to l)ıdia, and explanations thereof.93 Suffice it here to say

' that all such studies have remarked on the ability of the lithographic technique to better convey the writing that educated Muslims were used to. The most basic process involves a plate or stone, upon which a text or picture is designed with an unguent. After chemical treatment, the design will attract ink while the rest of the plate repels it. The lithographer adheres the ink to the design, then presses it against a piece of paper, and the image is preserved. Invented in Europe in 1798, it proved wildly popular in the Middle East, where it allowed seribes or calligraphers to write the texts in the familiar way and simultaneously mass produce them. One of the Ottoman Empire' s early lithographic printers, an ethnic Armenian named Gregoire Zellich, wrote a short work on the history of lithography. He deseribed the reaction when Henri Caillol, a ·Frenchman, proposed to open a lithographic press in Istanbul:

His proposals were received favorably, chiefly because it concemed a· process able to faithfully reproduce with great ease the manuscript writing in which many leamed men excel in Turkish c~lligraphy, and without which one needed, for printing books and whatever other works, to have recourse to the composition of moveable type, always too expensive and lacking in elegance of form. In fact, Turkish calligraphy can only be imperfectly rendered by the moveable type of typography; despite the immense progress accomplished in recent times in fashioning of Turkish font letters, the great variety of types that actually exist in all the printing houses of Turkey and w hi ch have attained the highest perfection in form and elegance are stili far from providing a response to calligraphic writing: how to reproduce typogiaphically this characteristic softness, these tums ofthe pen?94

··

The introduction of lithography thus appeared to possess the technical capacity to solve all the formal problems that had haunted Muteferrika and his early successors.

91

92

93

94

Hakkakzade, 40 Zakhoder, 21-2 Demeerseman 1953 and 1954; Francis Robinson, "Technology and Religious Change: Islam and the impact ofPrint", Modern Asian Studies 27(1): 229-251, 1993; Messick 1997 Gregoire Zellich, Notice historique sur la lithographie et sur !es origines de.son introduction en Turquie (Constantinople: Imprimerie A. Zellich Fils, 1895), 45

Mal.issa T a y l o r 313

Incidentally, Henri Caillol and his brother Jacques did found the first lithographic press in Istanbul, in the year 1830, and the first work their press produced was a book about European military tactics. At roughly the same time that the Caillol brothers were getting their press unde'iway in Istanbul, we can observe a veritab le explosion of Quran printing as this technique spread across the Muslim world: a lithographed Quran was printed in Telıran in 1828 and then again in 1831/2. Another was printed in Shiraz in 1830, Calcutta in 1831, Serampore and Tabriz in 1833, and Cawnpore in 1834.95 These were merely the first, for many others followed thereafter. Mysteriously, there remained no Ottoman editions of the Quran. Despite the fact that the Caillol brothers' lithographic press was established in 1830, it was yet another forty years before a Quran was printed in Istanbul using this technique.

There are many things that are stili unclear about what transpired between 1830 and 1870 that ultimately resulted in the printing of the Istanbul Quran of 1288 H/1871-2 M. W as Ottoman hesitation due to the fact that the lithographic press based in Istanbul was owned and operated by non-Muslims? If so, it is strange that Sultan Alıdulaziz chose a Frenchman by the name of Fanton toprint the 1288 Quran.96 The one thing that can be stated without any doubt at all is that when this Quran was published, the issue of error again took center stage. Every scrap of information that is known about the production of this Quran suggests that the publisher sought all possible avenues to convince readers of the legitimacy of the enterprise. First of all, there was the choice of the specific codex to be reproduced. This edition dated to the year 1094 H/1683 M, and was penned by one of the greatest calligraphers the Ottoman Empire had ever produced, a master known as Hafiz Osman. This particular Quran had been commissioned from Hafız Osman by the Grand Vizier of the time, Kopruluzade Mustafa Pasha, presumably in order to present it to Sultan Mehmet IV.97 Additionally, Hafiz Osman states in the colophon to the manuscript that this Quran was checked against and agrees with the text set down in yet another codex, that of Ali al-Qari of Mecca. Chauvin. quotes the following about the Ali al-Qari edition:

Nuru ddin Ali ofMekka, called el-Kari or the Coranist, flourished in the early part of the seventeenth century, and ranks among the followers of orthodox Islam as an unsurpassed commentator and traditionist. Consequently, his copy of the Coran is looked upon by the Muslimin as a codex of the highest importance: and the transcript made by the Hafiz Osman, another eminent doctor of the latter part of the same century, carries a prestige of authenticity and trustworthiness which does not attach to ordinary copies.98

95 Bobzin 16~ cites Victor Chauvin, Bibliographie des Ouvrages Arabes (Liege : Imprimerie H. Vaillant Carmanne, 1907), 62-66 for these examples.

96 Chauvin, 30 97 Muammer Ulker, Baslangictan Gunumuze Turk Hat Sanati (Ankara: Turkiye Is Bankasi, 1987), 79 98 Chauvin, 30

314 İ s, l ii m - T ü r k M e d e n i y e t i v e A v r u p a

Not surprisingly, we find that the printer or the authorities chose to print one of

the most authoritative versions of the Quran to which they had access, a copy above suspicion of any kind.

But even this was not enough. Whatever reassurances the edition and the accuracy

of the lithographic process provided, the publisher either chose to or was forced to rely

on the familiar method for insuring correctness: a group of learned proofreaders. Whereas Muteferrika' s committee had comprised fo ur leamed men, there are no fewer

than ten ulema who have signed their names and affixed their seals to the colophon of the 1288 Quran, swearing that they have approved the text and checked it by reading it

aloud while following the writing in the book. The way that each scholar signed his name explicitly brings to the reader's attention his competency to check a Quranic text

by this particnlar method, as each proofreader included the title 'hafiz' before his given name. That is, each has memorizid the Quran and can therefore check the written Quran

against the memorized one. Since all of these men are imams readers would have presumed that they had memorized the Quran in any case, so the statement to that effect in their signatures points further to the way that this Quran showcases its credentials as

explicitly as possible. Most of the proofreaders were or had previously been the imams

of various mosques in Istanbul. Three of them had been imam at the Shehzade Camii, and others hadservedat the mosques of Ayasofya, Fatih, Zeyrek and Rustem Pasha.

Nevertheless, these ten proofreaders and their publisher have left us with a mystery. For while their proofreading and testament appear to be aimed at allaying any suspicions about the text's accuracy, their collective statement is extremely ambiguous. In its

entirety, it reads as follows:

The copies of the Quran al-Karim that the famous calligrapher Hafiz ·osman produced in the year I 094 have been multiplied and reproduced by photograph and have

been read aloud by us from start to finish. It is certified that they contain no error in any

word other than those mistakes of dİaeritic marks and short vowels that are shown in the table that we arranged.99

This is not the ringing endorsement that we might have expected. Sornewhat comically, the note from the proofreaders actually contains a misspelled word, calling into question their competence. 100 Unfortunately, neither of the copies öfthis Quran that

I examined actually contains the promised tab le, which may have fallen out. 101 I have

been unable therefore to determine how many such alleged mistakes occur, and if indeed they are really mistakes or variant readings that the proofreaders did not

recognize. The matter is extremely perplexing: an unusually authoritative Quran is chosen for reproduction, and afterwards is found to contain mistakes that must therefore have been part of the original manuscript. Certainly calligraphers have been known to

99 Suleymaniye Kutuphanesi MS Hacİ Mahmud Efendi 6, final page. 100 The word for diacrtic 'nuqtah' is itself spelt with an extra, erroneous diacritic on the letter 'ta'. W as

this perhaps intentional, asa sort ofpun? 101 Suleymaniye Kutuphanesi MS Nafiz Pasha 28 is identical to MS Hacİ Mahmud Efendi except that it

does not contain the page with the ten ulema witnesses, and may perhaps be a later reprint.

Mal.issa T a y l o r 315

make mistakes but it would be quite strange to fınd mistakes in this particular copy

given its authoritative status.

One other thing is important to recall. It is probably no accident that an Ottoman . Quran did not appear until a:fter the development of photo lithography. This technique,

which is actually used in the present day for printing posters, magazines, CD covers and any number of other things, was invented in Europe during the 1850s, and became

commonly usedin mass media in the 1880s and 90s.102 The advantage of this process is

that a pre-existing image can be lithographed, whereas previously the image to be copied had to be specifıcally created for the process with the required materials-that is,

the author or copyist had had to write directly onto the plate with a special pencil called

lithographic chalk. With the photographic processusedon the 1288 Quran, a plate was prepared by taking a photographic negative, which would have been treated with a

photosensitive emulsion that only adheres to the positive image. The rest of the process

is substantially the same as other kin ds of lithography; the plate is covered with ink and water, the water is repelled, the ink is attracted to the emulsion and once the image is set in the ink, it is pressed with paper. Whereas previously it would not have been possible

to lithograph a pre-existing and famous edition of the Quran, photo lithography not only

made such a thing possible, it guaranteed that if the manuscript was accurate, then the copies would be accurate also. This further reduction of the risk of error through exact

replication of a recognized authoritative copy may have reduced Ottoman skepticism

about printed Qurans and allawed the printing of the 1288 Quran to go forward. The rather striking irony in this case is that ifthere are mistak.es in the 1288 Quran, then they

appear there not because the printing was faulty but because it was accurate; its fıdelity

to the arigirral would preserve everything exactly as set down by the calligrapher with hitherto unprecedented precision.

The 1288 Quran was only the fırst of the many printed editions that date to the

Iate nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Ottoman Empire. The preference for lithographed Qurans persists to this day, although there are plans afoot to cast a

moveable type font from the lerters in the Azhar Quran of 1923, which is at present the

most commonly produced version. What is striking about this state of affairs is the persistence of the conventions that the early Ottoman state and scholarly community

seemed so keen on preserving. If, as Busbecq implies, for scripture to be scripture

specifıc standards of quality must bemetin view of the object's sanctity, thenit would seem that Muslims found a way to have printed scripture that was stili scripture. That is,

thesestandards that were established prior to the advent ofprint were not (and stili are

not) compromised; rather, the Quran was not printed until the technology was able to meet the standards. This is not at all to say that the printing of the Quran and religious

texts has had no consequences on the practice of Islam in the Ottoman Empire and its

successor stat~s. Many things did change (among other things, a new uniformity among

102 Histoncal Boys' Clothing, lıistclo.com/photo/photo-print.htrnl: internet

316 İfliim-Türk Medeniyeti ve Avrupa

vocalizations has arisen), but those fears that the early texts most frequently articulate, textual errors and misshaped letters, have been categorically resolved.

Another remarkably enduring feature of Quranic printing has been the commitlee of proofreading ulema. Qurans printed in Iate nineteenth-century and early twentieth­century Istanbul include colophons attesting that they have been checked by an official body set up by Sultan Abdulhamid II purely for the purpose of checking Qurans. 103

According to Demeerseman, similar committees existed in both twentieth-century Egypt and Tunisia.104 He refers to these committees as a cultural guarantee-specifically, a guarantee against innovation. I have tried to show above that among the innovations most feared in connection with print was the introduction of error into the text. Naturally, those best placed to guarantee the accuracy of the Quran were those who had intemalized its every line, and were leamed enough to recognize mistakes if they saw them. The participation of the uiema would continue to guarantee the textual accuracy that the faith was built on, and has been continuously sought in the case of the Quran, long after it ceased to be sought on other kinds of books. One could also see this reliance on the ulema as cohering with the general view that books were only as reliable as the people who made them. Calligraphy manuals mak e it clear that the quality of the work depends not only on technical achievement of the master, but also on his refinement of character. 105 Similarly, Sultan Abdulhamid I, declares

And as the advancement and progress of this art [printing] depends upon the care and exactitude of the personuel capable of correcting the books, and bringing them to a greater perfection, and also capable of writing elegantly in prose and verse, and well leamed in diverse sciences; so that the e:ffects of these beneficial works will be long lasting, it is important to never adınit to the printing house, even if he entreats "to God, any man who is stupid and ignorant and has no familiarity with the sciences and arts. 106

The book is sure to be ,a reflection of its producer' s knowledge, piety and refinement. Therefore, only those of appropriate bearing and erudition are to be employed at the press. Accurate books could only be made by people who not only knew how to identify error, but were also cultured enough to appreciate the value of accuracy.

How widely shared were these concems? Was all the concem about error contained in the writs and colophons merely a nod to the convictions of the ulema? It is difficult to gage 'popular' or 'non-elite' attitudes towards print in the Ottoman Empire. There is of course the imperial order of Murad III inl588 that deseribes some of the ways in which European merchants trying to seli books in Turkish, Arabic and Farsi were being harassed and prevented from doing so. The order maintains that when

103 Eg. Suleymaniye Kutuphanesi MS H. Husnu Pasa 5, published in 1312, refers to the meclis-i teftish-i musahif-i sherife set up by Abdulhamid II.

104 Demeerseman 1954, 127 105 Cf Zakhoder, 21 106 Toderini, 2:229-30

Malissa T a y l o r 317

various Ottoman subjects encounter the European traders on roads or bridges or wharfs,

they ask them if they have Turkish, Persian or Arabic books and if so confiscate them without reimbursement. They inform the Europeans that they and their agents and their

servants are forbidderr to sell them and then destroy them. 107 While this reference

suggests that anti-printing views existed beyand the confınes of scholarly circles, it is difficult to extrapolate very much from this one terse example. However, in the specifıc

case of the Quran, it is no doubt relevant that the practices of keeping Qurans in high

places, holding them in particular ways and burying them when they are tattered were not merely scholarly practices, they were (and are) popular practices observed widely

across society. Such actions demonstrate that elites were not the only people concemed

with showing appropriate reverence to the Quran. It is therefore doubtful that the ulema alone cared about whether Qurans were printed, and whether the act of printing them amounted to desecration.

Conclusion

I have suggested that the anxieties present in these documents of sultans, popes and printers need not be regarded as merely elaborate window dressing for self interest.

While on most occasions there is at least some amount of self interest in human action, there is always the possibility that the people we study might have understood their

interests rather differently than we do. Therefore, I have not attempted to ascertain

whether or not these texts can tell us the real reason for why things happened the way they did; rather, the point was to better understand the concems and fears articulated by

the sampling of texts I surveyed and their signifıcance to their contemporary audience.

What, I asked, can these fears tell us about why restrictions on the printing press were deemed necessary? Certainly, there are important differences between the fears of the

early modem popes and those of the early modem sultans and ulema. In the first place,

they had different goals. The pope sought ultimately to restrict access to what he deemed wrong belief, and to restrict access to reading material that might lead to wrong

belief, such as the Bible. The sultan and the chief mufti sought to ensure that print

would not lead to the introduction of errors into textual heritage. The Catholic Church sought to achieve its goals through censorship, and the sultan pursued his through ulema

supervision of printing and the restriction of printing to worldly texts until the

technology was suitably advanced.

While the differences are easy to spot, the depth of similarity in these two situations is sornewhat obscured. Ultimately, on both sides, the fear is that printing

poses a threat to scriptural authority. In both faiths, a systematic hierarchy is in place for the purpose of maintaining the proper role of the text as tradition has come to define it.

The Bible is P,rimarily embedded within mechanisms that limit interpretation, the Quran in mechanisms that limit i ts transmission. Here too, we fınd a difference. Y et it is

107 Murad ID, "Firman," in Yazmadan Basmaya, 16

1 s I 6 m - T u r k M e d e n i y e t i v e A v r u p a

nevertheless striking how similar the two conceptions of scriptural tradition are. In both cases, living human beings are in effect the repository of the faith. They embody the continuing presence of sanctity in the world, and guard the place of scripture within the faith as a whole by mediating its authority explicitly on behalf of (and in the absence of) God or prophet. They are the living link connecting the present to the historical moment of revelation; their claim to speak on behalf of the divine is rooted in the unbroken line of authoritative interpreters and transmitters that personally heard the revelation and pass the baton down the generations 'from hand to hand' as the Council of Trent put it. In Catholicism, that linkage was centralized in the person of the pope, and in Islam, it spread across a group of people, the ulema, none of whom could hegemonically enforce h s views on the others. This idea of textual authority and its safeguarding differs markedly than that of Protestantism, where the Bible itself is the only link with revelation and concern with transmission and interpretive authority is barely present. For all their differences, the ways in which print raised fears in popes and sultans about preserving the scriptural traditions of Catholicism and Islam makes them appear more similar to one another than either is to Protestantism.

What are historians to make of the anxieties articulated here? Should we say that those who acted upon such fears were essentially backwards, futilely attempting to resist the onset of modernity? Or, in solidarity with their resistance to change, should we apologize for their actions, agreeing that modernity is more oppressive than traditional patriarchy even when the latter consigns people and books to the flames? Need we do either? I think it more productive, and have tried above, simply to understand the rationale of popes and sultans and to explore the logic they employ for justifying their deeds. My hope was to better understand what they believed was best for their community, and how they presented their actions as conforming to a vision of what their society should be, ideally. To judge their actions on the basis of either liberal humanist or post-structuralist priorities is in fact to miss entirely the significance that they and their contemporaries would have seen. The fears of early modem Catholics and Muslims that their predominant sacred structures would be broken down and their purity of faith undermined are understandable, whether or not they arouse sympathy. Such anxieties in fact proved to be prophetic; the center did not hold, things did fall apart, and the anarchy they feared was loosed upon the world.