Müteferrika Opens the First Ottoman Turkish Press

In the late 1720s, the Ottoman court authorized the establishment of a state-sanctioned printing house in Istanbul dedicated to producing secular texts in Ottoman Turkish. The project was spearheaded by Ibrahim Muteferrika, an intellectual and diplomat born in Kolozsvar who had converted to Islam and risen through the imperial administration. Although other communities in the empire had used presses for centuries, producing Hebrew volumes as early as 1493 or 1504 and Arabic-type texts in Aleppo between 1706 and 1711, Muteferrika became the first Muslim permitted to run a press using movable Arabic type.

The initiative required careful negotiation with political and religious authorities. During the Tulip Era under Sultan Ahmed III, Muteferrika submitted a formal report in 1726 to Grand Vizier Nevsehirli Damat Ibrahim Pasha, the Grand Mufti, and prominent religious leaders. His treatise advocated the efficiency and practical utility of printing. To address resistance from religious scholars and professional scribes, who feared the decline of their copying trade, imperial permission was strictly confined to non-religious titles, leaving Islamic devotional texts restricted exclusively to manuscript production until 1803.