Person
İbrahim Müteferrika
Ottoman official of Transylvanian origin; in 1727 he received imperial permission for a Muslim-run press, and his first book appeared in 1729.
Biography
İbrahim Müteferrika is known as the owner of the first Turkish-language press in the Ottoman Empire set up with imperial permission . He was born in Kolozsvár (today’s Cluj) in Transylvania; sources give his birth year as somewhere between 1670 and 1674. He moved from Unitarian Christianity to Islam and in 1716 became a müteferrika (a court official close to the sultan) in Ottoman service; his name comes from this title .
In 1726 he wrote a treatise on the benefits of printing, Vesîletü’t-tıbâa. He took the idea first to the grand vizier and the chief mufti; permission came in 1727 with a fatwa by Sheikh al-Islam Yenişehirli Abdullah Efendi and a firman of Ahmed III. The permission left out religious subjects; the request in the treatise itself was already limited to fields such as dictionaries, history, medicine, astronomy and geography . His first book, published in 1729, was the Vankulu Dictionary; the firman and the fatwa were printed at its front .
According to the sources about seventeen works were printed (the figures vary between 16–17 works and 22–23 volumes) . He died in the mid-1740s; sources give 1745 or 1747. This lesson treats him as one of the emblematic names in the debate “was Ottoman printing late?”, without forgetting that presses run by Jewish and Christian subjects had already worked in the empire before him .
In this course
He is the hero of the printing cards in the Turkey section of A History of Mass Media.