First Ottoman Turkish Printing Press
In 1729, İbrahim Müteferrika, a Hungarian-born convert to Islam serving at the Ottoman court, issued the first book printed in Ottoman Turkish using Arabic script in Istanbul. The work was a Turkish translation of an Arabic dictionary, the Vankulu Lügati. The event matters because it marks the beginning of sustained Muslim-run printing in the Ottoman capital, though its immediate impact was more modest than is often assumed.
Printing was not unknown in the empire. Jewish refugees from Iberia had set up presses in Istanbul in the 1490s, and Armenian and Greek communities later did the same, producing books in Hebrew, Armenian, Greek and other languages. Printing in Arabic script for Muslim readers, however, was largely absent. Scribes and calligraphers made their living copying manuscripts, and religious scholars were wary of mechanically reproducing sacred texts. Historians debate how far a formal ban existed; the traditional story of a sultanic prohibition is now treated with caution, and the evidence suggests a mix of cultural preference, economic interest and practical obstacles rather than a single decree.
Müteferrika, a diplomat and writer, argued for printing in a treatise often dated to around 1726, listing the benefits of printed books for learning, statecraft and military knowledge. He won support from Grand Vizier Nevşehirli Damad İbrahim Pasha, during the period later called the Tulip Era, when the Ottoman elite showed growing interest in European diplomacy and culture. A fatwa from the head religious official, the şeyhülislam, reportedly approved the venture on the condition that it avoid religious texts such as the Quran, and Sultan Ahmed III granted permission.
His press operated for about a decade and a half and produced a modest number of titles, usually cited as around seventeen works in some two dozen volumes. They focused on history, geography, language and science, including histories of the Ottoman state and the Islamic world, a geographical work by the scholar Kâtip Çelebi, and treatises on military and naval matters. Print runs were small, commonly said to be in the hundreds, and sales were slow. After Müteferrika's death in 1747 the press fell largely idle, and it was revived only later in the century.
The legacy is therefore gradual rather than sudden. Müteferrika's press showed that printing in Ottoman Turkish was technically and politically possible, and it influenced later reformers who saw books as tools of modernization. Regular, widespread Muslim printing in the empire took off only in the nineteenth century, when presses multiplied and newspapers appeared. Müteferrika is remembered as a pioneer, even if his own enterprise remained small.