Reading Modernity in (and out) of the Ottoman Empire

The Ottomans certainly loved their books. From the massive book collections of bureaucrats to the books a father gifted to his daughter whom he affectionately called “Miss Molla (Monlā Ḫānım),” evidence of bibliophilia is never far off.¹ Ottoman books were overwhelmingly copied by hand rather than printed, much to the surprise of those unfamiliar with the field. Until recently, the persistence of this manuscript culture flummoxed many historians too, who insistently focused on why Muslims failed to adopt print until the late nineteenth century. Now, though, scholars are beginning to look at the empire’s manuscript culture not as a static medieval holdover, but as an evolving and lively creature. We can point to a high and possibly increasing rate of book ownership, the establishment of public libraries, a flourishing world of cheap pamphlets and stories, and a new class of lay readers and writers who took tentative steps onto the intellectual scene.² Should we classify such developments as an incipient modernity, an Ottoman early modernity, that was located not in print but in manuscripts?

Let me suggest no. As tempting as it might seem, we should refrain from viewing these developments through the lens of early modernity. Not because manuscripts are somehow unmodern, but because the very search for a birth of modernity directs us to the wrong questions. The concept of global early modernity has fruitfully allowed us to utilize categories beyond the boundaries of the Ottoman Empire, to tie it to similar developments in Europe and Asia, and, through predominantly European analogues, to offer alternative interpretations to the story of Ottoman decline. There has been a productive discussion as to whether and how we should use European exemplars in our analysis,³ but these quibbles over the spatial boundaries of early modernity gloss over the real problem—modernity’s temporal limits.

For centuries, print has been one of the enduring standards of modernity and therefore its relative absence in the Middle East has been a persistent fly in the ointment of those hoping to posit an Ottoman modernity. Many scholars are happy enough to simply start the story with the introduction of printing in the late nineteenth century. Recent work on the adoption of print in Egypt, though, demonstrates not only that its adoption was primarily driven by government support but its social effects were negligible.⁴ In turn, a number of historians, including myself, have urged historians to push the clock back to the seventeenth or eighteenth century, when manuscript culture seems to have developed larger publics. Having manuscript culture fulfill the role of print and link the Ottoman Empire into the stream of modernity is an alluring prospect. Yet, why start the clock at the sixteenth century, the beginnings of what we now call the “early modern”? Mamlukists such as Konrad Hirschler would point to popular reading groups and public libraries in thirteenth-century Damascus.⁵ Others would take it back to the book revolution that occurred in Abbasid Baghdad with the introduction of paper.⁶

What each of these histories share is a desire to identify that magical moment when mass reading and literacy, and therefore modern politics via a true public sphere, was born. The equation more or less runs like this: More books lead to more readers which equal more political participation. The relationship between forms of communication and the political landscape they create is a worthwhile topic of investigation, of course, one that is at the center of our current debates on the impact of social media on democracy. When we narrate this relationship through claims of an ever earlier modernity, not only does our particular choice—the early modern—seem arbitrary if not wrong, but we cast out whatever falls beforehand into that analytical wasteland of the Other—the “pre.” Is it possible to craft a deeper historical narrative, one that can incorporate all the above developments without relying on identifying that first manuscript pamphlet, popular reading circle or newspaper that signals modernity?

We might here take a page from Andrew...