Why The Printing Press Appeared in the Middle East 400 Years After Europe

History Unplugged Podcast

History Unplugged

Society & Culture, History

4.2 • 3.7K Ratings

🗓️ 7 May 2019

⏱️ 49 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Why were there no printing presses in the Middle East until four centuries after Europe? Did it have to do with Islam prohibiting this technology? Was the calligraphy lobby too strong? Or is the answer more complicated?

The global spread of the printing press began with the invention of movable type by Johannes Gutenberg in 1439. A few decades later there were millions of books in Europe. But there were few printing presses in the Ottoman Empire until the 1800s. Some historians say this has to do with lack of interest and religious reasons were among the reasons for the slow adoption of the printing press outside Europe. The story goes that the printing of Arabic, after encountering strong opposition by Muslim legal scholars and the manuscript scribes, remained prohibited in the Ottoman empire between 1483 and 1729, initially even on penalty of death.

However, we will see in this episode that scholars and sultans had no problems with the printing press. The real reason for the printing press's slow spread was twofold: First, the thousands of calligraphers made hand-copied books so cheap that printing presses were not needed. Second, Arabic letters are more difficult to render than Latin ones, meaning that the printing press had to become more technologically advanced before it could cheaply and easily churn out Arabic, Turkish, and Persian texts.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the History Unplugged Podcast.
0:05.4	The unscripted show that celebrates unsung heroes, Mythbust's historical lies, and rediscoveres
0:11.9	the forgotten stories that changed our world.
0:15.5	I'm your host, Scott Rank.
0:18.9	Hi everyone, in this episode I'm going to be tackling a chicken and the egg question.
0:26.2	This chicken and the egg question idea comes from listener Firaus Hollawani, and I'm just
0:30.9	going to jump right into it and see what his question is without a long preamble.
0:34.7	So here's what he asks.
0:36.4	Hey Scott, I've enjoyed your series on Ottoman Lives, and that was a series I did on different
0:41.8	people in the Ottoman Empire, like the Sultan, the Janissary, the Unic, etc.
0:47.4	I'm researching on why the Ottomans didn't adopt the printing press when it was invented.
0:52.3	Any insights or references or similar findings is appreciated.
0:57.0	Alright Firaus, that is your chicken and the egg question, and he didn't ask it in that
1:01.3	way, but here's what I'm getting at.
1:03.8	How does technology affect society?
1:07.0	Does technology determine human action, or does human action determine technology?
1:13.0	In the former that technology determines human action, some people might think that there's
1:18.4	really only one pathway that technology can work.
1:22.9	For example, with an airplane, the way that physics is set up, there's not that many
1:27.7	ways that you can design an airplane.
1:30.2	You have to have wings that create drag that cause lift.
1:33.9	You can't have cooking inventions like they had in their early 1900s or late 1800s where
	...

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