The Question of Genesis

The first book in Arabic script to be printed with movable type in any Arabic-speaking country appeared in Aleppo, in 1706. The psalter Kitāb al-zabūr al-sharīf was printed by the Christian deacon ᶜAbdāllāh Zākhir under the guidance of Athanasius Dabbās, the Melkite Patriarch of Antioch. This casual venture in an Ottoman province, though duly recorded in historical annals, has been given less scholarly attention than the printing project launched two decades later in the Ottoman capital by the enterprising Ibrahim Müteferrika, a Christian convert to Islam. In 1727, in the wake of a firman by Sultan Ahmet III, which permitted printing in Arabic script in the empire, Müteferrika was given an imperial clearance to launch his own press. It took him two years to publish the first work, a Turkish rendition of an eleventh-century Arabic lexicon in two volumes, and more printed books followed. Müteferrika's enterprise has been the focus of extensive historical discussion, in which he has often been hailed as “the first Ottoman printer.”

Zākhir and Müteferrika were pioneers, but neither of them could claim the honor of being the world's first-ever printer in Arabic letters. Their initiatives were preceded by printing schemes in Europe, begun in the early sixteenth century. Presses in Italy, France, the Netherlands, Germany, and England produced printed works in several Islamic languages, including printings of the Qur'ān, for religious-missionary, scholarly, and sometimes commercial purposes, copies of which reached Ottoman collections. Zākhir and Müteferrika were also preceded by printers in the empire itself, non-Muslim subjects of the sultan who produced books in their own languages and scripts. Jewish exiles from Spain opened Hebrew printing shops in Istanbul as early as the mid-1490s, and Jews later set up presses in Salonika, Edirne, Izmir, and Safad. A press in Armenian opened in Istanbul in 1567 and one in Greek in 1627. We also know of printing in a Mount Lebanon monastery which produced at least one item, a prayer book in Arabic (in the Syriac/karshūnī script), in 1610, and of several other small plants owned by Jews or Christians elsewhere in the empire. Such sporadic endeavors by non-Muslim minorities aside, it was only in the early eighteenth century that books began to be printed in the languages of Islam under an Islamic-Ottoman rule; to wit, two centuries and a half after Gutenberg.