The Eighteenth Century: the Westernizers 399
of European armies, perhaps because with their detail they might sound too
“Westernizing”. Interestingly, a copyist or collector noted on the title page that
the work was authored by “a monk who was honored by the glory of Islam”.
Clearly, a link can be established between the outburst of such Westernizing
proposals and works and the “Tulip Period”, which roughly coincided with
them and are usually associated with a marked influence of European ways
and ideas. Yet Bonneval’s activity in the Ottoman Empire and his treatises (as
well as Müteferrika’s essay) date to after Patrona Halil’s revolt. Furthermore,
Müteferrika’s ideas share much not only with contemporaneous authors
and scientists such as Es’ad Efendi and Mahmud Efendi of Athens but also
with Kâtib Çelebi, whom Müteferrika admired greatly, Na’ima, and Ebu Bekr
Dımışkî (see chapter 5). The very notion of the need to imitate Western prog-
ress in military matters (what would later be termed mukabele bi’l-misl or reci-
procity), was first found in Hasan Kâfi Akhisari (see chapter 4); the argument
that Western technology and other innovations could be used by Muslims
without restriction, as long as it did not touch religion, was also used by the
famous Damascene scholar Abd al-Ghani al-Nabulusi (d. 1731) in 1682 (in order
to defend the use of tobacco!).36 Thus, the genealogy of this group of ideas goes
far beyond Ahmed III’s reign and the cultural openings to the West within it.
Of course, all these authors being European converts cannot be considered
mere coincidence. It might also be the reason (or at least one of the reasons)
their views went unnoticed for decades, as there were no other proposals for
the imitation of Western models until the 1770s. Another reason may be sought
in the socio-political balance established after 1703 and confirmed in 1730: the
acceptance of the janissaries’ share in power by the palace and the govern-
mental bureaucracy, which was mentioned in the previous chapter, made any
suggestion for a re-orientation of the standing army toward efficient warfare,
and even more for the creation of a new army, very difficult to uphold and, of
course, to apply. Osman II’s ghost was still very much alive.
On the other hand, it is impressive how influential and long-lasting the ar-
guments in these tracts were. For one thing, it appears that, its absence from
mid-eighteenth-century political texts notwithstanding, the idea of European
inventions being a rediscovery of earlier Islamic findings had permeated
Ottoman culture. The 1740 example of Nu’man Efendi’s pride at having copied
36 Grehan 2006, 1371. Interestingly, among those who accused the defenders of tobac-
co of using European sources (instead of logic) we find the Greek Phanariot Nikolaos
Mavrokordatos (d. 1730), whom we saw above as a pioneer of Aristotelian philosophy dur-
ing the “Tulip Period”: see Kermeli 2014, 133.