276 | Muslims’ Contributions to Science and Identity
While it developed in the 1860s, the narrative achieved even more signifi-
cance in the 1880s and 1890s when the empire’s non-Muslim population sharply
decreased as a result of the empire losing most of its European territories. As is
well known, Sultan Abdülhamid II (r. 1876–1909) started to emphasize a nation-
alized version of Islam as the empire’s official identity, hoping to galvanize sup-
port among the empire’s diverse Muslim populations and avoid losing the Arab
provinces to nationalist separatist movements. Unsurprisingly, a textbook from
the 1890s on the history of Islam, for instance, wholeheartedly embraces Arab
contributions to science. Similarly, the journals and newspapers of the period
contain numerous essays on the contributions of Muslims or Arabs to science
that do not refer to Turks at all. The newspaper Ta r i k, for instance, published
a series of articles under the title “The Civilization of Islam: The Sciences and
Letters of the Arabs” in 1886, in which the focus was entirely on Arabs, and their
contributions were identified with Islam. The legacy that the Ottomans were to
claim, thus giving them a respectable place in the history of humanity, was the
Muslim legacy, regardless of the ethnic origin of the Muslims in question. As
long as Islam remained the strongest bond, the narrative continued.
Strand Two: Muslim and Arab Are Not the Same Thing!
Science and Turkishness
While the Golden Age and “Muslims as the missing link” narratives enabled Ot-
toman authors to find a place for what they defined as their legacy in the Eurocen-
tric historiography of science, the emphasis on these narratives came with a cost:
if early Muslims had contributed so much to science, then why had the Ottoman
Empire failed to build on this legacy? The Eurocentric narrative, while generally
sympathetic to pre-Ottoman Muslims, had little or nothing to say about Otto-
man contributions to science. Furthermore, and very importantly, many Euro-
pean texts referred not even to Muslims in general but to Arabs in particular.
Indeed, most authors used “Moslem” (or “Mohammedan”) and “Arab” (or “Sara-
cen”) interchangeably. Thus, while perhaps saving Islam from the position of an
antiprogress religion, authors who adopted the Eurocentric approach could end
up sacrificing the Ottoman Empire itself. Similarly, that it was supposedly Arabs
alone who had contributed to science proved to be an argument that disturbed
many Ottoman authors even before the emergence of a full-fledged Turkish na-
tionalist ideology and brought the issue of Ottoman identity directly to the center
of the discussion.
The exclusion of Turks from a history of progress that had room for other
Muslims did not remain unnoticed or unchallenged. Ali Suavi published his fa-
mous article “Türk” in 1869 in which he, after emphasizing Muslims’ contribu-
tions to science, made a case for the contributions of Turks in particular. For