 Muslims’ Contributions to Science

and Ottoman Identity

M. Alper Yalçınkaya

Acommon approach in the study of the cultural transformations of the Otto-

man Empire in the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries is to consider them
within the framework of a so-called Ottoman encounter with European culture.
Especially in popular discussions, we commonly hear portrayals of this pro-
cess as involving the Ottomans’ realization that they would either “Westernize”
or perish. In fact, much twentieth-century historiography and social scientific
analysis themselves were not different in essence from such approaches, as they
tended to focus on modernization and often equated this concept with Western-
ization. What is common to all such ways of studying the transformations of the
Ottoman Empire is the centrality of Europe and Europeanness to the narratives
that they construct. The Ottomans are presented as having looked exclusively at
Europe as a model, contemplated the characteristics of European peoples, and
discussed the extent to which the Ottomans themselves did or could possess
these characteristics.
Many members of Ottoman society did think and write about the factors that
had enabled European states to dominate the world economically and militarily
in the nineteenth century. Some such treatises elaborated even on the question of
t he persona lit y tra its of t he people of Europea n countries. It is a lso tr ue t hat espe-
cially toward the end of the nineteenth century the concept of Europeanization
enjoyed some usage. But it was not simply Europeanness that intrigued Ottoman
authors. In fact, the debates on Ottoman identity that arose, particularly after the
1850s, in the Ottoman Empire included arguments not only about Europeanness
but also about many other definitions of identity, such as Arabness, Turkishness,
or Muslimhood. Ottoman authors of the late nineteenth century were as inter-
ested in delineating the qualities of Muslims, Arabs, or Turks as they were in
specifying the characteristics of European peoples.
Perhaps even more remarkably, a somewhat unlikely topic brought to the
fore questions such as the meanings of Arab, Ottoman, or Muslim identity more
effectively than any other: modern science. When Ottoman elites thought and
wrote about European sciences in the nineteenth century, they frequently thought