274 | Muslims’ Contributions to Science and Identity
a community in the light of the paradigm of the Eurocentric historiography of
science—however, required defining the community itself. And this is precisely
why Ottoman elites, too, ended up discussing what it meant to be Ottoman in
their writings on science.
Strikingly, the arguments of the Ottoman elites were not necessarily just a
reflection of their political perspectives. Rather, arguments shaped by the en-
counter with the Eurocentric historiography of science themselves appear to have
informed the broader political debate on identity to some extent. Indeed, an ex-
amination of the arguments of Ottoman intellectuals reveals that there is not a
straight line of evolution from Ottomanist to Turkist to Turkish nationalist nar-
ratives about science: the debate on the contributions to science that Ottomans
could embrace as their own was, in all its stages, a debate that included references
to Muslim, Ottoman, and Turkish identities. Arguments about who had contrib-
uted to science made clear the complexity of the question of identity rather early
and arguably earlier than the emergence of full-fledged nationalist discourses.
To highlight this point, this chapter has a thematic organization. While it is
certainly possible to trace the development and growing dominance of different
narratives in particular periods, I focus on three strands in the Ottoman debate
on contributions to science that, at least to some extent, chronologically overlap.
Strand One: The Muslim Origins of Science
and the Ottomans as Muslims
The emerging Eurocentric historiography of progress was, overall, appealing to
nineteenth-century Muslim intellectuals, as it indicated that the Islamic civili-
zation of the eighth to thirteenth centuries (the so-called Golden Age of Islam)
was the missing link between the ancient Greeks and the European Renaissance.
Masters such as Avicenna (Ibn Sina), Averroës (Ibn Rushd), Al-Hazen (Ibn al-
Haytham), and Al-Kindi were commonly referred to as scholars and scientists
who had preserved, if not improved on, the legacy of the Greeks. The Egyptian
intellectual and statesman RifaɆa al-Tahtawi promoted this narrative in his trav-
elogue published in 1834 after his visit to Paris—a work that achieved popularity
in Istanbul as well after it was translated into Ottoman Turkish.
Six years later, Mustafa Sami, a bureaucrat formerly employed in Ottoman
embassies in Europe, published his Avrupa Risalesi (Treatise on Europe). In this
work Sami praised the sciences of the Europeans, such as chemistry, and what
he considered the products of these sciences, such as the steam engine. But Sami
also noted that these sciences had nothing to do with the religion of the Euro-
peans. They were based on the sciences developed by Muslim Arabs, so the con-
temporary sciences were “our true heritage.” Hence, as early as 1840, the debate
on the new sciences of the Europeans was about the heritage that the Ottomans