Yalçınkaya|277Suavi, not only had Turkish authors surpassed Arabs in their literary use of the
Arabic language, but Turkish scholars like Ibn Sina and Farabi had made a great
impact on European science. While it was true that the contributions of such
scholars remained theoretical, Suavi argued, “the advanced physics of today has
done nothing but corroborate the conclusions of [their] arguments and demon-
strate them with experiments.” Elsewhere, Suavi wrote that there was no such
thing as “Arab science”: what existed was Islamic science, to which non-Arabs
had contributed more than Arabs. Indeed, Arabs tended to produce transmitters
rather than scholars. Yet emphasizing these differences would only weaken the
Muslims, he wrote, and it was the Muslim legacy that had to be claimed by all
Muslims.
In 1879 the Albanian Ottoman author Şemseddin Sami published his book
Islamic Civilization and made an argument that was similar to Suavi’s:
If those who want to refer to Islamic civilization as the civilization of the Ar-
abs knew that the majority of the scholars that they call “Arab scholars” were
from non-Arab races [cinsiyyet] such as Persian, Turkish, etc., and that, of
the greatest scholars of Islam, Ibn Sina was Persian and Farabi was Turkish,
and Salahaddin Eyyubi, who demonstrated that civilization to the Europeans
in all its perfection was Kurdish, it is indubitable that they would drop their
claims and refer to that civilization as the Islamic civilization, and acknowl-
edge as we do that all Muslim peoples have got their share of that civilization.But while he commented on the contributions of Muslims of different “races” and
claimed them for a comprehensive “Islamic civilization,” Şemseddin Sami also
made clear the impact of the Eurocentric narrative on his account. He wrote, “We
must not forget that it is European scholars themselves who show us the level Is-
lamic civilization had reached and that contemporary civilization was born from
it, and who even put before our eyes many works of our ancestors that we were
unaware of.” Thus, and in a somewhat ironic way, Sami’s efforts to make a case
for the glories of the civilization of Islam were coupled with an inadvertent un-
dermining of the very argument that Muslims in general and Ottomans in par-
ticular should claim the Islamic legacy in question. This was a legacy packaged
by European authors and needed to be appropriated by societies to which it was
supposed to belong in the first place.
Ahmed Midhat Efendi had misgivings about considering the by-then clearly
established contributions as part of the Ottoman legacy as well. In an 1886 letter
to Beşir Fuad, Ahmed Midhat challenged the validity of approaches that con-
sidered the legacy of the scholars of the Golden Age as truly belonging to the
Ottomans: “When necessary, we brag, saying that we produced Ibn Sina [and]
Ibn Rushd.... Do we [actually] have any knowledge about what they said? Even