Yalçınkaya|279Ottoman, and in particular the Ghaznavid and the Seljuk, wrote almost all of
their religious and scientific works in Arabic and most of their literary works
in Persian—Europeans who wrote on the “Civilization of Islam” confused
Turkish scholars with Arab and Persian scholars. However, it is established by
a study of their origins and genealogies that a third, if not half, of these virtu-
ous servants and disseminators of the learning and civilization of Islam were
definitely Turkish.In addition to noting also that Turks constituted almost half the great Mus-
lim scholars in the field of religious sciences, Tahir, in a move similar to
Yenişehirlizade’s, emphasized the importance of state patronage for the growth
of scholarship. This move justified referring to Arabic and Persian men of science
who had lived under Turkish rule as “Turkified” scholars. As a result, Mehmed
Tahir was able to declare even such celebrated theologians of Islam as al-Ghazzali
(1058–1111) and al-Djurdjani (1339–1413) as Turkish in this sense.
It is clear from the way Mehmed Tahir presented his theses that the apprecia-
tion by European scholars was of paramount importance—it was to the builders
of the Eurocentric narrative on the history of science that Tahir offered this cor-
rection. Nevertheless, his goal was not limited to proving the Turkish contri-
butions to the contemporary sciences developed by the Europeans. In fact, The
Services of the Turks to the Sciences and the Arts provided short biographies of
many scholars and covered areas ranging from Koranic exegesis and fiqh (Islamic
jurisprudence) to astronomy and geography. While Mehmed Tahir expressed his
intention to demonstrate how mistaken European representations of the Turks
were, it is particularly significant that he insisted on the importance of the reli-
gious sciences. By devoting the first half of his book to these sciences and indi-
cating that the presence of Turks among Muslim scholars was more pronounced
in these fields, Mehmed Tahir also made a case for the continuing leadership of
the Turks to the rest of the Muslim world, including the Arabs, in this account of
Turkish contributions to science.
While all these examples attest to a desire to prove the right of the Ottoman
Empire to remain in Europe and Ottomans in the history of civilization, Arabs
(commonly referred to as kavm-i necîb, or “the noble people”) were not consid-
ered as outside the category of Ottoman. In other words, “Ottoman identity” did
not exclude Arabs. The Turkish-speaking Ottoman intellectuals that this chapter
focuses on continued to regard the unity of the empire as their chief priority, and
Turkish nationalism was far from an ideology that shaped their accounts. Turk-
ish contributions to science and Islam perhaps legitimized Ottoman leadership
within the Muslim world, but nothing more than that.
Nevertheless, the very existence of numerous examples of a strand that em-
phasized Turkish contributions to science even in the 1860s and the 1870s reveals
the potentially independent impact of the debate on the history of science on