İbrahim Müteferrika

Sultan Ahmed III receives French ambassador Vicomte d'Andrezel at Topkapı Palace.

Ibrahim Muteferrika (; 1674–1745 CE) was a Hungarian-born Ottoman diplomat, publisher, economist, historian, Islamic theologian, sociologist, and the first Muslim to run a printing press with movable Arabic type.

Early life Ibrahim Muteferrika was born in Kolozsvár (present-day Cluj-Napoca, Romania). He was an ethnic Hungarian Unitarian who converted to Islam, but his original Hungarian name is unknown.

It was during his years as a diplomat that he took a keen interest in collecting books that helped him understand the ongoing Renaissance, the emergence of Protestant movements in Europe, and the rise of powerful colonial empires in Europe.

Printing press This map of the Indian Ocean and the China Sea was engraved in 1728 by the Hungarian-born Ottoman polymath and publisher Ibrahim Muteferrika; it is one of a series that illustrated Katip Çelebi’s (Universal Geography), the first printed book of maps and drawings to appear in the Muslim world. The printing press had already been known in the Ottoman Empire since 1493 or 1504 in Hebrew characters. Other communities operated presses. The first Ottoman press using movable Arabic type was operated in 1706–1711 in Aleppo by Christians. Kenyan academic Calestous Juma argues that printing was delayed in the Islamic world due to the greater emphasis on oral transmission in Islamic tradition compared to Christianity and Judaism, as well as the cultural significance of religious books and calligraphy manuscripts; scribes especially exerted a strong resistance.

Muteferrika's volumes, printed in Istanbul and using custom-made fonts, are occasionally referred to as "Turkish incunabula". Muteferrika, whose last name derived from his employment as a , or head of the household, under Sultan Ahmed III and during the Tulip Era, was also a geographer, astronomer, and philosopher.

Among the works published by Müteferrika were historical and generically scientific works, as well as Katip Çelebi's world atlas Cihannüma (loosely translated as The Mirror of the World or the World Seer).

After 1742, however, Ibrahim Muteferrika's printing activities were discontinued and an attempt by the British diplomat James Mario Matra, motivated by the exorbitant prices for manuscript books, to re-establish a press in Istanbul was aborted in 1779. In his account, Matra refers to the strong opposition of the scribes that Müteferrika's enterprise had faced:

A Press had been set up here about sixty years ago in the turbulent reign of Ahmed III but those who maintained themselves by copying of Books, apprehending with reason that their trade would be totally ruined, were so loud in their clamours as to alarm the Seraglio, and as they were supported by a seditious Corps of Janissary, the Sultan apprehending what really did after happen, that as he mounted the throne by one insurrection, he might be tumbled from it by another, gave way to their complaints, and suppressed the Press, before anything better than the Quran, Sunnah, and some trifling books of Mathematics had been struck off.

Books published There were 17 titles published by Muteferrika at his press during his lifetime:

Kitab-ı Lügat-ı Vankulu (Sihah El-Cevheri), 2 volumes, 1729 Tuhfet-ül Kibar fi Esfar el-Bihar, 1729 Tarih-i Seyyah, 1729 Tarih-i Hind-i Garbi, 1730 Tarih-i Timur Gürgan, 1730 Tarih-I Mısr-i Kadim ve Mısr-i Cedid, 1730 Gülşen-i Hülefa, 1730 Grammaire Turque, 1730 Usul el-Hikem fi Nizam el-Ümem, 1732 Fiyuzat-ı Mıknatısiye, 1732 Cihan-nüma, 1732 Takvim el-Tevarih, 1733 Kitab-ı Tarih-i Naima, 2 volumes, 1734 Tarih-i Raşid, 3 volumes, 1735 Tarih-i Çelebizade, 1741 Ahval-i Gazavat der Diyar-ı Bosna, 1741 Kitab-ı Lisan el-Acem el Müsemma bi-Ferheng-i Şuuri, 2 volumes, 1742

(Most of the copies of the book Tarih-i Çelebizade have been bound into the third and last volume of Tarih-i Raşid and sold together with it and thus have erroneously led several sources to believe a total of 16 items have been published.)

Own works

Risâle Islâmiyye (available in manuscript form) (published by [Esed Cosan] in 1993)