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By Root 1307 0

in the word they appear. The creation and use of Arabic fonts in the West was not something that most commercial printers would sensibly undertake: they would need a minimum of 500 different pieces of type. The font used by Napoleon to print documents in Arabic during his invasion of Egypt in 1798 had 700 different characters. As a rough comparison, a European “Roman” typeface might contain about 250 different variants of type (uppercase, lowercase, punctuation symbols, and so on). All the early Western ventures in Italy and elsewhere to create Arabic-type fonts usually needed the support by a patron with deep pockets (such as Cardinal Ferdinando de’ Medici in 1585) who supported the venture for ideological motives or for reasons of prestige.20 One of the immediate objectives was to provide liturgical material for Eastern Christians whose language was Arabic. Rome feared they might otherwise be won over to Protestantism through printed texts in Arabic or Ottoman Turkish supplied by heretics from the Netherlands, England, Sweden, or Germany.21

Not many books in Arabic script were produced in Europe and none could accommodate all the subtleties and flourishes of the calligraphic Arabic texts. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, they compared unfavorably with the work of a skilled copyist in the Ottoman domains. There was no shortage of those willing to enter this profession. Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli suggested that there were more than 80,000 scribes working in Constantinople in the 1680s, although his figure must have included all the numerous letter writers as well as the book copyists. It was a common saying that “the Qur’an was revealed in Mecca, recited in Egypt, and written in Istanbul.” The manner of book production in the East was normally oral: a scholar would dictate from memory to a battery of scribes. In Christendom, St. Thomas Aquinas had been renowned for dictating four books in the same session to four different secretaries, switching back and forth from secretary to secretary to keep up the pace of work.

For the Muslim world the process was more mechanical. Perhaps a dozen copyists would inscribe the same text from a single dictation. Once it was completed, each scribe would read back what he had written down to ensure accuracy, and the scholar would certify the copy as correct. Very quickly more than a hundred copies could be produced by systematic copying and verification.22 There was also a great number of libraries in the Muslim world, initially on a far larger scale than those in the West. Many were part of mosque complexes and most of their texts were religious in nature.23 But there was also a tradition of private book collections being open to the public. There were large public libraries in the capital, but in many smaller places as well. In Jerusalem, the Khalili collection had more than 7,000 manuscripts in Arabic, while the Ragib al-Khalidi collection contained more than 10,000 works in Arabic, Turkish, and Persian when it opened to the public as the Maktubat al-Halidja early in the twentieth century.24

In the first two centuries after Gutenberg, the benefits of print must have seemed questionable within an Eastern world that used the Arabic script. But by the end of the seventeenth century it was evident that for anything of a technical nature, the printed text had great advantages. However, the introduction of this Western innovation would trample on several powerful vested interests. The first was the scribes and clerks upon whom the entire Ottoman administration depended; and the second was the religious class, ulema, who controlled the mosques, where much of the book copying was carried out, and the majority of publicly accessible texts in their libraries. The advocates of printing were careful to take account of the objections of the ulema. The document submitted by a Transylvanian convert to Islam named Ibrahim Müteferrika in 1726 to the grand vizier stressed the many benefits of the new technique, but especially “the publication of dictionaries, histories, medical texts and science