Hasan Umut

This paper aims to address a case of intertextual and inter-linguistic practice observed in the teaching of theoretical astronomy during the early modern Ottoman Empire. My focus will be two works written by ʿAlī al-Qūshjī (d. 1474), a prominent scholar who was patronized by the Timurid ruler Ulugh Beg (d. 1449) in Samarqand, and who participated in observation activities of the Samarqand Observatory, and finally found his way to Istanbul upon the invitation of the Ottoman sultan Meḥmed II (d. 1481). The first work is Risālah dar ʿilm al-hayʾah, a Persian work written in Samarqand in 1458. The other is al-Fatḥiyya fī ʿilm al‐hayʾa, which was compiled in Arabic in 1473 under Ottoman patronage. Literature produced so far on Qūshjī’s astronomy has been based on the assumption that while al-Fatḥiyya was largely studied in Ottoman lands, the Risālah was read in such regions as Iran, India, and Central Asia, where Persian was a major spoken language of the educated classes. Though this claim is basically compatible with the available historical sources related to those texts, my talk aims to present a more nuanced picture of how Qūshjī’s astronomy was studied, by showing how his Risālah and its commentaries also attracted a great deal of attention among Ottoman scholars. Specifically, I will discuss how Qūshjī’s work and its derivatives, especially Muṣliḥ al–Dīn al–Lārī’s (d. 1571) commentary on the Risālah, were used as marginal notes to explain parts of al-Fatḥiyya. This will allow us to see how Ottoman readers interpreted the contextual, linguistic, and intellectual differences between the two texts.

Yakın zamanda neşredilen Osmanlı Kitap Kültürü: Carullah Efendi Kütüphanesi ve Derkenar Notları (ed. Berat Açıl, Nobel Yayıncılık, 2015) başlıklı eser, döneminin önemli alimlerinden olan Veliyyüddin Carullah Efendi’nin (ö. 1151/1738), şu anda Süleymaniye Yazma Eserler Kütüphanesi’nde bulunan kitaplığındaki yazma eserlerin derkenarlarına düştüğü oldukça bol ve tafsilatlı notları sistematik bir şekilde ele almaya çalışmakta, böylece Osmanlı entelektüel tarihi sahası için ufuk açıcı bir bakış açısı sunmaktaydı. Koleksiyonunda bulunan pek çok nüshaya; eser, yazarı ve de ait olduğu ilim dalının tarihine dair dikkat çekici notlar düşmesi Carullah Efendi’nin, döneminin hemen hemen bütün ilimlerine meraklı ve dahi pek çoğuna vakıf olduğuna işaret etmektedir. Onun tafsilatlı derkenar notlarını bulduğumuz ilim dallarından birisi de heyʾet olarak bilinen teorik astronomidir. Carullah Efendi, Osmanlı medreselerinde okutulan teorik astronomi eserlerinden olan Çağmînî’nin Mulahhas fi’l-heyʾe’sine, Kadızâde-i Rûmî’nin Şerhu’l-Mulahhas fi’l-heyʾe’sine ve de Bircendî’nin bu şerhe yazdığı haşiyeye hatırı sayılı miktarda notlar düşmekle yetinmemiş, saydığımız bu eserler üzerine bir haşiye dahi kaleme almıştır. Bu tebliğde, Kadızâde-i Rûmî’nin yukarıda zikredilen şerhine düştüğü derkenar notlarından hareketle, Carullah Efendi’nin teorik astronomi disiplini içerisinde ilgi alanına giren meseleler, bunları nasıl ele aldığı ve de konuları ele alırken hangi eser ve alimlere atıflarda bulunduğu irdelenecektir. Böylece Avrupa bilimi ile etkileşimin henüz hız kazanmadığı bir dönemde Carullah Efendi özelinde Osmanlı alim prototipinin astronomi bilgisinin ana çerçevesine işaret edilecektir.

The eighteenth century marked an increased encounter of the Ottoman Empire with the
scientific knowledge that emerged during the early modern period in Europe. One of the main reasons for such engagement was the Ottoman state’s efforts to modernize its military technology in order to compete more effectively with its European rivals. The literature on the late Ottoman period has largely presented the foreign engineers, who were hired by the Ottoman state to institutionalize military engineering education in the country, as the only epistemic group that promoted early modern science among the Ottomans. This paper aims to challenge this narrative by pointing out that these foreign engineers cooperated extensively with madrasa-oriented scholars. Such cooperation led to a complex and hybrid environment of science in which both the engineers and scholars used their own scientific backgrounds for educating new Ottoman engineers. In fulfilling this aim, I will take as a case study Ismail Gelenbevi’s (d. 1205/1791) years as a mathematics teacher in the Ottoman naval engineering school roughly between 1784-1789. What makes his case intriguing is that he was primarily a distinguished scholar in the madrasa sciences, especially in kalām (Islamic theology) and logic, producing significant works in those fields that would be studied extensively in the late
Ottoman period. Having written and taught scientific subjects such as arithmetic, which was a branch of the pre-modern mathematical sciences, and logarithms, as developed by the Scottish mathematician John Napier in the seventeenth century, as well as having worked on applied mathematics during his engineering years, Ismail Gelenbevi shows himself as a member of the Ottoman ulamāʾ, who played a significant role in the appropriation and early development of the new sciences in Istanbul.

One of the earliest and most important works on the Ottoman experience of science was published by Adnan Adıvar in 1939 under the name La Science chez les Turcs Ottomans, whose enlarged version appeared a few years later in Turkish as Osmanlı Türklerinde İlim [Science among the Ottoman Turks]. Though it points out a number of significant scientific and intellectual topics in Ottoman history, and is still useful for the field, its approach is largely Eurocentric. Accordingly, since the Ottomans allegedly could not keep up with the newly emerging modern science, their science was afflicted with stagnation, and eventually with decline. Moreover, he describes Ottoman science as “the deficient and sometimes incorrect continuation of science in Arabic and Persian languages.” In this paper, considering the fact that Adıvar has been influential, to varying degrees up until now, on directions of the literature that has been produced after him, I will problematize his narrative of science among the Ottomans, discussing some of the basic assumptions upon which his work relies. I will argue that Adıvar’s approach that centralizes the European experience of science, by which he marginalizes and even orientalizes the Ottoman experience, can be better understood by paying close attention to the political and intellectual challenges he faced in his checkered life, which witnessed the political transition from the Ottoman Empire to the Republic of Turkey.

This paper focuses on the impact of ʿAlī al‐Qūshjī (d. 1474) on theoretical astronomy (hayʾa) within the Ottoman Empire during the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. A prominent scholar originally from Samarqand, Qūshjī wrote numerous works in various fields including theoretical and observational astronomy, mathematics, kalām (Islamic theology), and Arabic linguistics. He eventually settled in Constantinople/Istanbul, just a few years before his death, having been invited there by the Ottoman Sultan Muḥammad the Second. Although the Ottoman period of his life was brief, his teaching and writings seem to have stimulated a vigorous interest in theoretical astronomy among Ottoman scholars. Based primarily upon his al-Fatḥiyya fī ʿilm al- hayʾa, a treatise he dedicated to the aforementioned Sultan, this paper deals with the extent to which Qūshjī’s astronomical enterprises in Istanbul influenced Ottoman astronomy. In so doing, it also addresses intellectual and historical contexts in which he wrote this new work in theoretical astronomy under Ottoman patronage, in spite of the fact that hay’a was already a well established field at the time.

Ismail Gelenbevi is one of the most prolific scholars in eighteenth century Ottoman Istanbul, with more than thirty works in many disciplines including kalām (Islamic theology), logic, mathematics and astronomy. Being a madrasa professor, as well as a mathematics teacher at the naval engineering school established in 1775, and also having written on both Islamic scholarship and early modern science, he represents a transitional figure in Ottoman education between the already existing scholarly traditions, primarily represented by the madrasa, and the newly emerging system of knowledge in the Ottoman territory mainly based upon the engineering-oriented European science. This dual character of Gelenbevi seems to have led later authors of bibliographical and other secondary works to emphasize on one aspect of his scholarship over others. In this context, a striking example is the scholarship of Ahmet Cevdet Pasha, a famous Ottoman statesman and scholar, who wrote well known chronicle work, Tarih-i Cevdet in the nineteenth century. This work, though acknowledging Gelenbevi’s success in the madrasa sciences, focuses heavily on his achievements in early modern mathematics and engineering. This paper aims to deal with the meaning of the way Gelenbevi is narrated in Tarih-i Cevdet, given the fact that the period during which Ahmet Cevdet Pasha wrote his chronicle can be characterized by the increasingly impact of the European systems including the political and the scientific, upon the Ottoman Empire, as well as by the efforts made by the Ottoman political and intellectual elites in the nineteenth century to respond to the European challenges they faced. I will argue that Tarih-i Cevdet’s narrative on Gelenbevi not only shows the Ottoman elites’ interest in mathematical and engineering knowledge transmitted from Europe as necessary assets for strengthening the state, but also shows how they retrospectively construed the legacy of a learned man of this era as being one of rivalry with respect to his European counterparts.

In 1980, the Canada Science and Technology Museum acquired a collection of 130 mathematical instruments dating from the 12th to the 19th century. The collection includes a wide variety of standard rules, compasses, plumb bobs, levels and dividers, many of which were produced or used throughout the late Ottoman period. Some have fascinating markings and inscriptions. They were collected over a lifetime by George Petrovic, who flourished in Yugoslavia and emigrated to Montreal. Petrovic studied, practised, and taught architecture, held a doctorate in technical science, and was a member of the International Committee for Historical Metrology, in Basil, Switzerland. This talk, which aims to focus on this interesting case of the migration of scientific objects across time and cultures, will be in two parts - first, we shall describe
the provenance and collecting history of these instruments, and how they came to Canada; second, we shall place some of the instruments in their original Ottoman context of making and use, placing them in the larger context of Ottoman science studies, and examining the changing scientific culture and its influence on the usage of scientific objects as a result of the encounter with European science.

Ali Kuşçu (ö. 1474), İslam teorik astronomi geleneğinde müstesna yeri olan bir şahsiyettir. Ömrünün sadece son birkaç senesini İstanbul’da geçirmiş olmasına rağmen Ayasofya ve Sahn-ı Seman medreselerinde müderrislik yapmış olması hasebiyle Osmanlı ilim kültüründe önemli rol oynamıştır. Sahn-ı Seman’ın ders müfredatının hazırlanmasında da katkısının bulunduğu kabul edilen Kuşçu, 15. yüzyıl Osmanlı entelektüel hayatının dinamiklerini anlamak açısından oldukça büyük ehemmiyeti haizdir. Ali Kuşçu, astronomi ilminin muhtelif dallarında eserler yazmış birisi olarak etki sahası oldukça geniş olmuştur. Bilhassa medrese geleneği içerisinde okutulan eserleri Osmanlı astronomi eğitimi açısından incelenmeyi hak etmektedir. Bu bağlamda oldukça ilginç iki eserinin, 1458 yılında Semerkant’ta Farsça olarak kaleme aldığı Risale der ilm el- hey’e ile 1473 yılında İstanbul’da Arapça olarak yazdığı ve Fatih Sultan Mehmet’e sunduğu el‐Fetḥiyye fī ʿilm el‐Heyʾe olduğunu ifade edebiliriz. İkinci eserin ilkinin genişletilmiş versiyonu olduğu kabul edilmektedir. Buna karşılık Ali Kuşçu’nun Arapça eserde değişiklik yapıp yapmadığı; yaptı ise sebeplerinin neler olabileceği ve iki eser arasındaki farkların neler olduğu gibi sorular cevaplanmayı beklemektedir. Bu bakımdan tebliğimizin amacı, iki metni genel hatları ile karşılaştırmak ve böylece benzerlikleri ile farklılıklarına dikkat çekmektir. Ayrıca, Ali Kuşçu’nun entelektüel kariyerinin ve dönemin Osmanlı entelektüel kültürünün Arapça versiyonun hazırlanması kararına olan tesirleri de bahis konusu olacaktır.

""The science of the judgments of the stars (ʿilm aḥkām al-nujūm), better known as astrology,  based upon the assumption that celestial bodies influence the sublunary world, has been a significant as well as debatable field in Islamic intellectual history as it had religious, scientific,  philosophical, social, political and economic implications. While many religious authorities, philosophers and theologians condemned astrology, it was widely accepted and consulted by both low and middle class people, as well as the ruling elite who throughout Islamic history patronized astrologers and sought to take their advice. In this talk, I will compare Abū Maʿshar's view of astrology, well known as Albumasar in Western literature, who was patronized as court astrologer in the Abbasid time and could integrate the Greek and Persian astrological tradition, with that of al- Fārābī, a leading Islamic philosopher, who provided one of the earliest and the most important criticisms of astrology. This comparison is significant in the sense that both these figures have an Aristotelian background and deal with astrology philosophically. The primary question to which I will seek relevant answers will be in which cases these two scholars are different from or similar to each other. In this respect, I will first compare how Abū Maʿshar and al- Fārābī define astrology. Second, I will examine their opinions on the existence of the possible and its relation to astrological knowledge. Finally, I will deal with Abū Maʿshar's and al- Fārābī's views on the usefulness of astrology as a science.""

"Atomism is an important natural theory whose origins go back to ancient times. Philosophers such as Democritus and Epicurus in Greek thought, Kanada in Indian philosophy proposed their own version of atomism.  However it was also controversial. For instance, Aristotle was a harsh opponent of atomism.. He was especially critical of Democritus and was able to dramatically change the perception of atomism after him. After centuries, the discussion of atomism gained a new phase with Islamic speculative theology (kalām), which was one of two main intellectual systems along with falsafa, that favoured an ontology mostly based on atomism. It became one of the most important debates between the falsafa and kalām traditions which left us a huge literature on it.

In this paper, I will focus on Ibn Sīnā's argumentation against atomism in al- Ishārāt wa'l- Tanbihāt (Remarks and Admonitions), one of the most important works of him, by comparing it with its two famous commentaries by al- Rāzi and al- Ṭūsī. In this respect, I have two aims. First is to trace the evolution of Ibn Sīnā's argumentation against atomism by comparing al- Ishārāt with his another significant work, al- Shifā᾽ (The Healing). I will show that while mathematical and geometrical assumptions have an important place in refuting atomism in al- Shifā᾽, Ibn Sīnā in al- Ishārāt and his commentators does not use them at all  but only logical argumentation. My second aim is to reveal how Ibn Sīnā's argumentation in al- Ishārāt was transmitted and understood by two leading philosophers. It is very striking that both al- Rāzi and al- Ṭūsī focus on the notion of motion when they comment on Ibn Sīnā's argument against atomism. I will argue that this represents another crucial difference from al- Shifā᾽ and that two commentators' main contribution in this case is that they investigate to what extent Ibn Sīnā's argumentation based on motion in al- Ishārāt is demonstrative (burhānī).
"

Many studies in the history of science literature have evaluated the introduction of new science into non-European societies within a limited perspective. This process has been generally called as “transfer” or “reception” which mainly implies that non-European societies were passive and that their only function was to transfer new knowledge with no regard to their local contexts. Studies that have been made so far tend to disregard the multi-directional and complex patterns of this process and ignore the historical, political and social backgrounds and implications of it. In this talk, I will focus on the introduction of logarithms invented in Europe in the seventeenth century, into the Ottoman Empire as an example. Based on an analysis of the Sharhu Cadavil-i Al- Ansab (Explanations of the Tables of Logarithms), by Ismail Gelenbevi, one of the leading mathematicians in the Ottoman Naval Engineering School in the eighteenth century, on logarithms, I will argue that Ottoman encounter with new science in general and logarithms in particular was an active process which affected and was affected by the contemporary Ottoman scientific and social discourses. In this respect, I will discuss the political, social and intellectual implications of the appropriation of logarithms by Ottoman scientists and thereby show how investigating the transfer of certain mathematical concepts can reveal the dynamics of the process of transfer from Europen to non-European societies itself and thereby prove an important tool for historiography in general.

Osmanlı Devleti’nde eğitim sahasında onsekizinci yüzyıldaki değişimi anlamlandırma çabalarını önemli ölçüde etkilemiş tavır, “geleneksel- dini- eski” ile “modern- seküler- yeni” şeklinde kendi içinde müteradif iki zıt kavram grubu çerçevesinde şekillenmiştir. Buna göre, Osmanlı Devleti’nin, Avrupa kökenli değer ve sistemleri olduğu gibi benimsediği varsayılmaktadır. Bu bakış açısı “benimsemeci görüş” olarak adlandırılabilir. Son yıllardaki bazı çalışmalar ise eğitimdeki değişimi farklı şekilde değerlendirmeye başladı. İkili karşıtlıklar yerine, “eski” ile “yeni”nin iç içe geçmişliğini ifade eden “uyarlama” kavramı kullanılır oldu. Temel tez, Osmanlı eğitim sistemi yeniden şekillenirken oluşturulan yeni düzenin mevcut birikimi göz ardı etmediği, bu birikimin yeni olan ile birlikte kurucu rol oynadığı idi. “Uyarlamacı görüş” diye adlandırabileceğimiz bu fikri savunanlar verilen eğitimin içeriği ve araçlarına da bakmaktaydılar.

Bu tebliğde, ilk mühendishane tecrübesi, “uyarlamacı görüş” temel kabul edilerek ele alınacaktır. İlk olarak mühendislik eğitiminin başlamasının Osmanlılar’daki tarihsel gelişimi ve mühendishanelerdeki eğitim programları ele alınacaktır. Ardından mühendishane kütüphanesine ve mühendishane matbaasında mühendislik eğitimine dair basılan eserlere yoğunlaşılacak ve Osmanlılar’ın yeni bilgiyle karşılaşmaya gösterdikleri tepki anlamlandırılmaya çalışılacaktır. Bu tecrübede “eski” ile “yeni”nin buluştuğu ve iki bilgi türünün de kullanılıp değerlendirildiği vurgulanacak, Osmanlı toplumundaki değişimi anlamlandırma aracı olarak “karşılaşma hattı” kavramı önerilip izah edilmeye çalışılacaktır.