Cross-confessional Diplomacy and Diplomatic Mediators in the Early Modern Mediterranean
Central European University, Budapest; May 24-27, 2012
Ibrahim Müteferrika’s Apology for Islam*
Ibrahim Müteferrika, the founder of the first Muslim printing press in the Ottoman Empire,
has been in the center of many studies on Ottoman printing, most recently, Orlin Sabev /
Orhan Salih’s impressive study entitled İbrahim Müteferrika ya da ilk Osmanlı Matbaa
Serüveni (1726-1746): Yeniden Değerlendirme.1 The focus of this paper, however, has
nothing to do with printing. While I could focus on Ibrahim’s role as a diplomatic mediator,
since, as one might well know here in Hungary, his wide-ranging diplomatic activities also
included acting as the Ottoman liaison officer for Prince Ferenc Rákóczi during the last
eighteen years of the latter’s life which he spent in the Ottoman Empire in exile, that is not
my intention, either. What I would like to write about is Ibrahim’s cross-confessional
experience as a diplomatic mediator, on the one hand, and as an Ottoman officer at court, on
the other. I will argue that there may well have been a tension between these two facets of
Ibrahim’s life, a tension that is related to his conversion to Islam. Another point I underline in
this paper has to do with the anxieties of twentieth-century Turkish historiography the strong
secularist bent of which obscured certain obvious facts in Ibrahim’s own writing – lest I am
*
I should first issue two apologies for myself. Given the topic of the conference, it would have been much more
appropriate for me to present something about the French ambassadorial correspondence between Istanbul and
Paris in the early seventeenth century which I had researched extensively for my dissertation back in the late
1990s. Yet since this academic year I am on sabbatical in Istanbul, where I am a TÜBİTAK (the Scientific and
Technological Research Council of Turkey) fellow at Dr. Günhan Börekçi’s home institution, Şehir University,
I could not access my notes in Davis and had to come up with a different topic. Second, I apologize for the state
of this first draft, which has not even been edited – I thought that you would rather have ample time to read an
unedited draft rather than a day or two for a more polished one.
I believe, though, the topic I chose falls right into the center of the theme of our conference as it
involves both cross-confessional activities and diplomatic mediators. I should also express my gratitude to
TÜBİTAK and İstanbul Şehir Üniversitesi, especially Dr. Günhan Börekçi, for making the research for this
paper possible, and to Tijana Krstić for thinking of me for this conference (inşallah yüzünü kara çıkartmam!).
Last but not least, I would like to thank Orlin Sabev / Orhan Salih for providing me with a copy of his article,
“A Portrait of the Printer as a Young Man: The Transylvanian Past of the First Ottoman Printer,” Colloquia:
Journal of Central European History 15 (2008).
1
İstanbul: Yeditepe Yayınevi, 2006. This book is the author’s own translation of his Bulgarian original. Sabev
also published on this topic in English; see, for instance, his “The first Ottoman Turkish printing enterprise:
success or failure?” in Ottoman Tulips, Ottoman Coffee: Leisure and lifestyle in the eighteenth century, ed. Dana
Sajdi (London: I.B. Tauris, 2007), and the article mentioned in the note above.
2
taken to be a “Muslim democrat,” I should add that the piece also includes a critique of
scholarship with a strong Muslim bent.
Let me start with the secularist anxieties of twentieth century scholarship by way of a
discussion of the Christian denomination that Ibrahim must have belonged to before he
became Muslim. After the publication of Imre Karácson’s study in 1910,2 Ibrahim was
believed to have been a Hungarian Calvinist seminary student – if not priest – from
Kolozsvár (today’s Cluj-Napoca in northwestern Romania) before he converted to Islam.
This assumption was ultimately based on the contemporary correspondence of someone who
had been close to Ibrahim: Czézárnak (César) de Saussure, who was in the company of Prince
Ferenc Rákóczi in the early 1730s while the latter was in exile in Ottoman lands. De Saussure
claimed in a letter, which he wrote in 1732 to a Swiss friend, that Ibrahim was a young (1820 years old) Calvinist seminary student when he had been taken prisoner by the Ottomans in
1692 or 1693 during the “war of Tököly.”3
This account was challenged by Niyazi Berkes in the early 1960s.4 Berkes first
juxtaposed Karácson’s account with Saussure’s and demonstrated that the former had
embellished the latter’s contemporary account to dramatize the events and exaggerate the
difficulties faced by Ibrahim during his slavery. He further argued that Saussure’s account
could not be trustworthy, either, as it was too vague with no precise dates, names, or places.5
Instead, Berkes argued, Ibrahim must have been a Unitarian. The evidence he puts forward in
support of his assertion is supposed to be Ibrahim’s Apology for Islam, an untitled treatise
that Ibrahim wrote in 1710, which came to be known as “risâle-i İslâmiyye” (Islamic treatise)
2
Karácson Imre, “İbrâhîm Müteferrika,” Ta’rîh-i ‘Osmânî Encümeni Mecmû‘ası 1/3 (1326): 178-185.
“[L]a guerre de Tököly,” cited by Sabev, “A Portrait of the Printer as a Young Man,” from Lettres de Turquie
(1730–1739) et Notices (1740) de César de Saussure. Communiqués en texte original français et en traduction
hongroise avec une préface et des remarques historiques par Coloman de Thály (Budapest, 1909), pp. 93–4
(Translation in Hungarian is provided at pp. 192-93).
4
Niyazi Berkes, “İlk Türk matbaası kurucusunun dinî ve fikrî kimliği,” Belleten 26/104 (1962): 715-37; Berkes,
“104 sayılı Belleten’de çıkan «İlk Türk matbaası kurucusunun dinî ve fikrî kimliği» adlı yazı için bir not,”
Belleten 28/109 (1964): 183.
5
Berkes, “İlk Türk matbaası,” pp. 719-23.
3
3
after the anonymous description written on the cover page of one of its manuscripts.6 While
Berkes claims that this treatise includes, among other things, the defense of the major ideas of
the Unitarian creed, he has not a single citation from the text in support of his claim. Instead,
he simply states that the text includes Biblical passages in Latin that are transcribed in Arabic
letters and adds that the task of comparing these passages with Servetus’ Biblia Sacra
requires some additional work.7 Servetus is one of the founders of the
Antitrinitatian/Unitarian movement; and Biblia Sacra is his Latin edition of the Bible. Had
Ibrahim used the work of Servetus in his treatise, Berkes would have a stronger case for his
Unitarian background.
As it turns out, however, Ibrahim used a different Latin translation of the Bible. In this
section of the paper, I focus on the text of Ibrahim’s Apology for Islam with a view to
establish the Latin editions that he consulted, to identify the Biblical passages in his
quotations, and to test whether his aim is really a defense of Unitarian ideas rather than a
defense of Islam. After this technical but necessary diversion, I will come back to Berkes to
underline his secularist anxieties.
I first followed Berkes’ suggestion and compared Ibrahim’s transcription of Biblical
Latin in Arabic letters with the text of Servetus’ Biblia Sacra, which proved to be a futile
exercise. Then, I noticed that Ibrahim was giving his readers a very good clue about the
source of his Latin text of the Bible. In a marginal note, Ibrahim names Immanuel Tremellius
(1510-80) and Junius Biturigis (Franciscus Junius, the elder; 1545-1602) as the translators of
the Torah and the Psalms (“Tevrat ve Zebur”), and [Theodore] Beza (1519-1605) as the
translator of the New Testament. The 1648 Amsterdam edition of Biblia Sacra, which brings
6
This manuscript, MS Esad Efendi 1187, which was believed to be the only extant one, is to be found in the
Süleymaniye Library; for an edition, see M. Esad Coşan (aka Halil Necatioğlu), Risâle-i İslâmiyye: Matbaacı
İbrahim Müteferrika ve Risâle-i İslâmiye Adlı Eserinin Tenkitli Metni, ed. Necdet Yılmaz (Istanbul: Server
İletişim, 2010 [first ed., 1982]). Necdet Yılmaz, the editor of Coşan’s work, identified two more manuscripts;
see, pp. 11, 348-56.
7
Berkes, “İlk Türk matbaası,” p. 732.
4
together Tremellius and Junius’ translation of the Old Testament from Hebrew with Beza’s
translation of the New Testament from Greek, might very well have been the one used by
Ibrahim since he names Andreas Rivetus (André Rivet; 1572-1651) as the man who ordered
this translation. As it happens, the 1648 edition opens with a preface by Rivet, a Calvinist
who was living in the Netherlands at the time. It is quite possible, then, that the Bible,
containing both the Old and New Testaments, found in the estate of Ibrahim, was this 1648
edition.8
There are altogether fourteen Latin quotations in Arabic script in Ibrahim’s Apology
for Islam. The first one of these, Ibrahim states, is no longer included in the text of the Old
Testament. He claims that he had read it in one of the old pieces of the Torah that were
forbidden for them to read at the seminary. He also adds that one can find it in some exegeses
because authors included it in order to refute it. Since an ancient piece of the Torah would not
be in Latin, his assertion that he read it on old Torah pieces has to be approached with
suspicion. I am afraid it is impossible for me to provide you with a translation of this as I
could not establish the Latin text. Although Ibrahim claims to provide translations of his
Latin quotations, his “translations” are really extended commentaries on a verse the exact
translation of which is hard to pin down in the midst of the commentary. Therefore I would
rather not hazard a guess for this quotation.
The second Latin quotation includes half a sentence from the New Testament,
Matthew 11: 13 (Nam omnes Prophetae & ipsa Lex... prophetârunt – For all the prophets and
the law prophesied [until John]). According to Ibrahim, the original of the verse he is quoting
included a reference to Ahmad, one of the names by which Muhammad was known. This
seems to me a creative new twist on an old claim. In John 14:16, “And I will ask the Father,
8
Orlin Sabev, İbrahim Müteferrika, p. 350. Ibrahim gives 1639 as the date of the translation but he uses a
different method of calculation for the calendar as he refers to “suud-i İsa,” that is Jesus’ rise to heaven on the
day of his crucifixion, which is what Muslims believe happened to Jesus. I must admit, however, that this does
not seem to add up to 1648.
5
and he will give you another advocate to help you and be with you forever,” the original word
for advocate (paracletus in Latin translation, paraclete in Greek), when understood in its
senses of “comforter” and “protector,” had been likened to the attributes of Muhammad and
thus was claimed as a harbinger of Muhammad in Muslim literature that focused on (what
Muslims believed was) Biblical foretelling of Muhammad.9 Now Ibrahim was claiming that
his name Ahmad was actually mentioned in the Bible.
The third Latin quotation is an exact one: “is verò qui poné me venit, validior me est,
cujus non sum dignus qui soleas portem,” or “But after me comes one who is more powerful
than I, whose sandals I am not worthy to carry,” which comes from Matthew 3: 11, where
John the Baptist refers to Jesus. According to Ibrahim, however, John the Baptist is talking
about Muhammad here: Ibrahim, in his Turkish “translation” of the passage, states that after
John mentions all the miracles in the life of Jesus, he ends his words with foretelling the
coming of another prophet much worthier than him and Jesus.
While the story surrounding the fourth quotation is that of Matthew 20: 20-28, the
quotation’s wording is closer to Matthew 11:11 (“sed qui est minimus in regno caelorum,
major eo est,” or “yet whoever is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he,” which is
something Jesus says after praising John the Baptist). There are two more quotations from the
New Testament (Matthew 11:11 [this time quoted exactly and in full] and Mark 13: 22-23)
and eight quotations from the Old Testament, all of them from the Book of Genesis.10 An
important technical detail to note is the similarity of the transcribed Latin text to the actual
text of the Bible translation by Tremellius, Junius, and Beza. So contrary to Berkes’
anticipation, Ibrahim is not using a translation with a Unitarian bent.
9
Mehmet Aydın, Müslümanların Hristiyanlığa Karşı Yazdığı Reddiyeler ve Tartışma Konuları (Konya: Selçuk
Üniversitesi Yayınları, 1989), p. 219.
10
After working for many hours to identify these quotations by myself, I discovered (in the evening of May 17
to be exact!) that Necdet Yılmaz identified most of them correctly in his new edition of Coşan’s work on
“Risâle-i İslâmiyye” – but he uses a different Latin edition which lacks a verbatim correspondence to Ibrahim’s
text.
6
More importantly, while Berkes claims that Ibrahim was preoccupied in this treatise
by his Unitarian tendency to prove the falsity of Trinitarianism, so much so that a title like
“risâle-i tevhîd” (treatise on the unity of God) would have been more appropriate for
Ibrahim’s work, the contents of Ibrahim’s work suggest that this was not the case. After the
first part in which Ibrahim relates Biblical or Biblical-like passages which he interprets as
foretellers of Muhammad, the second part of Ibrahim’s treatise is on the Book of Revelation
and how to interpret it. Ibrahim states that Christians interpret the Whore of Babylon as the
leader of the Islamic World, that is the Ottoman sultan, and the beast with seven heads she is
riding as Istanbul. Yet, Ibrahim tells us that she actually symbolizes the Pope, and her beast
stands for Rome. Then he goes into a very long diversion to tell the history of the Pope,
which includes sections on Zechariah, John, Jesus, the Apostles, (that which Muslims believe
is) the corruption of true Christianity, the establishment of papacy, a history of Rome, and an
account of how the people of the Americas came to follow the Pope. It is in this context that
he quotes Mark 13: 22-23, which he interprets as Jesus’ warning about the Pope:
Surgent enim pseudochristi & pseudoprophetae: & edent signa ac miracula ad
seducendum si fieri possit, etiam electos. Vos auté cavete. Ecce, praedixi vobis
omnia.
For false messiahs and false prophets will appear and perform signs and wonders to
deceive, if possible, even the elect. So be on your guard; I have told you everything
ahead of time.
He closes this lengthy section with his own interpretation of the end of the Whore of
Babylon, which happens at the hands of a man who comes from the south and is in all whites,
which is supposed to be Muhammad. Ibrahim also manages to prophesize the Ottoman
conquest of Rome at the end of this section.
It is in this lengthy section that one can find two short subsections which might be
called antitrinitarian. First, during the discussion of (that which Muslims believe is) the
corruption of true Christianity, Ibrahim tells a story about three devils appearing to early
Christians in the shape of three heralds. One of them tells them that God is one substance but
7
three essences: body, knowledge, and life, which correspond to the Father, the Son, and the
Holy Spirit. The other one said that God does not beget, so He cannot be a father; it is Jesus
himself who is God. The third devil claimed that God befriended Mary and created Jesus
from her. After this event, Christians were divided into three groups according to their choice
among these three explanations.
Then Ibrahim talks about Paul and how he misled Christians by telling one group
among them that Jesus was God (the followers of this belief came to be known as Jacobites),
while another group heard him say that Jesus was the Son of God (the followers of this belief
became Nestorians), and a third one (the Melkites) was led to believe by Paul that Jesus is
God, Mary is God, and God is the third of the three.
It is only in these two anecdotes that one can find an antitrinitarian bent. In a treatise
written to make a case for Islam, finding two antitrinitarian anecdotes is not surprising at all –
actually, if anything, one would expect to find more of them. In short, Berkes’ claim that
Ibrahim’s Apology for Islam is a Unitarian text in disguise is not persuasive.
Just to be thorough, I should also add that the third and final part of Ibrahim’s treatise
is a history of the world that is written to emphasize the significance of prophets who are sent
for each millennium. In this history, Ibrahim mentions most of the prophets accepted by
Muslims, but he puts special emphasis on Adam, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and
Muhammad as prophets who have been sent for a millennium (please do not ask me how
Jesus and Muhammad could have been sent for sixth and seventh millennia, respectively,
while they lived about six hundred years apart!). It is also in this part that he quotes the Book
of Genesis for a total of eight times (once in relation to Adam, twice for Noah, and five times
for Abraham). In short, most (eight out of fourteen) of the biblical (or biblical-like)
quotations in Latin (transcribed in Arabic letters) have nothing to do with Christianity in
particular, let alone Antitrinitarianism.
8
Having established that Ibrahim’s Apology for Islam is not a Unitarian text in
disguise, let me go back to Berkes to speculate why he might have pushed for such an
unpersuasive case. I believe casting Ibrahim as a Unitarian helped Berkes to kill two birds
with one stone. First, once Berkes claimed that Ibrahim’s Apology for Islam was a primarily
Unitarian text, the uneasy question of why someone like Ibrahim might have written such a
pro-Islamic text could be pushed aside. Ibrahim mattered a lot for Berkes’ grand narrative of
Ottoman Turkish modernization, The Development of Secularism in Turkey,11 which he was
working on when he published his article on Ibrahim’s supposedly Unitarian background.
Berkes represents Ibrahim’s printing press as the “First Innovation” (pp. 36-42) in his first
chapter entitled “Silhouette of a Renaissance.” A man who is supposed to represent the
beginnings of a secularist tradition in eighteenth-century Ottoman Empire could only write a
book like the Apology for Islam if his real aim was to make a disguised case for the Unitarian
creed. God forbid, might he entertain any serious belief in Islam as the founder of secularism
in Turkey! In short, what I propose is that Berkes’ anxieties about the place of religion in
modern secular nationalist Turkey led him to skip over some very important questions about
Ibrahim and his Apology for Islam, and to push for an argument for which there was no
support in Ibrahim’s text.
The second bird Berkes killed with his stone of casting Ibrahim with a Unitarian
background was his explanation for Ibrahim’s conversion. Saussure’s account of his
conversion suggested a forceful one. Once he had been enslaved by the Ottomans, the
Hungarian Calvinist who was going to become Ibrahim could not endure the hardships of
slavery and thus became Muslim. This sounded like an embarrassing story that could not
serve as a background for the man who ignited the light of renaissance in the Ottoman
11
Montreal: McGill University Press, 1964.
9
Empire. It made much better sense if he had been a Unitarian in the first place and was thus
predisposed to Islam because of its antitrinitarian core.
Berkes also noted that a man named Ibrahim was in the retinue of Tököly as his
secretary and that this man could well have been our Ibrahim.12 Unfortunately, however, this
seems to be unlikely as the document Berkes refers to is dated “evail-i [Şevva]l 1100,” that is
late July 1689.13 According to Saussure’s letter from 1732, the Hungarian Calvinist who was
going to become Ibrahim was 18-20 years old in 1692-93. That estimate, coming from
someone who had met and conversed with Ibrahim, would make him a seventeen-year-old in
1689 – at most. It would be difficult to imagine that Tököli would refer to a seventeen-yearold as his secretary and “old and faithful servant” (kadimî emekdarı). So most probably the
Ibrahim in the Ottoman document dated July 1689 is not our Ibrahim.14
Finally, Berkes claimed that it did not make sense for a Hungarian to be enslaved
during the “war of Tököly,” because Tököly and the Ottomans were on the same side, so the
Ottomans would be supportive of Hungarians and not enslave them during these wars in the
early 1690s. Thus, according to Berkes, Ibrahim was probably serving Tököly and shifted his
allegiance only slightly when he became a Muslim Ottoman as a result of his antitrinitarian
predisposition to Islam. We should, however, not forget the possibility that Ibrahim could
also have been a Calvinist opponent of Tököly, a Lutheran Prince, and could thus have been
enslaved by the Ottomans. Another detail to keep in mind is that Ibrahim might have had a
Christian or Jewish master as Saussure’s account suggests that Ibrahim became Muslim to
escape a cruel master. As is well known, the conversion of a slave to Islam does not
12
Berkes, “104 sayılı Belleten’de.”
Ahmed Refîk, “Türk hizmetinde Kıral Tököli İmre (1683-1705),” Darülfünun Edebiyat Fakültesi Mecmuası
8/3 (May 1932): 3-59, at pp. 13-14, # 8.
14
The possibility of the existence of a different Ibrahim, who was also dealing with diplomatic activities but was
more senior than our Ibrahim, has been noted by Erhan Afyoncu, “İlk Türk matbaasının kurucusu hakkında yeni
bilgiler,” Belleten 65/243 (2001): 607-622, at p. 612.
13
10
guarantee freedom, but it would require his sale to a Muslim owner if he had been owned by
a non-Muslim.15
We will not be able to solve the mystery of Ibrahim’s conversion. However, it is safe
to say that the likelihood of him being a Unitarian is slim. While Saussure could have made
up some of the details of his account of Ibrahim because of some anti-Muslim prejudice he
might have had, I cannot think of a good reason for him to call Ibrahim a Calvinist if he
actually had been a Unitarian.
If Berkes’ modern secular nationalist anxieties constitute one of the reasons that
complicate approaching Ibrahim’s life, Ibrahim’s own anxieties create the other. Berkes
blames Saussure for the prejudices he might have had against Muslims which led him to
claim that Ibrahim’s conversion was a result of his misery as a slave in the hands of a cruel
master. He also reminds us that Saussure’s account is too vague with no precise dates, places,
and names. The same account could also be seen as evidence of Ibrahim’s uneasiness about
his conversion. I would suggest that the vagueness about dates, names, and places comes
from him. Charles Peyssonnel, a Frenchman who met Ibrahim in the outskirts of Sofia in
1738, six years after the date of Saussure’s account, and conversed with him in Latin, states
that he does not know why he converted.16
We have to keep in mind that while Ibrahim might have represented himself as a
committed Muslim in his Apology for Islam, he might have chosen to represent himself
differently when he was in the company of European Christians. As noted by Sabev, Ibrahim
enjoyed drinking wine during his conversations with Jean-Raymond Delaria, the interpreter
of the French embassy.17 He might have felt uneasy in talking about his past or discussing the
15
For examples of such sales, see Marc Baer, “Islamic conversion narratives of women: social change and
gendered religious hierarchy in early modern Ottoman Istanbul,” Gender & History 16 (2004): 425-52.
16
Gérald Duverdier, “Savary de Brèves et Ibrahim Müteferrika: deux drogmans culturels à l’origine de
l’imprimerie turque,” Bulletin du Bibliophile 3 (1987): 322–59, at p. 354.
17
Sabev, “A Portrait of the Printer as a Young Man,” citing А. Х. Рафиков, Очерки истории книгопечатания
в Турции (Sanct Petersburg, 1973), p. 138.
11
circumstances of his conversion with central and western Europeans with whom he shared a
common culture just as he shared a common culture with Ottomans. He might even have
fabricated an enslavement story himself in order to make his conversion more acceptable to
his European interlocutors while he chose to assert that he was already suspicious of
Christianity when he was a seminary student when he was writing for a mainly Muslim
audience. It is interesting to note that Ibrahim was not shy of talking about conversion when
his audience was mainly Muslim and what he had to say was gratifying to Muslim ears. It
was also Ibrahim who related in his edition of Katib Çelebi’s Cihânnümâ the conversion
story of Mehmed İhlâsî, Katib Çelebi’s assistant in Latin translations, who had been a French
priest and was so taken by the Qur’anic verse 11:44 that he became a Muslim.18
This is not to say that he was not a sincere Muslim. Rather what I am suggesting is
that we are not in a position to judge him, nor do we have any meaningful evidence. It is
quite telling that the two noteworthy studies we have on Ibrahim’s Apology for Islam are both
products of heavily politicized scholarship representing two opposite ends of the political
spectrum vis-à-vis the role of religion in society.19 I already noted above Berkes’ likely
agenda, which led him to interpret Ibrahim’s Apology for Islam as a Unitarian text even
though there is no evidence to support this interpretation. What is forgotten about in studies
on Ibrahim’s Apology for Islam is that the only edition of the work is the one by Mahmud
Esad Coşan, who prepared it as his professorial thesis. The late Coşan, as some of you might
know, was also a Naqshbandi sheik. Since he published his edition first under a pseudonym,
Halil Necatioğlu, most scholars could not notice the real identity of Ibrahim’s editor. So for
18
Fikret Sarıcaoğlu, “İhlâsî, Şeyh Mehmed,” Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı İslâm Ansiklopedisi, vol. 21, pp. 538-9, at p.
539; the verse in question reads “And it was said, ‘O earth, swallow your water, and O sky, withhold [your
rain].’ And the water subsided, and the matter was accomplished, and the ship came to rest on the [mountain of]
Judiyy. And it was said, ‘Away with the wrongdoing people.’”
19
Tijana Krstic notes that “[t]he two essays that have been devoted exclusively to Risale-i Islamiye also fall
short of a detailed analysis that would satisfy curiosity about how Müteferrika viewed his religious past in his
Muslim present;” “Narrating Conversions to Islam: The dialogue of texts and practices in early modern Ottoman
Balkans,” Ph.D. diss. (University of Michigan, 2004), p. 234. I am embarrassed to add that I could not have
access to Tijana’s book, Contested Conversions to Islam: Narratives of Religious Change in the Early Modern
Ottoman Empire (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), at ISAM where I finalized this draft.
12
Coşan (aka Necatioğlu), Ibrahim’s Apology for Islam was a text written by someone who had
seen the “light.”
The question that Coşan does not even ask is why Ibrahim wrote his Apology for
Islam. Had his intention been to write a proselytizing text, or a text that shows the strength of
Islam against Christianity for Christians to see, he would have written it in Latin for a nonMuslim audience. Yes, there is a whole apologetical literature in Arabic, but there is also a
large Christian Arab audience for the authors of that literature. Ibrahim’s Apology for Islam,
on the other hand, is written in Turkish which was not read widely among Ottoman
Christians. Moreover, the latter group would not understand much from Ibrahim’s Latin
transcribed in Arabic letters as they read their scripture in Armenian or Greek. Ibrahim wrote
for an Ottoman elite audience and made great prophesies about impending Ottoman victories,
including the conquest of Rome in 1710, while he was still in a relatively early stage of his
career even though he was about forty years old (Ibrahim enters the extant Ottoman archives
in 1715 when he is noted as a member of the imperial cavalry troops).20 In short, while I am
not trying to dispute Ibrahim’s sincerity as a Muslim, I am also wary of turning him into a
harald of the greatness of Islam when at least one of his intentions in writing his Apology for
Islam was to gain the trust of his patrons, as noted by Krstić.21
In conclusion, I am afraid I do not have much to say other than reiterating what I
stated in the introduction, namely: Ibrahim’s cross-confessional experience as a diplomatic
mediator, on the one hand, and as an Ottoman officer at court, on the other, most probably
created a tension between these two facets of Ibrahim’s life (one connected with his former
life as a Christian and the other with his current life as a Muslim), which complicates
20
Erhan Afyoncu, “İlk Türk matbaasının kurucusu,” p. 610; Fikret Sarıcaoğlu and Coşkun Yılmaz, Müteferrika:
Basmacı İbrahim Efendi ve Müteferrika Matbaası [Turkish and English, the latter part trans. Jane Louise
Kandur](Istanbul: Esen Ofset, 2008), p. 121.
21
Tijana Krstić, “Illuminated by the Light of Islam and the Glory of the Ottoman Sultanate: Self-Narratives of
Conversion to Islam in the Age of Confessionalization,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 51 (2009):
35-63, at p. 61.
13
anything and everything one might say about his conversion. As if this were not enough, the
politicized nature of the study of his life as the founder of the first Muslim printing press
creates widely divergent accounts that have deep flows in their evaluation of Ibrahim – be he
depicted as the harbinger of Ottoman secular modernity, or as the evidence of the greatness of
Islam. Let’s hope that our discussion at the conference could suggest a new approach to
Ibrahim and other cross-confessional mediators like him.