Introductory Notes on Addressing Issues and Problems of Multireligious-Ethnic Scholars in the Ottoman Science

The intercultural and scholarly interactions among the integral parts of the vast mosaic of Ottoman population that stretched over three continents, namely South East Europe, Asia Minor, Caucasus, the Levant, North Africa, part of the Gulf countries, Hejaz and Yemen, are still undiscovered sites waiting for interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research. This diverse mosaic of population consisted of various communities of different ethnic and religious backgrounds, e.g. Turks, Arabs, Greeks, Armenians, Jews, Albanians, Hungarians, Serbs, Croatians and Bosnians. Today, thanks to the publication of the eighteen volumes of the History of Ottoman Scientific Literature and the two volumes of The Ottoman Scientific Heritage, we are better equipped to discover, study and explain aspects of these intercultural and scholarly interactions. There are two main categories to be observed in these uncharted waters, the first interaction is among three Islamic languages (Turkish, Arabic and Persian), while the second includes translations from other languages to Turkish and Arabic. In this second category, we observe two subgroups, the first subgroup contains translations from Ancient Greek and Latin to Arabic and Turkish; the second subgroup features a vast number of translations from modern European languages to Turkish and Arabic.

Meanwhile the ethnic backgrounds of scholars from different religious communities e.g., Muslim, Orthodox Greek, Orthodox Armenian, Jews, provides insights into the different processes of interaction among scholars, the production and exchange of knowledge, and the movement of ideas during the six-century long history of the Ottoman Empire. This is certainly an unexplored field of research waiting for the cooperation of modern scholars with diverse training.