According to Donald Quataert, a distinguished Ottoman scholar, the Ottoman Empire was one of the greatest, most expensive, and long lasting empires in history. It began prior to 1300 and endured until after World War I. In his book The Ottoman Empire (1700 - 1922) (2004), he dedicates an entry called reading and literacy where he indicates:
1. The Ottoman Empire was characterized as having an oral culture.
2. Few people coulld read and write in the Ottoman Empire.
3. In 1752, Aleppo had 31 Muslim medrese schools, altogether educating hundreds of students primarily reciting the Koran and learning rudimentary arithmetic.
Koran recitation
4. Only a very few women could read: a far smaller proportion than men.
5. The literate rate of Muslims was about 2 - 3 percent at the beginning of the 1800s and 15 percent at its end.
6. Literacy increased from 2 to 15 percen at the beginning of the 1800s due to:
Muslim School
- the emergence of a state sponsored educational system
- the rise of privates school among the millets (religious communuties):
Christian Schools Jewish schools
. Ottoman Christians
. Sephardic Jews in the city of Salonica had 50 private Jewish schools (9,000 students)
Also, Quataert emphasizes that another measure of literacy is to count the number of books and newspapers beign published. He gives the following statistics of books acquired and published in the Ottoman Empire:
- In 1752, Aleppo's largest library had only 3,00o volumes.
- In Istanbul annually publishing figures were:
- Before 1840, eleven books
- In 1908, 285 books by 99 printing houses
3. The circulation of the two leading Istanbul newspaper were:
- 15,000 and 12,000 copies each during Sultan Abdúlhamit II's reign (1876 - 1909)
- 60,000 and 40,000 copies each after the Young Turk Revolution
No comments:
Post a Comment