The Venture of Islam, Volume 3: The Gunpowder Empires and Modern Times

"So, after Ibn Khaldun, the Ottomans emerged as a big empire together with two others, the Safavids and Mongols. These three really dominated a major geographical area from the Balkans to Bengal for the 16th and 17th centuries. After the Mongol and Crusader invasions, Muslim states recovered politically and militarily and even expanded their geopolitical influence, but they never recovered scientifically and intellectually. The Ottomans didn’t produce a philosopher of the calibre of Farabi or Ibn Sina. These three empires were even late in embracing European developments like the printing press. The ulema-state alliance was responsible for the delay in adopting printing technology and the scientific stagnation. Marshall Hodgson’s The Venture of Islam is a seminal analysis of Islamic history, and the third and last volume is dedicated to analyzing these three empires. Hodgson called them the ‘gunpowder empires,’ which is the subtitle of the third volume. Some Muslims think that it’s a source of pride for them that they established three powerful empires with gunpowder technology, but I disagree. I think there is a criticism inherent in the term. Why? Because when we compare the Ottomans and other Muslim-run empires with Europeans at the time, the Europeans produced the achievements of the Renaissance , the printing revolution, and the Scientific Revolution, similar to the earlier Muslim Golden Age between the eighth and twelfth centuries. “There’s too much emphasis on the Middle East in academic and policy debates” During their Golden Age, Muslims had diversity, dynamism, production of paper and other technologies and taught them to Europeans. Later on, Europeans became the leader in certain technologies and they used three instruments very effectively: the printing press, the nautical compass, and gunpowder. Out of the three, Muslims only picked up gunpowder—hence the emphasis of Hodgson. They didn’t use the nautical compass effectively, no major expedition on the oceans was undertaken. An Ottoman ship finally arrived in the Americas in the mid-19th century. It was even worse for printing presses. For about 300 years there were no Muslim-run printing presses. The ulema , the dominant clerical class, opposed it. Finally, at the insistence of the Ottoman bureaucracy, the shaykh al-Islam , the chief cleric in the Ottoman Empire, issued a fatwa in the mid-18th century that books could be printed as long as they were non-religious, allowing the printing of dictionaries, history books, etc. Hodgson explains this problematic role of the clergy, in partnership with the military, in the gunpowder empires very well."