Who is that bearded man?
In my capacity as a relatively obscure writer, people come to me with all kinds of questions. “Will I enjoy Infinite Jest?” they ask me. Or: “Does Turkey belong in the EU?” Sometimes, they send me pictures of bearded men to identify—for example, this one, from the cover of a Korean book about IQ:
I have no idea who he is.
The other day I received another bearded man image, from n+1 web editor Charles Petersen who, when not web-editing n+1, also works at the New York Review of Books. This bearded man was made of bronze, and was located in Sahaflar Çarşısı (the book market near the Istanbul Grand Bazaar), and the NYRB had chosen his likeness to illustrate an essay by Orhan Pamuk, titled “My Turkish Library.”
Pamuk’s essay appears in the December 18 holiday issue… which I already received by FedEx, in recognition of how I successfully identified the bronze man as İbrahim Müteferrika (d. 1745), who ran the first Ottoman Turkish printing press using movable Arabic type! Based on Müteferrika’s achievements, Bob Silver even instructed the editors to “make room for an extra large caption”:
But even though the caption was extra large, it still couldn’t fit all the interesting information about İbrahim Müteferrika, so it’s a good thing I have a blog.
Müteferrika, whose real name is unknown, was born in Transylvania to a family of Hungarian Unitarians or Calvinists. He fought with Imre Thököly against the Catholic Habsburgs, then was either captured by, or fled to, the Ottomans. In Istanbul he converted to Islam and entered the famous Ottoman bureaucracy, where he reached a high post in the müteferrika corps (I think, some kind of police). Later he convinced the Grand Vizier and the Grand Mufti that secular works should be allowed to be printed on presses, in defiance of a powerful cadre of religious scribes. He went on to publish works on subjects including politics, military strategy, magnetism, astronomy, and geography.
Happy Thanksgiving, dear readers!
Tags: beards, book reviews, bureaucracy, comparative literature, politics, publications, Turkey
November 26th, 2008 at 8:34 am
“Muteferrika” seems to mean all kinds of things, deriving from ‘muteferrik’, separated, sundry. A muteferrika could be, as you say, a police corps, more mundanely ‘the department of a police station dealing with petty offences, licences, &c., or more grandly ‘a sort of young nobleman’s club, where the sons of effendis, paşas and other notables got together. They often accompanied the sultan when he went out hunting.’ So rather like German ‘Abteilung’ it can apply to various divisions of things. Some websites say Ibrahim was more like someone’s ‘head of household’.