Eighth to the Sixteenth Century - Rashid Islamic Center

160 • The Making of Islamic Sciencehe declared himself the ruler of Persia as Nadir Shah. Thereafter heset on a course of destroying the neighboring Muslim empires. Hefought with the Ottomans in 1730, attacked India in 1739, and sackedDelhi. To the north, he attacked the chief Uzbeg capitals alongthe Zarafshan and Oxus rivers. Nothing was rebuilt in the wake ofthis wave of destruction. Nadir Shah, like Muhammad Ali, found avacuous region and ascended to its kingship merely on the basis ofhis personal talent. When he was killed in 1747, Karim Khan Zand,a general from Shiraz, tried to restore the Safavid empire but failed.He ruled over a small region in his own name until 1779. After thisthere arose another tribal power, the Qajar, who consolidated theirhold over the entire region and founded an empire that lasted almostone hundred and fifty years, until a military coup d’état brought RezaKhan to power in 1921. In 1925 he extracted constitutional kingshipfrom the Assembly in his own name, thus establishing the Pahlavidynasty, which was overthrown in 1979 in a popular uprising.In Ottoman Turkey, the Grand Vizier Damad Ibrahim Pasha(from 1718 to 1730) introduced a number of measures aimed at themodernization of Turkey, including naval reforms and the use of theprinting press. Scientific geography became part of the curriculum ofmilitary schools. New training centers and schools were introducedon European models, often with the help of European experts andconverts. There were some visible results. A two-arc quadrant wasinvented by Mehmed Said, the son of the Mufti of Anatolia, for useby artillerymen; treatises on trigonometry, new works on medicine, aswell as translations of certain European scientific and philosophicalwritings started to appear. The new naval schools of mathematicsestablished in 1773 produced a new corps of engineers and artillery.Among all the eighteenth-century changes in Turkey, the introductionand acceptance of printing is perhaps the most important. Alreadyin the fifteenth century, certain Jewish refugees, fleeing Spain, hadset up printing presses in Constantinople in 1493 or 1494; this wasfollowed by similar presses in other cities. But Arabic and Turkishtexts could not be printed due to a ban that was not lifted until July5, 1727. The first book published from a fully Turkish press wasthe dictionary of Vankuli, published in February 1729 (Inalcik andQuataert 1994, vol. 2, 637–724).