this is so good this is SO good this is SO SO SO GOOD. languagehat you remain undefeated linksource. absolutely beautiful descriptions of arabic typography, calligraphy, etc, with technical details both scriptologically and in terms of the problems with the code. sorry for a long-ass pullquote that isn't even especially representative but this section made me SO happy
The first book printed in movable Arabic type was a book of hours, Kitāb Ṣalāt al-Sawāʿī, produced in 1514 in Fano, in the Papal States, by the Venetian printer Gregorio de' Gregori. It was set by craftsmen who could not read a word of what they were setting, and you can tell: letters detach at the joints, dots drift away from their letters, final forms turn up in the middle of words.
Two decades later the Paganini press in Venice printed the first Qurʾān in movable type, a commercial venture aimed at the Ottoman market, and it failed so completely (typographic errors compounded by textual ones, in the one book whose point is textual fidelity) that every copy vanished and scholars spent four centuries politely doubting the edition had ever existed. Then in 1987 a single copy surfaced in the library of a Venetian friary, where it had been sitting the whole time.
The Ottoman side of the story is usually told in one sentence, "the sultans banned printing," and the sentence is doing suspicious amounts of work. The standard account has Bayezid II prohibiting printing in Arabic characters in 1485 and Selim I renewing the ban in 1515 on pain of death. The inconvenient detail, which the historian Kathryn Schwartz laid out in 2017, is that no text of either edict survives, and the story traces back to the reports of European travellers. Which does not mean it is false; it means the favourite explanation for why the Islamic world "missed" printing rests on evidence that would not survive a code review. What is actually documented is that the first Ottoman Muslim press, İbrahim Müteferrika's in Istanbul, opened in 1727, and that the deeper resistance was professional and aesthetic rather than theological: an empire employing tens of thousands of calligraphers in a refined, thousand-year-old craft looked at Fano-quality output and saw, quite reasonably, a downgrade. They were the only people in this story with working quality assurance.
