History's A/B Test: The Printing Press in the Middle East

I have been writing a blog series on the impact of literacy on society (see posts here and here). I have been struggling with the question of what effect it had on different parts of the world. I was visiting Dubai to check in on some of our programs there two weeks ago. It was like the clouds parted. I was given the answer.

I met with their Minister of AI, an energetic, forward thinking man of incredible perspective. When I dove into the work we are doing at Endless in the context of literacy through the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution, he looked at me, shocked, and asked, “Have you read my speeches? I always talk about the printing press in my speeches!"

He went on to describe exactly what I had wanted to know. I want to share it, because it is as if we had gotten to run an A/B test through history. Path A: printing press. Path B: none.

The Islamic Golden Age

While Europe was in the middle of its Dark Ages, the Middle East was blossoming. The Islamic Golden Age lasted from the 8th century to the 14th century. It was a time of cultural flourishing. Muhammad stated that "Seeking knowledge is obligatory upon every Muslim,” and this era lived up to that edict. It was prosperous, spawned high art and advanced science and mathematics.

To help you visualize the era, let me take you to the House of Wisdom, also known as the Grand Library of Baghdad. To call it a library is an understatement. It began as a translation movement, in which the caliph at the time asked people across the empire to get any book and translate it. Anyone who did so would get the weight of the book in gold. This brought in ideas from across the world. Just as importantly, the fact that the caliph would mandate this set a standard: people should aspire to increase their knowledge. What evolved was a center of thought. Within its walls, translators, authors, scientists, and scribes would converge to debate the philosophical, scientific, and medical issues of the era. They would write and translate books. It was described as a sort of internet, a repository of information where anyone could go to learn about anything: "Its experts…usually doubled as engineers and architects in major construction projects, kept accurate official calendars, and were public servants. They were also frequently medics and consultants.” (link). Scholars converged, bringing both questions and knowledge, translating books across languages and bringing ideas back home with them.

This is the famous Round City of Baghdad, with the House of Knowledge at its heart.

The House of Knowledge represented the culture at the time: "Scientific knowledge was considered so valuable that books and ancient texts were sometimes preferred as war booty rather than riches. Indeed, Ptolemy's Almagest was claimed as a condition for peace by Al-Ma'mun after a war between the Abbasids and the Eastern Roman Empire.” (link) The results showed up in astronomy, mathematics, law, philosophy, optics, medicine, literature and art.

Bustling houses of knowledge spread their roots into almost every discipline.

In astronomy, they built observatories like the Maragha Observatory in what is now Iran. They deduced the real size of the earth and improved the astrolabe for navigation. The earliest known astrolabe was an Arabic creation and is currently in the Kuwait National Museum. They discarded the Ptolemaic system that claimed that the sun, moon and other planets were in orbit around the earth. They calculated the motion of the planets accurately for the first time in history. All of this, centuries before Europe would do so.

In mathematics, they are attributed with the invention of algebra in 1070. Algorithm is an Arabic word. An estimate of pi by Jamshīd al-Kāshī's stood as the most accurate estimate for 180 years. In The Book of Unknown Arcs of a Sphere, the 11th century mathematician Ibn Mu?ādh al-Jayyānī helped devise the law of sines, which relates the lengths of the sides of any triangle to the sines of its angles. Alhazen invented a precursor to calculus that would allow him to find the volume of a paraboloid and find the integral formula for any polynomial. 700 years before Newton. The society’s love of geometry made its way into Islamic art, which is an ode to geometric patterns and symmetries.

In science, "popular accounts of the history of science typically suggest that no major scientific advances took place in between the ancient Greeks and the European Renaissance. But just because Western Europe languished in the Dark Ages, does not mean there was stagnation elsewhere. Indeed, the period between the 9th and 13th Centuries marked the Golden Age of Arabic science." (link). Alhazen, the same man who invented early calculus, is described as “the world’s first true scientist” for having applied the scientific method with experiments, control groups and mathematical backing, 500 years before Galileo and Francis would do so in Europe. He conducted experiments in optics that disproved Plato, Euclid and Ptolemy’s theory that we see because light from our eyes shines on objects, and instead showed that we see because light enters our eyes. He invented the first camera obscura and in his Book of Optics, written around 1021, described the law of refraction and dispersion of light, which would not show up in the West until a Dutch astronomer wrote about it in 1621. All of this in just one man! Scientists of the era also advanced alchemy, which lay the foundations of chemistry. They were the first to systematically classify chemical substances and synthesized ammonium chloride from organic substances.

In medicine, Avicena and Rhazes conducted early forms of experimental medicine, testing both medicines and medical procedures with control groups and statistically significant numbers. Ibn al-Nafis mapped the circulatory system with a number of discoveries and Rhazes defined that nerves had motor or sensory functions and described 7 cranial and 31 spinal cord nerves. Al-Zahrawi, from the 10th century, is referred to as the "father of surgery."

In law, they advanced Islamic jurisprudence. Literature, art and calligraphy flourished. One Thousand and One Nights, an anthology of folk tales, gave us Aladdin, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves and Sinbad the Sailor.

And, as with all of my posts tracing the interaction between prosperity and literacy, we must look at their literacy rates as a clue: "While it is impossible to calculate literacy rates in pre-modern Islamic societies, it is almost certain that they were relatively high, at least in comparison to their European counterparts." (link) The Middle East was ahead of Europe on so many measures.

And then something happened. Their society turned. While researching OpenAI’s language model GPT-3, I asked it for a synthesis of what the Middle East was like from the 1600 - 1800’s: “The Middle East was a very unstable place during the 1600's - 1800's. There were a lot of wars and conflicts going on between the different countries and regions. The Ottoman Empire was in decline, and the Safavid Empire was in a state of flux. European powers were beginning to encroach on the region, and there was a great deal of religious and cultural conflict.” This is as good a summary as any.

How did this happen?

Neil deGrasse Tyson has a wonderful video on this. Most historians will point to the Mongol sacking of Baghdad in 1258 as a turning point. This was indeed a turning point, but culture survives the sacking of a city. Neil deGrasse Tyson talks about the religious voice amidst this as an important factor. But history’s dominoes usually tip with a multitude of causes. I want to turn to the role of one cause: the printing press.

The Printing Press in the Middle East

The printing press was invented in 1450. While it was spreading in Europe, sparking a multi-century long evolution from the Renaissance into the Reformation and the Enlightenment and ultimately into the Industrial Revolution and today, the Middle East took a different direction.

There are a lot of theories as to why the printing press didn’t spread through the Middle East. The most common theory holds that the religious establishment believed that the holy word was so precious that it should only be written by hand. This went deeper, with fears that fake and tainted versions of the Quran might spread, along with other salacious content that might scar the fabric of society, as they say in Arabic. Every calligrapher had identifiable handwriting, like fingerprints. With the printing press, you wouldn’t know who had written what. A ban was put in place for two hundred years. There are accounts of an ordinance punishing anyone who consumed books printed on a printing press “on pain of death.”

But remember that we are also talking about many kingdoms across many centuries. Laws were different in each place and at each time. After the initial rejection, there were many edicts encouraging the printing of nonreligious books. Still, for hundreds more years, it didn’t spread.

When I asked OpenAI’s GPT-3 for its summary, it gave a compelling synthesis of what I had read elsewhere. In its words, “the Middle East was wealthy, and Europe was poor. The Middle East didn't need it. They could afford to pay people to copy books by hand. On the other hand, Europe was very poor. They needed a cheaper way to make books. So the printing press spread through Europe.” I’ll add a little more detail, but that’s the core of it. They didn’t need it.

The Middle East had those libraries and houses of knowledge open to anyone, with crowds of calligraphers. At one point there were 86,000 copyists in Turkey who could keep up with all of the demand. It also took much less time for these copyists to copy a Quran than for Western scribes to copy a Bible. The Bible is ten times longer than the Quran (783,137 words vs 77,430 words) and Arabic can be written much faster than the Roman alphabet. (link). While most small churches in the West couldn’t afford a hand-copied Bible, calligraphers in the Middle East poured forth Qurans.

Ancient Arabic script was far faster to write than the Roman alphabet of the Bible.

The calligraphers were also furious with the launch of the printing press. This episode of the wonderful History Unplugged Podcast explains, “There is a story that calligrapher artists put their ink stands and pencils in a coffin and walked to the palace of the sultan to protest.” He describes this like the taxi lobby against Uber. It reminded me of a time that I got into an Uber in Bali and a group of taxi drivers surrounded us. In the calligraphers’ case, they stormed the streets and raided merchandise, and “the writing of religious books was given to calligraphy artists alone following this incident.”

Meanwhile, the printing industry in Europe was born from religious books. The Bible, missals, hymnals, liturgies, the Book of Hours: despite established demand for these books, the nascent printing industry still struggled to survive its first many decades. It was only after the industry gained sound financial footing and demand and distribution channels grew that the book’s subjects also expanded to include books on law, medicine, science, history and literature.

In the Middle East, when a printing press was set up on a pier in Istanbul in 1729 and they could only print long-tail books like maps and dictionaries, there wasn’t enough demand. The printer struggled to stay afloat for decades until he passed away. His press closed shortly thereafter.

Regardless of the reasons, the printing press didn’t gain traction in the region for 400 years. This gives us an opportunity to compare two paths: One in which the printing press flourished and another in which it didn't. The region may not have had access to the printing press, but it did start to be affected by it, in radical ways. The West advanced. Western technology brought Europe wealth, military strength and power. At first, the impact showed up indirectly; as Western cannons and guns helped the Islamic “Gunpowder Empires” of the Ottoman Empire, Safavid Iran and the Mughal Empire spread through the region. Those warring years were spawned by little more than traders from Europe showing up to sell guns in the Middle East. Centuries later, as Europe began colonizing the world, these kingdoms were unable to defend themselves. The result is that the Middle East has endured centuries of war and poverty while Europe has prospered.

But it was not always this way. The Middle East was wealthy, flourishing, advancing the state of human understanding. Imagine if those caliphs and calligraphers had not protested the press. Imagine if the House of Wisdom had added a printing house. How might the world be different?

As I have been researching the Renaissance, this parallel with the ‘School of Athens’, made an impression on me. I imagine these two societies walking hand in hand, prospering together.

When I shared this post with someone from Guatemala, he said that it made him wonder about Mayan civilization, about how things might have been different for them if they had a distribution method for knowledge. If books had spread before bullets, what a different world it would be.

We never see these things for what they are until it's too late. The Middle East was between 100 and 400 years ahead of Europe. If I could have been born into Europe or the Middle East in the year 1300, I would have chosen to be born in the Middle East. But when this technology came along, they saw it as a fad, a gimmick, and as something to be worried about. They didn't see how important it was until everything changed. In Europe, they embraced it.

As we can see from this story, it is not a given that strong nations will prosper forever. As Neil deGrasse Tyson says, “just because you’re making discoveries doesn’t mean it’s forever.” It is also not a given that regions that are struggling in poverty, like Europe was, will do so forever. There are moments when everything can change. There are technologies that have the potential to shape the landscape of the world. Software is one of those. Like the printing press, the implications may take a very long time to show up. Some will embrace it. Some will miss the train. As a parent or a leader of a nation on the heels of the printing press, the lessons are clear: teach kids to read and write. The lessons are equally clear today. Teach kids to read and write in the language of software. Teach them to be fluent in the language that will shape the future.

I heard the lyrics to a song: "Nothing hurts more than hope deferred. Don't let this slip away." Software is the printing press of our time. Coding literacy is the literacy of our time. Prosperity will be born from it. Prosperity unlocks prosperity. Don’t let it slip away. Our future depends on it.

With two potential futures ahead, I hope we will choose well. In one, every infant born today will grow up prepared to be part of a world in which software is at the center of everything. In another, they will not be. I hope that we get to look back and say that we learned from history.