Arabic was part of the linguistic landscape throughout the Ottoman Empire, represented in inscriptions, audible to everyone in the call to prayer from the local mosque, and visible on tombstones of Muslims, which usually contained an Arabic invocation to God, and as the text of the ṭuġrā, the Sultanic name sign, found on every coin, banknote, many buildings, and countless pieces of writing. Muslims encountered the language in worship and everywhere they interacted with their religion. Moreover, Arabic was the usual path to (or the gate in front of) literacy for the Muslim population. Most Muslims learned to read and write independently of their mother tongue on the basis of the Qur’an, which to read correctly and aloud (ḫaṭm) was the primary goal of this basic instruction.

Despite these two central features, in those regions where Arabic did not dominate as spoken language, its importance was diminished through the long nineteenth century. At the end of the process, it had largely ceased to be a medium of scholarly production and intellectual exchange for Ottomans who were no native speakers of it.

The talk looks investigates the role of the nineteenth-century medrese in Ottoman intellectual life, looks into the media-sphere of printing, and takes account of inner-Ottoman colonialism in order to explain this development that was to prepare the ground for the specific post-Ottoman nationalisms which in their turn are prevailing until today.