Western ideas percolating into Ottoman minds

Abstract

The dissertation examines late Ottoman intellectual history from the perspective of its confrontation with Western ideas through translations in the Ottoman capital Istanbul, and in a leading intellectual centre of the Ottoman Empire, namely Cairo. It consists of three chapters. The first chapter surveys the history of translation activity in the Ottoman Empire from its beginning to the nineteenth century and, particularly, focuses on the nineteenth century translation movement. The second chapter takes the Arabic and Turkish translations of Fénelon’s Les aventures de Télémaque as a case study and attempts to analyse the transmission of certain intellectual concepts through translations; while the third chapter concentrates on the reception of new ideas presented in the translations of the Télémaque and their impact on the process of reform.