Reading books

What is the impact of censorship and why do absolutist regimes prohibit the printing of material they find threatening?

I share a story here from the book “Why Nations Fail” by James Robinson and Daron Acemoglu. It sheds some light on censorship practice by an absolutist regime.

Before the Gutenberg press was invented in 1445 in Mainz, Germany, books were copied by hand and were, therefore, expensive and only accessible by the elites in Europe. Thirty years later, by the late 1470s, all of Europe could read printed books as printing took off there.

Europeans were becoming better educated and more learned than before. Alas, this did not spill over into our region and the Ottoman Empire.

Sultan Bayezid II banned his Muslim subjects, in 1485, from printing using Arabic letters. Obviously, the less his subjects knew the longer he would stay in power, or so he thought.

It was not until 1727, 300 years after Europe was printing and spreading knowledge, that the first printing press was allowed on Ottoman lands, when Sultan Ahmed II allowed Ibrahim Mutferrika to set up a press and operate it.

However, eight monitors, including three judges, were to closely proofread the text before it was printed and distributed.

Imagine having to please all these censors who had total control of whether to ban or allow the printing of a book.

Not surprisingly, and due to this heavy censorship, only 17 books were printed during 1729-1743, after which Ibrahim stopped working.

His family was able to print seven more books by 1797.

In 350 years after the first printing press was invented, only 24 books were printed in this part of the world. The Arabs, the subjects of the Ottoman Empire at the time, only started printing in 1798, in Egypt, using the press that remained after Napoleon’s departure.

Egypt thus became the cultural centre of the Arab world, a world that was and remains behind Europe by every developmental measure.

It took the Arabs three-and-a-half centuries to start printing!

Censorship and absolutist regimes were the cause of hindered development, not culture, as some may think, or geographical location and temperature, as some others may suggest, or even our own ignorance of what is right for us.

Dysfunctional institutions opted to safeguard their own interests by keeping people ignorant, a practice that remains common in the region.

Compare, for instance, the current practices of some of the regimes in the region. One neighbouring country did not allow fax machines until 2000, and mobile phones were only admitted in 2003.

A now-deposed Arab ruler did not allow his citizens passports so they would not travel outside and see how others were living.

Another regime pays $10 million a day to a company to censor the Internet. A close-by country recently changed its press and publications law to enhance its control and censorship.

The practices are many and are often conducted under the guise of protecting morals or the state from imaginary internal or external enemies.

Needless to say, the practice monitoring books before printing and distribution remains common in our neck of the woods and, yes, we remain underdeveloped.

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