WI: Muslims invent the Printing Press?

It is if your complaint is that literacy was a problem because of the writing system.

No, it's not.

At least if you posted figures from the same era it might make some sense as an indirect argument that "As other places with simpler writing systems show, other problems were more serious".

But picking two different places centuries later is practically a random factoid.
 
It is if your complaint is that literacy was a problem because of the writing system.

I meant that it would have been much harder for the population as a whole to memorize several thousand characters, in comparison to about 20-30 letters or so, especially if they did not have access to education. Of course, in general, literacy was low across the world until the 19th-20th centuries, depending on the region. However, I'm just trying to say that a combination of the difficulties due to the writing system, both in terms of creating separate blocks for each character, along with memorizing thousands of characters, would have made it extremely difficult for a literary revolution to become widespread within China. That's all.

No, it's not.

At least if you posted figures from the same era it might make some sense as an indirect argument that "As other places with simpler writing systems show, other problems were more serious".

But picking two different places centuries later is practically a random factoid.

Technically, this is true as well.
 
Given that Gutenburg's invention is three centuries earlier, I'd say that it taking that long is not a good sign, either.

Would love to see those readings.
Clarification: I meant Turkish printing; there was Hebrew printing from 1530 on by the Soncino family and I think there was also earlier Armenian printing, although I don't have anything with me to verify that.One other way to look at the question is to check the prices of manuscripts, which one of the authors of the papers here mentions as being available and see how expensive they actually were and if there are any things that might make printing less cost-advantaged(for example, paper being fairly common). Also, I attached the article on the first Ottoman Turkish press-if you'd like, I can PM the fetva and the reading on Ottoman literary culture.
 

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Clarification: I meant Turkish printing; there was Hebrew printing from 1530 on by the Soncino family and I think there was also earlier Armenian printing, although I don't have anything with me to verify that.One other way to look at the question is to check the prices of manuscripts, which one of the authors of the papers here mentions as being available and see how expensive they actually were and if there are any things that might make printing less cost-advantaged(for example, paper being fairly common). Also, I attached the article on the first Ottoman Turkish press-if you'd like, I can PM the fetva and the reading on Ottoman literary culture.

As long as it's in English (poor monolingual me), that would be much appreciated.
 
Here's the article I was talking about for Al-Andalus, BTW.

Medieval Arabic Ṭarsh: A Forgotten Chapter in the History of Printing,
Richard W. Bulliet, Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 107, No. 3 (Jul. - Sep., 1987), pp. 427-438.

http://ghazali.org/articles/jaos107-3-1987-rwb.pdf

Interesting, thank you. I've read other things by Bulliet and he's quite a good scholar IMVHO, though sometimes prone to excessive generalizations (a common feature among Islamicists to be fair).
 
Lot of interesting stuff in this thread, really.
Some points:
There WERE religious-grounded objections to printing press as such in the Ottoman Empire IOTL, though they were not universal.
The structure of Islamic learning, especially but not exclusively in that era, was quite intimately intertwined with handwriting. Learning something was quite often connected with copying it, though this connection was far from absolute or universal.
The very nature of Arabic script, as it was used to write Arabic, but also (to a lesser extent) Persian and Turkish, was rather conducive to such situation. However, potential for printing existed. Now, a century before Gutenberg was hardly the best time for it, especially as far as the Ottomans go. The Ottomans domains in 1353 were a peripheral relative backwater in the Muslim world, and the worst effects of both the Mongol conquest and the waves of Black Death were quite active. Poltically, it was a time of weakness, decline and instability for most Muslim polities west of India, with the Mamluk state as the most remarkable exception.
Someone pointed out that the Kufic script is better suited to printing than the subsequent various forms of naskhi, which is basically true, but this would require an invention of printing press way earlier, before 1100 AD at latest I think.
I would not rule out, but it makes for a very different scenario (one where Europe is likely to pick it out in the thirteenth century, for example).
It is really a complex thing.
 
It sounds like something one might develop relatively naturally in the right alt-timeline, but not as a POD in and of itself.
 
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