The Tanzimat novel in the service of science: On Ahmet Midhat Efendi’s American Doctors

Abstract

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when Ottomans started to syste1natically adopt European science and technology, they largely conceived of it as an addendum to their established body of traditional knowledge (ilim). flim was a concept, which, thanks to religious and scholarly works composed over the course of thirteen centuries, enjoyed immense prestige among both scholars and lay people alike...