...there [was] no Gutenberg revolution in Ottoman lands. The literacy rate in Turkey, Egypt, and Iran at the turn of the nineteenth century was around 3 percent, compared with England’s rate of 68 percent for men and 43 percent for women... In the Muslim world, the small class of scholars known as the ‘ulama (learned men) had rejected the printing press on the grounds that “making the Quran accessible would only enable the ignorant to misinterpret it.” Printing in many parts of the Middle East and North Africa was a capital crime, and there were no newspapers to report on such world-changing events as America’s rejection of British rule in 1776...

“making the Quran accessible would only enable the ignorant to misinterpret it.”