The Mufti, Supreme Religious Leader

In 1727 a Transylvanian-born convert to Islam, İbrahim Müteferrika, wanted to open a printing press in Istanbul with Arabic type. Before it could start, it needed a legal opinion, a fatwa, from the mufti of Istanbul, the şeyhülislam. As the highest religious authority in the empire, he ruled on whether the state's actions agreed with Islamic law, and the Rijksmuseum counts him, with the sultan and the grand vizier, among the three most powerful men in the empire.

The opinion allowed the press, with a limit. It could print dictionaries, histories and books of science, and it stayed away from the Quran and religious law. Its first book, an Arabic dictionary translated into Turkish, came out in 1729.

The museum thinks the seated man here is probably the mufti who gave that ruling, Abdullah Efendi, born in Larissa in Thessaly and in office from 1718. He lost the post in the revolt of 1730 and was sent into exile, and later he came back quietly to Istanbul, where he died in 1743.