Growing up in one of the countries formerly a subject of the Ottomans, we were taught that the Ottoman ban of the printing press which lasted for around 300 years after its introduction in Europe, was a major reason behind the backwardness of the Middle Eastern Islamic societies in comparison with European ones. How true is that statement?
The idea that Ottoman rejection of the printing press was responsible for the ascendancy of Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is definitely false—but more interestingly, it's false on a number of points and for a variety of reasons. So let's unpack the claim, so we can see what points we can take issue with! In longer form, the printing press argument might run thus:
So, starting with point one, this is obviously on pretty shaky ground. Historians love trying to explain the "Great Divergence," and have proposed a wide variety of reasons why the West began to economically and militarily outperform the rest of the world. The printing press thesis, therefore, is far from universally accepted: perhaps Europe's ascendancy was due to the accessibility of coal deposits, or to innovations in military technology born out of endless infighting among small nations, or because free markets and capitalism helped European states allocate resources more efficiently than their rivals. Any of these reasons seems plausible on paper; the difficulty is that proving causation rather than mere correlation is really difficult when all you have to work with is historical data. We know Europe did adopt the printing press relatively early compared to the Ottoman Empire, and that the former eventually outperformed the latter—it's a far tougher sell to demonstrate that those two statements are linked by more than coincidence.
(Side-note, we really should be talking about moveable type rather than the printing press here—China had printing centuries before Europe, but it was outperformed just like the Ottomans.)
But while the first point is methodologically flawed, the second is outright false—again on multiple counts!
The few official materials we have on the subject of printing tend to be rather positive. A 1584 firman of Mehmed III authorized two European merchants to import printed Arabic books into the Ottoman Empire, and was itself printed at the back of the Medici Press's Arabic edition of Euclid four years later. In 1727, Ahmed III granted permission (based on a fatwa issued by the şeyhülislam, the chief religious officer in the empire) to Ibrahim Muteferrika to set up what would become the first Ottoman press to print Arabic-script materials. Notably, neither of these firmans made any reference to a past tradition banning Arabic printing, and the two earlier documents often cited as evidence of such a tradition (two firmans by Bayezid II and Selim I) have never been produced or quoted in full.
So there's a complete absence of evidence of the ban outside of some garbled European accounts. According to Kathryn Schwartz, whose article is the fullest treatment I know of this historiographic trope, it first appears in a 1584 book by the Franciscan priest and traveler André Thevet. Now, according to Thevet, Bayezid and Selim banned the consumption of printed matter rather than its production; within a century, however, the narrative shifted to a ban on printing altogether. And despite pushback from some writers intimately familiar with Ottoman mores, the print-ban trope was widely accepted by eighteenth-century European writers. By the nineteenth century, it was being repeated by reform-minded Ottomans as well, anxious to show how a slavish devotion to fundamentalism and tradition had politically crippled the empire. The print-ban narrative is therefore a heavily ideologically inflected account of the Ottoman Empire's decline, and should be treated with extreme caution.
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Kathryn A. Schwartz, "Did Ottoman Sultans Ban Print?," Book History 20 (2017): 1-39 [pdf].