Kâtip Çelebi

Mustafa ibn Abdullah, known among scholars as Kâtip Çelebi and in the bureaucracy as Hajji Khalifa, was an Ottoman polymath born in Istanbul in Dhu'l-Qa'da 1017 AH / February 1609 and deceased in the same city.¹² His greatest work is the Kashf al-Zunun, the vast bibliographic dictionary of books and their authors; Franz Babinger hailed him as the greatest encyclopaedist among the Ottomans.¹ On his faith, two independent texts quote his own self-description: the Arabic article reports that when he introduces himself he says he is "Hanafi in madhhab, Ishraqi in orientation", and Orhan Şaik Gökyay's entry in the TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi quotes the same words from his autobiography, the Sullam al-Wusul; on that self-identification carried in two sources, his faith is recorded as sunni-hanafi.¹³

His father Abdullah was a silahdar cavalryman and a secretary in the Anatolian finance accountancy, and from him came the love of learning.¹⁴ At five or six he was set to learn the Qur'an, tajwid and the elements of prayer under Imam Isa Khalifa al-Kirimi, then progressed through Arabic grammar and calligraphy until he excelled in penmanship, accountancy and the siyaqat treasury cipher.¹⁵ At fourteen his father found him an apprentice clerk's place in the Anatolian accountancy office beside himself.⁵

He fought alongside his father on the Terjan campaign (1624) and the failed expedition to recapture Baghdad from Persia (1625); on the return his father died at Mosul and his uncle a month later.²⁴ He was at the siege of Erzurum and the Baghdad and Hamadan campaigns (1629–1630) and joined Murad IV's expeditions to Erivan and Tabriz; in 1633 he left the army's winter quarters at Aleppo to make the Hajj, from which came his title Hajji.²⁴ Back in Istanbul in 1635 he obtained an apprentice post as Khalifa, second clerk, in the Audit Office of the Cavalry, and later a post in the Commissariat's head office.²

In Istanbul he attended the sermons of the preacher Qadizade, which inspired him to resume his studies, and he continued them for thirty-four years, interrupted only by military service.² In 1645 a legacy from a wealthy relative let him retire from office, devote himself full-time to scholarship and acquire books; he spent a substantial part of his inheritance building his famous library, which became the largest in Istanbul of its day, its first taste for acquisition having begun in Aleppo.² He studied with A'rej Mustafa Efendi, Kurd Abdullah Efendi at Ayia Sophia and Veli Efendi, and himself taught medicine, geography, geometry and logic; among scholars he acquired the sobriquet "Kâtip Çelebi", the learned scribe.² His tireless study regime seems to have contributed to ill health and a premature death in 1657, from a heart attack aged about forty-nine; in 1659, after his widow's death, Levinus Warner acquired part of his library for Leiden University.²

He authored at least twenty-three books besides shorter treatises, and was most productive in the decade before his death.² The greatest is the Kashf al-Zunun 'an asami al-kutub wa'l-funun, begun at Aleppo in 1042 AH/1632 CE and completed about 1062 AH/1652 CE: an Arabic bibliographic-biographical dictionary of some 15,000 Arabic, Persian and Turkish titles, 9,500 authors and 300 arts and sciences, published by Gustav Flügel with a parallel Latin translation in seven volumes.² The Cihannuma, a two-part geographic dictionary begun in 1648, was the first Ottoman work to use European atlases, being based on a translation of Mercator's Atlas Minor, and part of it was printed in 1728 with Ibrahim Müteferrika's maps.² Among the rest: the Fadhlakat al-Tawarikh (1639), the Taqwim al-Tawarikh (1648), the Sullam al-Wusul (1651/2), a biographical dictionary of 8,561 scholars, the Dustur al-Amal (1653) on reforming the state, the Tuhfat al-Kibar (1656) on Ottoman naval wars, and the Mizan al-Haqq (1656), translated by Geoffrey L. Lewis as The Balance of Truth.²

He died at Istanbul on 6 October 1657, as the Turkish article and Wikidata give it, the TDV encyclopaedia dating his death to 1067 AH; the English article's infobox and the Urdu article give 26 September 1657 instead, and both days are preserved in his record.⁵³²⁶ A university in İzmir bears his name, as does the Newton-Katip Çelebi Fund for science exchange between Turkey and the United Kingdom.²