Description
A charming book of geography with 7 double-page maps, printed in colour lithograph, representing the five continents, Turkey and the World.
Selim Sabit Efendi (1829 – 1910) was the pioneer of the Ottoman modern education. He was schooled in Istanbul and studied mathematics, physics and chemistry in Paris and was upon his return to Istanbul accused of breeching the traditional Islamic education, by arranging the classroom in a modern Western way.
Sabit revolutionized the approach to literacy in Ottoman schools by teaching the pupils to memorize the letters in connections with words, instead of memorizing them separately, as previously taught in Islamic schools. He authored two milestones in Ottoman literature Elifbâ-yı Osmanî (Ottoman ABC), a widely used primer, based on the European examples, reprinted several times in the following decades and used in the primary schools, and Rehnümâ-yi Muallimin, a pedagogical guide for teachers.
Selim Sabit also wrote several other educational books, such as a grammar manual Mi’yâru’l-Kelâm (Measure of the Word), a mathematics manual Muhtasar Hesâb Risâlesi (Short Calculation Booklet) and our geography book Muhtasar Hesâb Risâlesi (Short Geography Booklet), which is one of the first Ottoman geography school books.
Selim Sabit considered the modern geography to be a very important subject in the secondary classes. In his work Rehnümâ-yi Muallimin, a manual for teachers he states, that the students should learn about the five continents and also should be taught how to draw maps.
There were six editions of this title, with the fist one published in 1876. Ours is the fifth edition.
We could not find any institutional examples of the book on Worldcat. Hungarian Academy of Sciences Library houses a 1293 [1876] (first) edition.
References: ÖZEGE 14179. Osmanlı coğrafya literatürü tarihi. History of Geographical Literature during the Ottoman Period, 2000, pp. 411-412, no. 301.
