John W. Draper's History of the Conflict between Religion and Science is commonly regarded as the manifesto of the ‘conflict thesis’. The superficiality of this thesis has been demonstrated in recent studies, but to read Draper's work only as a text on ‘science versus religion’ is to miss half of its significance, as it also involved evaluations of individual religions with respect to their attitudes towards science. Due to Draper's favourable remarks on Islam, the Ottoman author Ahmed Midhat translated his (...) work into Turkish, and published it along with his own comments on Draper's arguments. Midhat interpreted Islam using the cues provided by Draper, and portrayed it as the only religion compatible with science. While his Christian readers condemned Draper for his approach to Islam, Midhat transformed the ‘conflict thesis’ into a proclamation that Islam and science were allies in opposition to Christian encroachment on the Ottoman Empire. This paper analyses Midhat's appropriation of Draper's work and compares it to the reaction of Draper's Christian readers. It discusses the context that made an alliance between Islam and science so desirable for Midhat, and emphasizes the impact of the historico-geographical context on the encounters between and representations of science and religion. (shrink)

The three translations of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation invested the text with new meaning. None of the translations endorsed the book for the author's advocacy of species transformation. The first translation, into German , put forward the text as evincing divine design in nature. The second, into Dutch , also presented Vestiges as proof of divine order in nature and, more specifically, as aiding the stabilization of society under God and king in a process of recovery from (...) the 1848 Revolution. By contrast, the third translation, into German , interpreted the book as furthering the very revolutionary, anti-ecclesiastical and anti- monarchist ideals that the Dutch edition sought to counter. (shrink)