Kâtip Çelebi

The German orientalist Gustav Flügel published Kaşf az-Zunūn in the original Arabic with parallel Latin translation, entitled Lexicon Bibliographicum et Encyclopaedicum (7 vols.

The orientalist Barthélemy d'Herbelot produced a French edition of the Kaşf az-Zunūn principally with additional material, in the great compendium, Bibliothèque Orientale.

His father was a sipahi[7] (cavalrist) and silāhdār (sword bearer) of the Sublime Porte and secretary in the Anadolı muhasebesi (Anatolian finance accountancy) in Istanbul.

[n 4][11] As the accountant of the commissariat department of the Ottoman army in Anatolia, he fought alongside his father on the Terjan campaign (1624)[12][13] and in the failed expedition to recapture Baghdād from Persian control (1625).

He taught medicine, geography, geometry, the Sí fasl ('Thirty Sections') and the Bīst bāb ('Twenty Chapters') on the astrolabe, Elements of Accidence, al-Fanārī, the Shamsīya on logic, Jāmī, Mukhtasar, Farā’id, Multaqā, Durar, and Ali Qushji's treatises titled al-Muhammadiya on arithmetic and al-Fathīya on astronomy.

[n 9] He wrote that his teaching method was “to enter every plurality by way of unity, and to master first principles by comprehending universals.”[20] The astronomer Mevlana Mehmed ibn Ahmed Rumi al-Aqhisar was among those who attended his lectures.

[citation needed] His research ranged across lexicology, fiqh (jurisprudence), logic, rhetoric, tafsīr (Qur’ānic exegesis) and hadīth (Prophetic tradition), mathematics, medicine, mysteries of religion, astronomy, genealogy, history and chronicling.

Çelebi’s taste for book acquisition had begun in Aleppo, and he would later expend a substantial part of his inheritance building his famous library, which came to be the largest in Istanbul in its day.