ABSTRACT
The Japanese victory over Russia in 1905 came as a bright star for those Middle Eastern optimists who thought their societies might be up to emulating the Japanese in confronting the West. Western science and technology thereafter became steadily more complex, expensive and larger in scale. In the golden age of science and Muslim civilization it was the Abbasid Caliph who initiated and supported the translations of scientific and medical texts to Arabic. In 1724, when the Tulip Period and Ibrahim's printing press were bringing in a bit of European science and technology, Dutch merchants in Japan were given imperial permission to import European texts on science and technology that Jesuit missionaries in China had translated to Chinese. In the Egyptian and Ottoman experience a few hundred students were sent abroad to master science and technology. All of seven million Egyptian pounds over a five-year period was budgeted for the Supreme Science Council.
