A fundamental problem confronting the major Islamic powers in the development of an effective navy during the age of fighting sail was that of having fully embraced the idea of land being the source of all wealth. Here, reference is made to the Ottoman, Persian and Mughal empires, all three failing to develop a maritime-based leadership that fully understood how a navy could work on equal terms with a land-based army to achieve long-term overall objectives. For the Mughals, the value of the navy never went beyond its use as a tool to counter threats posed by enemies within the coastal waters that bordered its territorial land mass, while frequently calling upon the more maritime-proficient European trading companies to bolster their own maritime forces. As for the Persians, a period of naval expansion under Nādir Shah never saw his fleet venturing outside of the Gulf and, through heavy dependence upon ethnic Arabs to man his ships, he was too reliant upon those of no immediate affinity to the Persian state over which he ruled.

The Ottomans, in creating, from the mid-seventeenth century onwards, a large fleet of warships fully dependent on sail, were slow to integrate into this fleet essential elements of organisation, training and management that had been successfully developed outside of the Islamic world. Through the conservative elite that dominated the Divan-ı Humayun and other influential bodies, a distancing from the Christian west had been maintained, resulting in a failure to detect some of the more important advances, but especially those within the more hidden areas of naval administration. This, quite naturally, disadvantaged the Ottoman navy when it came into conflict with navies making greater use of such developments, with new ways of thinking only apparent when crisis in battle prompted a need to bring about improvement. The very moves that led to the Ottomans embracing large sail-powered warships, a fatwa of 1650 and the naval kanun of 1701, were both a reaction to significant naval failings in a series of wars against Venice and her allies fought at sea.

A major defeat of the Ottoman navy at Çeşme certainly energised those who recognised a need to reform the navy, but the pace of reform was tediously slow and continued to be subjected to constant opposition.