I want to point out that people who compare the Ottoman Empire to the European empires come across as really silly.
The European states had vastly different circumstances with their territories in Europe at least. For example, the European territory can be described as easily mod as most European powers were located on flat land with a river network that allowed power to be centralised much easier than the mountainous Ottoman empire.
The mountainous territory made it more difficult for the government to govern and allowed minority groups to avoid assimilation. This created a massive problem as most of the empire's population wasn't Turkish-speaking. By the 1800s, the empire only had about 8 to 9 million Turks out of 31 million people.
In other words, it was nearly impossible for the state to increase literacy in a multicultural state such as the Ottoman Empire.
Also, those European states didn't have a better literacy rate than the Ottoman Empire, as the data is somewhat manipulative. When people discuss the literacy rate in the Ottoman Empire, they talk about the entire Ottoman Empire, which includes the Christian minorities in the mountains and the countless nomadic Muslim tribes of the deserts and plains.
That said, when people discuss the literacy rates of the European empires, they do not discuss the complete picture, as most of the European empires' populations were also illiterate; for every English-speaking subject of the British empire who could read, there were a hundred Indian subjects who could not. The same applies to all the European empires, but this is never discussed when comparing the Ottoman Empire to other European empires.
I should also point out that European empires that did have higher levels of education often had them in areas in which the religious book was in the languages of the local population. In other words, there was a link between education and religious literature. Separating the religious component of education has actually slowed down the spread of education in the Muslim world, at least in the 20th century.
Religious education, of course, only goes so far in spreading literacy. Eventually, a country does need to break with religious teaching and adopt a more secular education system, but that comes after society matures a bit, but not before.
