Mardin (1969b, 26-27) attributes the text to Damad Ibrahim Pasha himself. Berkes (1964, 30-31) thinks that it was “inspired by the recommendations of some European observers who happened to be in Turkey at the time” and suggests more specifically a French officer, De Rochefort, who according to Hammer submitted in 1717 a project to create an engineering corps in the Ottoman court. He also makes the bold hypothesis that “the document was inspired, if not prepared, by Ibrahim [Müteferrika], perhaps with encouragement from his former compatriots, for submittal to his patron, the Sadrazam [Damad] Ibrahim Paşa” (N. Berkes, The Development of Secularism in Turkey, London 1964, repr. in facsimile 1998, 33; the same suggestion was made by F. R. Unat, “Ahmet III devrine ait bir ıslahat takriri”, Tarih Vesikaları 1 (1941), 107 fn. 3).
The text was allegedly a record of a dialogue between an Ottoman statesman and a Christian officer; it was copied by the chronicler Es’ad Efendi (d. 1848), who notes that it was written “in the form of a discussion by some wise men” (ba’z-ı erbâb-ı ukûlün muhâkeme yollu kaleme alıp) and “submitted to Ahmed III through the Grand Vizier Ibrahim Pasha”