The Evolution Of Arab Print Culture
Introduction
The communicative shift from scripted to printed text has been acknowledged by historians as the bridge to modernity. Scholarship on the advent of printing, ever since Elizabeth Eisenstein’s path-breaking work on the Gutenberg print shop, has focused its preliminary lens on the technological potential and capacity of movable type print.1 Eisenstein’s “unacknowledged revolution” that happened due to the invention of print, which subsequently led to the increase in public knowledge and thought in early modern Europe,2 impacted ideas about the role of print in the Arab world as well. As a result, scholars started questioning the considerable gap in the timing between the adoption of print in Europe in the fifteenth century, and its integration in the early nineteenth century in the region, and examining why this part of the world withheld the establishment of early printing for too long.
As a burgeoning enterprise during the late nineteenth century, publishing houses in the Arab world began to circulate texts, books, pamphlets, and periodicals as a response to intellectual, economic, and social demands in society. This essay aims to shift the focus of examining printing’s effect on cultural and political history from a Western to a more Middle Eastern experience, and proposes an understanding of print that contextualizes a set of broader societal systems and actors that shaped Arab intellectual development. Rather than reiterating the framing of printing as a technological revolutionary drive forward from script, it sets out to understand the role that people such as editors, patrons, and scholars played in shaping printing initiatives in the region, and to identify the multiple local histories of the print experience.
Scholarship on the history of print in the Arab world has usually begun with the anchoring of Napoleon Bonaparte’s ship on the Egyptian Alexandrian coast in 1798,3 which introduced a movable type print to circulate leaflets and decrees to the masses in order to instate colonial rule. In some debates, be it Western or Arab, the print machinery continues to be painted through a limited scope, as a harbinger of enlightenment, modernity, and revolutionary impact during the Arab Renaissance, or al-Nadha, with all that preceded its adoption framed as stagnation, inefficiency, and an irrational hold onto tradition. However, this binary approach of analyzing the adoption of print has been contested by numerous scholars like Muhammad Qasim Zaman,4 Ahmed El Shamsy,5 and Ahmad Khan.6 In following the same vein, this essay proposes a different moment to anchor and contextualize the story of print in the Arab world, which would require changing our understanding of print from being a deterministic force that “swept through the region and upended earlier ways of life”,7 to one that weaves together a multiplicity of global actors and cultures.
On the question of origins
In 1727, an imperial decree was issued by Ottoman Sultan Ahmet III permitting the practice of printing with movable type in Arabic script, and Ibrahim Muteferrika, a Christian convert to Islam, was given an imperial clearance to launch a movable type press in the Ottoman capital.8 Nonetheless, Muteferrika’s enterprise and the decree did not spur a massive market for printing presses, nor did they mark any historic turning point. That said, what followed at a later stage was several independent initiatives arising in Ottoman Arab provinces by the appointed governors, namely Muhammad ‘Ali in Egypt in 18219 and ‘Uthman Nuri in the Hijaz in 1882.10 In both cases, the printing press advanced both political and intellectual purposes, including serving the governors’ ambitious objectives of maintaining their rule and curbing Ottoman influence, as well as helping different groups and constituencies as they sought out to commission the publication of belles-lettres and religious texts.
In addition to fulfilling governmental ambitions, earlier publishing initiatives catered to a wide variety of interests, including poetry. Among the early literary texts that were published through commissioning in the Bulaq Press, the first official and governmental printing press in Egypt, had been Diwan Ibn al-Farid in 1842,11 a collection of devotional poetry by the thirteenth-century poet. Likewise, the Meccan press which symbolized a fascinating episode in Muslim printing history, used movable types of Arabic, Turkish, Javanese, and Malaysian,12 to cater for a cosmopolitan community in the city during the late nineteenth century. The catalogs listing the names of employees who had worked over the years in this printing press also reveal cohorts of editors specialized in Arabic, Javanese, Malay, and Urdu,13 which showcase how the print shop was a collaborative space run by editors, translators, and patrons from different walks of life, rather than a top-down institution managed by state officials, bureaucrats, and the new class of educated elites in the region.14
Analyzing the printing experiences in Cairo and Mecca allows us to envisage innovative and technological endeavors outside of Western scholarships’ limited scope in explaining the late advent of printing in the region. This historiography constructed and revisited offers a different understanding of the imaginary power of the printing press. Rather than framing its adoption as due to the insistence of market forces or aspirations for emulating European modernity, this historical background hopes to formulate a narrative that frames printing in the Arab world as a conscious decision as opposed to a historical afterthought.
Public print culture and periodicals at the turn of the century
The historiography of printing in the region can help counter the hegemonic notion that printing was not present prior to the state initiatives of the nineteenth century. In other words, by revisiting the history of print in the Middle East, we can understand how its adoption was not a top-bottom approach, as the printing endeavors of different communities and the circulation of periodicals show.
Printing was not only done in the Arabic language by Muslims, and thinking of it in this limited scope fails to acknowledge the printing initiatives of Christian and Jewish communities and their contributions to the print experience in the region. After their expulsion from the Iberian Peninsula in the early fifteenth century, Jewish immigrants began to expand in the Ottoman Empire, bringing their printing presses to Istanbul.15 Rabbi Isaac Garcon’s printing press was amongst the very first to flourish in the Empire,16 alongside other Armenian and Greek presses.17
Maronite communities in the Levant were also amongst the initial waves that embraced print. The religious texts from Europe that were being disseminated in the region were seen carrying different teachings than that of the region’s Maronites. This prompted them to establish their own printing presses in order to print texts pertaining to their own religious doctrines. These endeavors began in the Qazhiya region in Northern Lebanon, in 1610.18 Later ventures were heavily influenced by the strategic location of the Levant as a trading hub, and an exchange site between different key players of the international trading network.
Arab Christians were heavily affected by this exchange. It was during this period of the eighteenth century that translation movements flourished through translating religious Orthodox books into Arabic, which inadvertently led to the circulation of the Arabic language and resulted in consolidating it as the lingua franca of Syriac communities to the point where Syriac languages were only understood in Mount Lebanon and small areas in Damascus.19 Such a linguistic transformation is interesting as it showcases the cultural influence of circulating printed material, and highlights the important overlooked contributions of these communities.
Another historical moment that pushes against the top-bottom approach of the adoption of print is the flourishing of printed periodicals. This provides an opportunity through which we can identify a horizontal development of printing vis-a-vis popular reading consumption in the late nineteenth and twentieth century in Egypt. Revisiting the historiography of the types of printed periodicals in the late nineteenth century places them within their proper context. They circulated people’s thoughts and grievances, which reflected the political tendencies in Egypt at the time and served as a precursor to the nationalist revolt in 1879 that sought to end foreign influence over the country and was led by Ahmed ‘Urabi, who was then an officer of the Egyptian army. In the years leading up to the revolt, the political context of Egypt under both British interference and the Khedivate, which was the office of the viceroy that was governing the country on behalf of the Ottoman Empire, experienced several dimensions in the political, economic, and social spheres. Egypt slowly sank into debt due to excessive and ceaseless borrowing from abroad, which paved the way for increased interference of British politics in the country’s affairs.20 Ethnic tensions were also increasing between the Turco-Circassians and the Egyptians, which was especially manifested in the dissatisfaction of Egyptian-born military officers with the monopolization of higher ranks by foreigners.21 Furthermore, the ways in which printed periodicals interacted with the reading public are an interesting contribution to the corpus of scholarship on the Arab Renaissance.22 The increased use of the printing press spurred an intellectual awakening during al-Nahda period.23 This was seen as the beginning of the formation of Arab nationalist inclinations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century,24 and consequently spurred changes in attitude, ideology, and values within society, especially in Egypt.
The expansion of education and increase in intellectual activity
Alongside the intellectual awakening that Egypt had experienced, increased urbanization, state-centralization, and infrastructure projects were undertaken at the time. This changed the socioeconomic makeup of the Egyptian state’s subjects, leading to a climate of changing class structures, as well as the stimulation for social transmission of values and mobilization.25 Additionally, it resulted in a shift in educational practices, which led to the rise of a newly educated class of professionals, other than the ‘ulama, or the religious scholars.26 Education in rural areas was not only circumscribed to religious teachings but expanded into fields of mathematics, medicine, and natural sciences. In order to cater to this newly educated class, a translation movement arose to provide textbooks through the Bulaq Press,27 and the circulation of periodicals further expanded, coupled with the rising employment in the Press and the Journal Officiel, thus contributing to the shaping of public opinion.28
As such, print was not only accessible to the educated classes but also to the ordinary masses, thanks to the influence of some intellectuals on the press who provided texts in a more colloquial format. These men were Ya’qub Sannu’ and Abdallah al-Nadim, who printed, respectively, Abu naddara zarqa’, or The Man With The Blue Eyeglasses, and al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit, or Mockery and Reproach, in response to the growing demand for entertaining and informative press.29 The significance of these printed periodicals was in their content as well as in their writing. Sannu’ and Nadim’s work veered away from classical Arabic texts and speeches previously attributed to elites and ‘ulama, to the informal and colloquial dialect that informed the masses of current problems and acted as a medium to air out their grievances. This introduction of the colloquial press blurred class divisions, which were exacerbated by literacy rates and juxtaposed the elite and ‘ulama with the majority of other Egyptians. The ideas and writings reached individuals from all walks of life, which elicited a mass appeal for informative and humorous intellectual production, and paved the way for not only written but also oral transmission of popular and political ideas that were sometimes read out loud at coffee shops, or other urban meeting spaces.30
The intertwining of classical Arabic texts and speeches with the informal and colloquial dialect mobilized the masses into an awareness of the current political and economic immiseration they were facing as an Egyptian collective, sparking a nationalist imagination within the consumers of these printed periodicals. It was this increased accessibility of most Egyptians to political channels of expression that led to communal solidarity through ideological nationalist lines, which in turn piqued Ahmed ‘Urabi’s interest in tapping into the potentiality of printed periodicals. After ‘Urabi was able to amass the allegiance of the military to join his revolutionary forces, due to their opposition to the monopolization of military upper ranks by foreigners as well as the weakening state of the Khedive, he found that the revolt movement needed a larger base for revolutionary opposition, which manifested in the ordinary masses.31 He sought the help of Abdallah al-Nadim in order to publicize and popularize the cause, relying on his oratory skills and colloquial printed periodicals to disseminate the main pillars of the ‘Urabi movement.32
It is important here to note how influential and threatening the printed periodicals were to the different actors during the revolt. Firstly, it was influential to ‘Urabi and his officers as a means to address constituents of society that were previously alienated. Secondly, printed periodicals were instrumental in instigating a change in the way opinions and written texts were consumed during the time period, making information, news, and political satire accessible to all echelons of society, and blurring class lines with their potential. Thirdly, the printed periodicals’ role as a medium of expressing grievances against British intervention and the Khedive proved to be threatening, which was exhibited by the issuance of a press censorship law on November 26, 1881,33 illustrating how prominent printed periodicals were seen in the eyes of the masses, the revolutionaries, and those in power at the time.
Conclusion
Revisiting the diverse examples within the historiographical narratives of printing in the Middle East highlights four key conclusions. First, the adoption of print in the Arab world was not the result of imitating European endeavors, but it was a deliberate choice by the people in the region. Second, the role of non-Arabic and non-Muslim printing has been severely overlooked by existing scholarship and the historiography of printing in the Levant has not been given its due for its influence on later printing initiatives. Third, printed periodicals, during the socioeconomic changes in the late nineteenth century along with the revolutionary period of ‘Urabi, served as mediums for discussing and debating important national and intellectual issues. Fourth, periodicals paved the way for both written and oral transmission of popular nationalist ideas, highlighting their accessibility to a large group of Egyptians in specific, and blurring class lines and the monopolization of certain educated strata in society in regards to intellectual endeavors, revolutionary movements, and reading cultures. Constructing a historiography while bearing in mind different moments on which we can anchor the ‘origins of the story’ shows that the printing scene was an effervescent one that engaged different constituencies of migrants, revolutionaries, and scholars who at a particular point, based on political, economic, and social contexts, found movable type important to adopt.
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The statements made and views expressed are solely the responsibility of the author, and do not represent Fiker Institute.
