The daily newspaper al-Muqtabas was founded on 17 December 1908 in Damascus by the Syrian publicist Muhammad Kurd ‘Ali (1876–1953). Kurd ‘Ali was newly returned from exile in Cairo where he had gained a solid grounding in journalism and where, in 1906, he had already established a literary and scientific review of the same name (al-Muqtabas). Thanks in no small part to the fact that they owned their own printing house, Matba‘at al-Muqtabas, and helped along by the climate of liberalisation brought about by the Young Turk Revolution of July 1908, Muhammad Kurd ‘Ali and his brothers Ahmad and ‘Adil found themselves at the head of a press enterprise whose workings – from editing right down to sales – were under their sole control. With the assistance of a team of casual editors, one of whom was the famous representative for Damascus in the Ottoman parliament, Shukri al-‘Asali (1878–1916), they embarked on a pioneering enterprise in the years leading up to World War I that secured al-Muqtabas's status as a cultural phenomenon and an artefact of Syria's newly introduced press technology. Al-Muqtabas thus became a vehicle for specific norms and values that we may refer to as ‘reformist’ and, in so doing, had a significant impact on the Damascene society of the time.

The political context of the era was conducive to the success of the brothers’ enterprise since the re-establishment of the Constitution in 1908 proclaimed freedom of expression (and thus freedom of the press) as a fundamental principle of the new regime. Between 1908 and 1914, around forty newspapers and reviews were set up in the city of Damascus alone. The link between these press organs and Arabist organisations (or Arab reformists) is well known and al-Muqtabas was a case in point because a great many of its editors, the most notable amongst them being Muhammad Kurd ‘Ali himself, were members of the Society for Arab Renaissance which had been founded at the end of 1906 by Muhibb al-Din al-Khatib (1886–1969). These close ties were to see al-Muqtabas take on the role of advocate for Arab demands in the Ottoman Empire and, in particular, those concerning the preservation of Arabic language and culture within the empire.