Salim Haddad: A Turbulent Time for a Typewriter

In late 1890s Egypt, a young painter-turned-inventor named Salim Haddad crafted a new version of the Arabic alphabet. Next, he grafted it onto the keys of a Caligraph New Century No. 10 typewriter made by the American Writing Machine Company, and then, leaving Cairo in 1899 for New York, he successfully acquired a patent for his invention.Footnote ²⁵ Reports in the Arabic literary press confirmed this event with excitement. Writing technologies like the telegraph were always met with delight, as artifacts of progress bringing the Arab world onto the global stage.Footnote ²⁶ Haddad's typewriter, too, inspired great enthusiasm—but it was not unqualified. The machine required a radical transformation of the Arabic alphabet; it was therefore initially deemed impossible by the press, and its impossibility deemed evidence of Arab/ic's inherent backwardness and delay. Once achieved, the new Arabic alphabet was described with excitement but also, at points, a hint of unease. The machine threatened to blur the boundaries between familiar and foreign, private and public, human and machine. The script it produced was simply odd. In press articles and the translated fiction in which typewriters made their first Arabic literary appearance, the typewriter was encountered both as a belated triumph and, on occasion, as a source of lingering concern.

Typewriter Temporality

The late 1890s was a particularly turbulent time in which to be experimenting with Arabic scripts and writing technologies. Since the 1830s, the Ottoman Empire and the semiautonomous Ottoman province of Egypt had undergone wide-ranging reforms aimed at centralizing their respective states and modernizing their economies, legal systems, and bureaucracies.Footnote ²⁷ Printing presses had proliferated over the course of the 19th century, along with a flourishing publishing industry and press and translation movements.Footnote ²⁸ This period of intense cultural activity was known in Arabic as the Nahda, or renaissance, and was distinguished by linguistic reforms seen as necessary to render Arabic “simpler” and more “modern.”Footnote ²⁹ In the 1890s, debate over whether and how to incorporate new foreign terms into Arabic became particularly fierce, as physical foreign presence in the region expanded and the Egyptian and Ottoman economies were incorporated into global markets. The debts incurred during modernization had provided a pretext for Egypt's occupation by the British in 1882, and since the Ottoman Empire's own bankruptcy the new sultan, Abdulhamid II, had been struggling to retain and consolidate power.Footnote ³⁰ Among other things, his administration enforced censorship that prompted many intellectuals, including Salim Haddad, to relocate from the Ottoman Arab provinces to Cairo.Footnote ³¹

In Cairo, intellectual professions were in flux, and the emergent field of communication technologies was transforming them further. Haddad was a fairly successful portrait painter, but many of his peers in Beirut were abandoning their training for new technologies and industries, chiefly photography.Footnote ³² In Egypt, he too changed course to become an entrepreneur, the owner of The American Stores in Cairo and Alexandria where he sold his typewriters alongside office supplies.Footnote ³³ He soon found collaborators and competitors. Philippe Wakid, for instance, was another Levantine émigré, a fellow entrepreneur and one-time collaborator of Haddad's. Wakid did not receive the same credit for his own typewriter in the press, but he challenged Haddad's claims to invention for decades.Footnote ³⁴ Ibrahim al-Yaziji, differently, was a calligrapher-turned-editor famous for his scathing critiques of the new, journalistic Arabic writing style. Nevertheless, he developed the standard font for Arabic printing presses and reportedly helped Haddad with the typewriter font.Footnote ³⁵ Historian Hala Auji has argued against narratives of rupture in this period, pointing out that Arabic printing was shaped by the aesthetic norms of earlier practices like calligraphy and engraving.Footnote ³⁶ That collaborations between calligraphers and painters produced the Arabic typewriter is a reminder, if one were still needed, of the collective labor and older forms of expertise that facilitated new technologies and their proprietary patents.

Although Haddad was not a major figure on the Cairo intellectual scene, his typewriter was drafted immediately into furious debates about linguistic reform. The Arabic literary-scientific press had a particular interest in new communication technologies, and from 1884 onward major journals such as al-Muqtataf (The Digest), al-Hilal (The Crescent), and al-Diyaʾ (Illumination) had printed articles on Latin, Russian, Indian, Hebrew, and Chinese typewriters. These inserted typewriters into wider discussions of Arabic's place among global language hierarchies.Footnote ³⁷ There was much early enthusiasm, for instance, for the “ease” (suhūla) with which typewriters allowed Europeans to write; it corresponded to a wider preoccupation with Arabic's perceived difficulty or “complexity” (taʿqīd) relative to other languages.Footnote ³⁸ Descriptions of American typewriters tended to reproduce the self-Orientalizing civilizational discourses circulating in some Nahda circles.Footnote ³⁹ Once the American machine had been developed, noted one article from 1898, it spread across “the civilized world . . . carried by tourists, pioneers, and colonizers to Africa and Asia, from the North Pole in the North to China, Japan, and India, and to Australia.” Arabic, however, had been excluded from this widening “civilized world.” “As for Arabic [typewriters], they have tried, but failed, due to the number of letters and their positions.” Haddad's typewriter, happily, promised salvation. One Salim Effendi Haddad, the article concluded, “has managed to produce an Arabic typewriter of the utmost precision and facility (fī ghāyat al-diqqa wa-l-suhūla) and it may be that he has achieved something of service to the language and the nation/homeland (waṭan).”Footnote ⁴⁰

These are familiar 19th-century tropes: the conflation of civilization and technology with Europe, and the identification of colonization as the means by which they are spread. In such frameworks, the successful adaptation of an Arabic typewriter had both geographic and temporal implications. Most obviously, it offered a way for the waṭan (nation) of Arabic-speakers to enter civilization.Footnote ⁴¹ But philological writings of the time also coded geographic difference temporally, framing the “Orient” as culturally belated in comparison to Europe.Footnote ⁴² Such temporalities, it has been argued, became part of the mythology of the Nahda itself, with its visions of Arabic culture “rising” belatedly from slumber.Footnote ⁴³ According to On Barak, innovations in communication technologies (like telegraphs and typewriters) bolstered such narratives, associating Europe not only with progress but with new measures of speed.Footnote ⁴⁴

Certainly, the absence of an Arabic communication technology—the non-invention of the Arabic typewriter—was here read as evidence of a general, and shameful, state of anachronism. In the article quoted above, Haddad's triumph was postponed, and its perceived deferral given as evidence of Arabic's temporal misfit with “civilization.” Over the next years, reports in this and other journals reproduced the same narratives of Western success and Eastern failure, Western speed and Eastern slowness.Footnote ⁴⁵ In May 1901, for instance, a reader wrote to al-Hilal to inquire about rumors of a new writing-machine. The editors responded briefly: the machine was called by “the Franks” a “‘tāybrāytir’ . . . and was created by them.” However, there also was an Arabic one created by Salim Effendi Haddad, and “we will publish its picture and a description . . . at a later date.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Three years later, as Haddad's Arabic typewriters went into production with Monarch and arrived physically in Cairo, the promised illustrated article appeared (Fig. 1). It opened with a history of typewriter production, in which Arab “indolence” (ghafla) was counterposed to the European nations who had “rushed” to acquire the machine. Moreover, the European typewriter's own capacity for speed was enthusiastically emphasized: descriptions of the machine's movement emphasized its superior “quickness” (surʿa) in imprinting words on the page.Footnote ⁴⁷ The Europeans were already fast, and their machine would only make them faster.

Figure 1. “The Arabic Typewriter.” In al-Hilal 12 (15 May 1904).

However, the article itself also was framed as a response to a follow-up question from one of al-Hilal's readers: a question raised not in Egypt, but in Montreal. The editors of al-Hilal had initially failed to follow up on their promise of further news of the Arabic typewriter, and it was apparently not until an Arabic-speaking Canadian reader wrote in with a pointed reminder that they kept it.Footnote ⁴⁸ That the question was reportedly sent in from Canada testifies to the extraordinary global reach of the Arabic intellectual press. The plea and its response in fact reverse the perceived continuum, outlined by Barak, according to which knowledge and technology moved, slowly and belatedly, from center to periphery, and from West to East. The Arabic typewriter may have been produced and patented in America, but it was invented in Egypt. It was from Egypt, and through the medium of the global Arabic press, that information about it spread slowly westward.Footnote ⁴⁹ Indeed, Thomas Mullaney's study of the Chinese typewriter is a reminder of the parallel typographic controversies and innovations then taking place globally, as linguists and inventors struggled with the challenges the typewriter posed to other “non-Latin” alphabets.Footnote ⁵⁰ Mullaney points out that narratives of print technology moving from West to East had always been fantastical: “Type design in Asia,” he notes, “predates the work of Johannes Gutenberg by four centuries.” He convincingly locates the birth of movable type in 11th-century China.Footnote ⁵¹

Barak also argues that ultimately, the imposition of “efficient,” rationalized time in Egypt prompted sharp anti-imperial critiques, and subversive “counter-tempos” that refused linear ways of organizing time.Footnote ⁵² Al-Hilal was no anti-imperial publication, and for the most part it demonstrated only enthusiasm for the typewriter's embodiment of advancement and “progress.” But there is a point at which the sheer pace of typewriter popularity seems to have provoked even al-Hilal's surprise. In Europe and America, it observed toward the end of the article quoted above, “[the typewriter's] forms proliferated with a strange speed (surʿa gharība).”Footnote ⁵³ The temporality of the typewriter here did not simply raise concern about Arab/ic's comparative development but became concerning in itself: its celebrated speed became suspect, excessive. The evocation of strangeness is a brief one, eclipsed by the general excitement of the passage, but it foreshadows concerns raised elsewhere, and about something slightly different.

Troubling Tales

What underlay that hint of unease was arguably not so much a studied critique of rationalized time as a sudden, anxious apprehension of the price paid for “progress.” In al-Hilal, anxiety is expressed most clearly in descriptions of the changes made to the Arabic alphabet by Haddad and the “famous Arabic calligrapher” with whom he created his font.Footnote ⁵⁴ The article notes that Haddad's machine made significant changes to Arabic letters. It was a matter, first, of abbreviation: his font reduced the possible iterations of each letter to a maximum of two and the total number of letterforms to fifty-five. However, and second, it also entailed expansion. The sizes of the letters were altered by increasing some and decreasing others, and lengthening the shapes of the primary letterforms to make them easier to connect to one another.Footnote ⁵⁵ In 16th-century Europe, printers had created italic to mimic cursive writing, but this was different; it entailed the production of entirely new letterforms. Kittler wrote of the European typewriter that it “degrade[d] the word to a means of communication,” removing the trace of the human hand and rendering all writing the same.Footnote ⁵⁶ At its close, this al-Hilal article, too, betrays concerns about degradation and loss, but a loss not of the humanizing trace of the hand, but of the character and identity of the language itself, which, the article implies, should not so easily be subject to change by its human speakers.

As noted already, Arabic script had in fact undergone multiple transformations over the centuries, so that by 1904 there existed multiple Arabic scripts and styles.Footnote ⁵⁷ It is therefore not entirely clear against which standard the authors were measuring Haddad's new font, and it may even have been the newly standardized naskh script of print.Footnote ⁵⁸ What is clear is that Haddad's changes produced concern about aesthetic deficit, if not actual injury. The al-Hilal article acknowledges that Haddad had “tried . . . to preserve the splendor of Arabic's letters, despite this abbreviation (taqṣīr),” but it does not conclude that he had succeeded. A contemporaneous article in al-Diyaʾ, the more “conservative” journal run by calligrapher and rumored typewriter-collaborator Ibrahim al-Yaziji, went further, describing at length how typewriter prototypes “distorted” (tashawwahat) the alphabet.Footnote ⁵⁹ Whereas the European typewriter was described as a “release” from handwriting's burden, in Arabic contexts it was a potential threat to handwriting's art. Far from affirming Arabic's similarity to global languages, the Arabic typewriter gestured to its difference and to the stakes of erasing that difference.

The article ends by presenting what it describes as a sample of typewritten text. It is a section from a letter sent to al-Hilal three years earlier by Haddad himself, advertising his machine, and, in fact, its visual impact is slightly odd (Fig. 2).Footnote ⁶⁰ Arabic, as noted, is always cursive, and Auji among others has documented the labors involved in preserving calligraphic form in the move from lithographic printing, which reproduced images of handwritten texts, to movable type.Footnote ⁶¹ Preservation was never perfect, and in the case of movable type, mechanization left its mark in two all but unnoticeable ways: the perfect uniformity of the letters, and the fact that although they appeared to be perfectly joined, some letters were in fact imprinted fractionally separately, with tiny gaps just visible but too small to interrupt the “line” (see, for example, Fig. 2, first line ). The printing press had created an Arabic that conformed to the rules of naskh script, but that also, and within the bounds of aesthetic acceptability, marked its difference. Typewritten text collapsed that boundary. In the example of typewritten text itself (Fig. 2, second paragraph), the changes made by the typewriter to the letterforms reproduced seamless connection, resulting in script more like handwriting than movable type. In fact, this “typewritten” text is most likely a lithograph image of the original letter; like calligraphy, typewriting required the use of an older print technology to insert it into a journal.Footnote ⁶² However, unlike calligraphy, this text had oddly altered letters made to conform with the size constraints of the Latin alphabet. The final effect was of the faintly ill-formed handwriting of a foreigner or a child.Footnote ⁶³ Such was “progress”: a script both deceptive and defective, concealing its mechanical origins while hinting at their strangeness. The typewritten paragraph announces that the typewriter “matche[d] the European machines,” and that “the Egyptian government has used it in all of its affairs.”Footnote ⁶⁴ But Arabic typewriters would not be widely adopted for decades—and perhaps this uncanny typewritten text suggests why.

Figure 2. Example of typewritten text (paragraph two). Al-Hilal 12 (5 May 1904).

I use the term "uncanny" cautiously here. The Freudian uncanny (unheimlich) is described as an effect of the return of the repressed: uncanny aesthetics result not from an encounter with strangeness but from familiarity within the strange, from infantile compulsions resurfaced, or secret things come to light.Footnote ⁶⁵ Freud adds that in Arabic and Hebrew, the equivalents for uncanny (which he does not give) are synonymous with “gruesome” (schaurig) or “devilish” (dämonisch).Footnote ⁶⁶ However, a better, if still imperfect, Arabic equivalent might actually be gharīb, incidentally the term used by al-Hilal to describe typewriters; it connotes both strangeness and foreignness.Footnote ⁶⁷ Terry Castle points out that Freud specifically associates the uncanny with the unsettling technologies—thermometers, automata, robots, writing machines—of the 18th-century European Enlightenment. These emblems of scientific mastery and reason, she argues, by their excessive perfection “subverted the distinction between the real and the phantasmic—plunging us instantly . . . into the hag-ridden realm of the unconscious.”Footnote ⁶⁸ The Freudian uncanny must therefore be historicized, understood as a function and a “toxic side effect” of the Enlightenment's aggressively rationalist imperatives.Footnote ⁶⁹

Castle's analysis does not thoroughly engage with that other toxic underside to Enlightenment thought, namely its creation of nonrational others, and of the humanist hierarchies that would underpin justifications of imperial rule. However, that element seems relevant to typewriting's specific uncanniness in 19th-century Egypt, and to the concern produced, in a de facto British colonial context, when a script considered historic and sacred was visually rendered immature, illiterate, and even foreign.Footnote ⁷⁰ Homi Bhabha, indeed, retranslates the Freudian unheimlich as the “unhomely” to identify it as paradigmatic postcolonial affect, tied to the estranging experiences of occupation and displacement.Footnote ⁷¹ Yumna Siddiqi locates the conjunction of empire and the uncanny in the heart of British empire itself. In Arthur Conan Doyle's crime fiction, she argues, the figure of the disfigured or abject returned colonial functions as an uncanny double to his upright twin, the imperial adventurer epitomized in Sherlock Holmes's friend Dr. Watson.Footnote ⁷² As London is made strange by these returns of repressed violence, Holmes and Watson's job is to uncover and banish them.Footnote ⁷³

It is an odd coincidence, therefore, that the typewriter's first representation in Arabic fiction should be in a translation of a Sherlock Holmes story, published in 1906 in none other than the calligrapher Ibrahim al-Yaziji's journal al-Diyaʾ. As Samah Salim has noted, translated crime fiction was highly popular in the period, a popularity she connects to the legal and policing reforms then taking place in Egypt.Footnote ⁷⁴ Following the translation of Conan Doyle's novella A Study in Scarlet in 1900, his short stories were translated by Nasib al-Mashaʿlani for al-Diyaʾ from 1905.Footnote ⁷⁵ The story “A Case of Identity,” titled in Arabic “al-Ikhtifaʾ al-Gharib” (The Strange [or Uncanny] Disappearance) is a typewriter mystery that might colloquially be described as Freudian.Footnote ⁷⁶ Sherlock Holmes is hired to track down the missing fiancé of a young female typist, and for clues, has only the fiancé's typewritten love-letters. Holmes observes several misaligned letters in the texts, which allow him to identify the typewriter, and thereafter the man, who turns out to be none other than the woman's own stepfather! Although he had typed his letters to hide his handwriting, he could not hide the individual identity of his typewriting machine.Footnote ⁷⁷

The Arabic translation tends to bring out the English story's uncanny potential. The new title inverts the original: “A Case of Identity” is concerned with identifiable presence, whereas “al-Ikhtifaʾ al-Gharib,” or The Strange Disappearance, indicates inexplicable absence. The translation shifts attention from Holmes's capacity to uncover any mystery to the fact of the mystery itself. There was, Rebecca Johnson has argued, a general appetite in the Nahda period for narratives of “strangeness”; the new title might be read as part of that larger trend.Footnote ⁷⁸ But it is only one of several curious translation choices. Particularly notable in the body of the text is the repetition of the word “secret” (sirr). Absent from the original, secret appears multiple times in the translation: deduction becomes the “discovery of secrets” (kashf al-sarāʾir), and typewriting an act intended to hide what is now conceived as the “secret” of someone's identity.Footnote ⁷⁹ In the English text Holmes is presented as a scientist and scholar, separate from and smarter than the police.Footnote ⁸⁰ But the Arabic translator is not fooled by the putative separation between figures like Holmes and the policing state. Referred to in the original as a “private” or “consulting” detective, in Arabic Holmes becomes an agent of al-shiḥna al-sirriyya (the secret police).Footnote ⁸¹ A triumph of scientific revelation becomes a litany of hidden sins and state surveillance.

In the Arabic press of the 19th and early 20th centuries, then, typewriters in general and the Arabic typewriter in particular were met with excitement, but also, on occasion, with faint unease. The temporalities were unsettling; the typewriter produced worries about belatedness and yet also about excessive speed. Discussions of Arabic typewriting crystallized existing concerns about linguistic change and moved them into the sphere of the uncanny, an effect potentially exacerbated by typewriting's existing place in the uncanny genre of imperial crime fiction. In translated fiction, the typewriter's connotations of the secret and subtly wrong were expanded, and connections sketched to the centralizing and surveilling imperial state.

Theodor Herzl: Typewriter at the Bargaining Table

Fiction was moreover not the only place in which such connections were made. Months after Haddad had announced his patent, the Ottoman sultan, Abdulhamid II, banned the importing of typewriters to the Ottoman Empire, of which Egypt was officially a semiautonomous part. The ban apparently had little to do with Haddad, still less with al-Mashaʿlani's Sherlock Holmes translations. The justification for it, in fact, was that (contra Conan Doyle) typewriters could disguise authorship, and that by enabling the writers of seditious pamphlets to prevent identification they would constitute a danger to the state.Footnote ⁸² The ban reads coherently within the wider context of Ottoman restrictions, making typewriters simply the latest casualties of expanded censorship and surveillance under the Hamidian regime.Footnote ⁸³ At the same time, it is worth noting that the sultan himself may have known better regarding typewriters’ limited capacity for disguise. Although Conan Doyle's fiction was not published in the censored Ottoman press until 1909, Abdulhamid II's fondness for Sherlock Holmes was well-known long before then.Footnote ⁸⁴ The sultan's private library, held today at the Nadir Eserler Kitaplığı in Istanbul, contains handwritten Ottoman translations of the short stories, dating from 1904. The collection The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, in which “A Case of Identity” appears, is among them.Footnote ⁸⁵

Just another coincidence: one cannot know whether or when Abdulhamid II read the story, and it would be unwise to attribute too much personal power to the sultan in matters of imperial law.Footnote ⁸⁶ However, it certainly could be argued that the Ottoman administration's typewriter ban had motivations other than those officially given. Turn-of-the-century Istanbul was alsowitness to a second drama of typewriter invention, one that began a world away from Nahda language reform but which shared, perhaps, some of its stakes. The protagonist, this time, was an Austro-Hungarian journalist and activist named Theodor Herzl. It is to Herzl's account of typewriter invention, as detailed in his letters and personal diaries, that I will now turn. It begins in Vienna in 1901, when Herzl wrote to Abdulhamid II's secretary to announce his creation of a “Turkish-Arabic” typewriter, fitted with the modified version of the Arabic alphabet used for Ottoman Turkish. In early 1902 he had it sent it directly to the Yıldız Palace, accompanied by proposals regarding future Jewish immigration and sovereignty in Ottoman Palestine.

Herzl's typewriter was conceived in Europe, made in New York, and received in Istanbul; it is thought to have provided a model for later Remington machines.Footnote ⁸⁷ As such it reminds us, first, that a writing technology may be the product of many divergent national and linguistic histories. However, and second, it registers some striking connections with Haddad's machine. If Haddad's typewriter catalyzed Arabic debates around empire and language, Herzl's constituted a revealing intervention into early political Zionism. Herzl's representation of the typewriter drew on Orientalist repertoires like those echoed in the Nahda press, as well as borrowing from French and British economic strategies for colonial expansion. Unlike Haddad's typewriter, it was met with outright refusal by the sultan. But embedded in Herzl's gift was a larger campaign, one that would eventually find wild success in an event known in Arabic as the Nakba: the foundation of the State of Israel in 1948. In light of the Nakba, Herzl's typewriter makes the anxieties about place and identity sparked by Haddad's machine seem eerily prescient. Mobilized in a campaign to redraw the map of Ottoman Palestine, Herzl's typewriter was transformed from a worry to a weapon. This Arabic typewriter was embroiled directly in the estranging process of colonization.

The typewriter arrived at a tricky point in Herzl's ongoing negotiations with the sultan over Palestine. When Herzl wrote to Sultan Abdulhamid II's secretary Ibrahim Bey to announce his invention, it was far from his first missive to the Sublime Porte.Footnote ⁸⁸ Since the publication of his pamphlet Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State) in 1896, Herzl had gone to several imperial administrations seeking support for Jewish settlement in Ottoman Palestine or Argentina.Footnote ⁸⁹ By 1899 he had a more specific goal: an Ottoman Charter for unrestricted Jewish immigration into Palestine.Footnote ⁹⁰ In return, he was offering to help restructure the Ottoman Empire's crippling public debt.Footnote ⁹¹ Public debt was playing an increasingly important role in colonial expansion in this period; Britain's occupation of Egypt, for instance, was nominally undertaken to “supervise” Egyptian repayments to European creditors. Herzl had apparently taken note and was mobilizing such tactics in service of the Zionist cause.Footnote ⁹² He added a new incentive: “a small gift . . . a surprise that I hope will please [the sultan], for I believe that it does not yet exist in Turkey. It is a typewriter (Schreibmaschine) with Turkish characters. I have ordered it from America, and a professor of Oriental languages at the University in New York is supervising the accuracy.”Footnote ⁹³ When the machine followed months later, however, it was rejected, along with the letters of credit accompanying it.Footnote ⁹⁴ Discussions faltered. By 1903 Herzl was working with the British minister for the colonies on a different plan: Jewish settlement in Uganda.Footnote ⁹⁵

Herzl's presentation of the typewriter as a diplomatic gift seemed to be drawing on the same imaginaries that informed early discussions of Haddad's machine in the Arabic press: visions of Euro-American modernity, industry, and technological progress, brought by civilizing foreigners to the backward East.Footnote ⁹⁶ His covering letter stressed the novelty of the machine and detailed its American provenance; it was accompanied not only by offers of financial aid to the tune of “hundreds of millions of francs,” but also by other gifts meant to demonstrate wealth and technological advancement. These included fruit from Vienna's most expensive stores, snuff-boxes, a “warming-pan” for the Yıldız Palace kitchen, and gold mechanical pencils for the secretaries.Footnote ⁹⁷ The necessity of explaining the warming-pan to the palace staff, and its eventual ecstatic reception, were recorded with satisfaction in Herzl's diaries.Footnote ⁹⁸ Indeed, as such narratives are crystallized in the typewriter, they also are developed throughout the diary and in Herzl's other works, such as his 1902 novel Altneuland (literally Old-New Land). In the novel, a German Jewish protagonist and his American companion travel, via a secluded Pacific island, to Palestine, where they help to construct a technologically sophisticated socialist utopia.Footnote ⁹⁹ Herzl considered his Ottoman campaign a step toward this fictional vision; to arrive in Constantinople bearing a newly invented technology was almost to step into it.

That his typewriter should be an “Arabic-Turkish” technology also was significant. It allowed its inventor to claim foreignness and indigeneity simultaneously; to imagine not only a prospective technological future, but also a shared past. Herzl's writings, here and elsewhere, made much of the longstanding Jewish community in Ottoman Palestine.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Theories regarding ancient Jewish rights to the land were not as developed as they would become in later Zionist and Israeli national mythologies, but the colonization of Palestine was already framed as a homecoming of sorts.Footnote ¹⁰¹ To present a machine designed to write in the local languages implied a commitment to, even a knowledge of, those languages; it was a statement of Jewish presence and belonging. Indeed, Zionist iconography from that year paired Herzl and Abdulhamid as twin agents of the divine (Fig. 3).Footnote ¹⁰² Such implications are strengthened by another gift accompanying the typewriter: a collection of Herzl's own Philosophische Erzählungen (Philosophical Tales, 1900). In such company the typewriter also became a more literary offering, perhaps even recalling an older gift economy, in the form of the historic Ottoman literary patronage system.Footnote ¹⁰³ Patronage systems are typically associated with the classical and premodern periods, but they did survive into the early 20th century.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ To mobilize such systems would be to recast Herzl, after all a prolific if not terribly successful playwright, as a literary supplicant. It would frame the relationship between Herzl and Abdulhamid II not as a strategic one between political actors, but as a personal one between patron and poet, sovereign and (already) subject.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

Figure 3. Shana Tova postcard featuring Theodor Herzl and Abdulhamid II. Poland, 1901, National Library of Israel.

In a sense, such a framing came dangerously close to the truth. Scholars of early Zionism are dismissive of Herzl's Ottoman negotiations largely because, on both sides, they were little more than fiction.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ The typewriter-as-gift, for instance, imagined a model of personal sovereign power that, in the case of the Ottoman Empire, no longer existed (if it ever had). Certainly, Abdulhamid II imposed significant changes in his struggle to strengthen the state at home and legitimate the empire abroad.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ However, his reputation in Europe as an autocrat and an emblem of “Oriental despotism,” that timeless racial disposition to tyranny, may have been misleading.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ At this juncture, for instance, there were certainly limitations on his capacity to outright accept Herzl's offers of financial assistance in return for Palestine. The Ottoman Empire had declared bankruptcy in 1876, after which the Ottoman Council of Foreign Debt was convened to oversee its finances. It comprised an Ottoman, a British, an Italian, a German, an Austro-Hungarian, and two French members, each nominated by financial institutions in their native countries.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ From the late 1890s, moreover, Deutsche Bank had expanded its influence within the empire to the extent that it might be considered a form of quasi-imperial German presence there.Footnote ¹¹⁰ In short, a majority-European council and other institutions had considerable de facto control of the Ottoman public debt, and they were unlikely to be swayed by personal gifts. In such a context, Herzl's typewriter gift was an Orientalist anachronism, less uncanny than profoundly untimely: it mobilized imagined pasts to bargain for a Jewish state in Palestine that would not exist until decades into the future.

Moreover, if Abdulhamid II's power was not absolute, Herzl was no statesman at all. Financial support for political Zionism was growing, but the movement was still very young, and Herzl could not have provided a fraction of the funds or aid he grandly promised. His debt restructuring proposals, as Derek Penslar among others has argued, drew not only on the strategies of imperial states but also on stereotypes about Jewish finance then current in Europe. They were based in “fantasies about Jewish power, fantasies in which Herzl himself appeared to believe.”Footnote ¹¹¹ That Herzl should repeat and even make use of anti-Semitic tropes perhaps offers evidence only of their ubiquity; his Zionism is often read as a response to rising European anti-Semitism.Footnote ¹¹² But the racial hierarchies undergirding anti-Semitic thought were deeply entangled, it has been argued, with those used to justify colonial projects like the one Herzl was proposing. Edward Said, for instance, famously argued that Orientalism and anti-Semitism were inseparable. In writing Orientalism, he insisted, he was writing the history of “a strange, secret sharer of Western anti-Semitism.”Footnote ¹¹³ Recent scholarship concurs. Andrew Rubin argues that 19th-century philologists constructed a notion of the primitive Semite that encompassed both Arab and Jew; James Pasto goes further, identifying Jews as Germany's “internal ‘oriental’ colony.”Footnote ¹¹⁴ The racial logics that alienated European Jews at home, rendering them local and yet unsettlingly foreign, were the same ones that made it possible to imagine their taking homes in Palestine. Herzl's typewriter stood poised at the intersection of the Orientalist and anti-Semitic imaginaries that helped to underwrite the campaign for Palestine's colonization.

Edward Said: Typewriter in Exile

Arabic typewriter histories are recursive ones, repeatedly estranging familiar terrain. The eventual establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 haunts the text in which a third account of typewriter invention appears: Edward Said's own memoir Out of Place, published a century later and a world away. If Herzl's machine gave new form to the fears provoked by Haddad's invention, Said's narrative unfolds the consequences of Herzl's endeavors. Earlier intimations of the uncanny expand into the totalizing experience of dislocation. Out of Place was written in English, and in it, the Arabic typewriter becomes a motif through which to explore the fraught relationships to place, language, and filiation that are made in an unhomely geography of exile. Wadie (also known as “Bill”) Said creates an Arabic typewriter in 1940s Cairo with Royal; thereafter the machine reappears at key moments in the narrative, serving to delineate the intermittently erupting tensions between father and son. For Wadie Said, as for Haddad and Herzl, to invent an Arabic typewriter is to make a claim on the Arabic language and its means of production in a period of imperial capitalist expansion. It is a business opportunity that, cannily exploited, will help the family build a new home. For his son, however, an Arabic writing-machine offers no solution to the fraught language politics he must navigate, and his father's world of commerce only estranges him. The young Edward refuses a place in the typewriter business and begins a career in which the unheimlich experience of postcolonial exile will be transformed into an ethical commitment to intellectual dissonance.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Said was a loving critic of Freud, and his memoir is a knowing exploration of childhood impulses and intimacies in which the typewriter's uncanniness manifests in familial drama. That drama is also, of course, at the center of wider political and historical currents. Out of Place resists a too-neat mapping of psychological complexes and traumas onto historic ones, but the Arabic typewriter is one of the places they collide.

The invention of the Arabic typewriter occurs in the fifth chapter of the memoir, at a point in the narrative when the young Edward is becoming profoundly aware of his uncomfortable place in the world. The chapter opens in 1946, when Edward is eleven and living with his father, his mother Hilda, and his younger sisters Rosemarie and Jean in Cairo. The family is not Egyptian but Palestinian-American. All of them save Hilda have American citizenship, and they are all bilingual, speaking a mixture of languages at home.Footnote ¹¹⁶ The English memoir is identified as a text always already translated. “The basic split in my life,” states the author in the preface, “was between Arabic, my native language, and English, the language of my education.”Footnote ¹¹⁷ When the young Edward had first learned English, he constantly mixed up the “I” and “you” pronouns: that binary on which rests the capacity to distinguish self from other, and without which, so Emile Benveniste tells us, there is no language at all.Footnote ¹¹⁸

Later, Edward exploits divisions within English itself, finding a “parallel life to the unreal British syllabus” in the serialized tales of Tarzan, Jeeves, and (who else) Sherlock Holmes.Footnote ¹¹⁹ But in the fifth chapter, when he moves from the British Gezira Preparatory School to the Cairo School for American Children, the need to renavigate languages and allegiances produces a sense that perhaps his childish instinct was correct. His identity is deeply divided, his “I” also a “you.” Edward has a dawning sense that he is the possessor of a “flawed, frightened and uncertain” self: an “American businessman's son who hadn't the slightest feeling of being American,” within whom there “lurked” an Arab.Footnote ¹²⁰ The verb “lurked,” with its connotations of secrecy and suspicion, gives a sinister note to this description of doubled identity, recalling, perhaps, Freud's identification of the inner “primitive” as one source of the uncanny double.Footnote ¹²¹ More pertinently, it is a reminder of the colonial racial hierarchies that arguably informed Freud's framing, and of which the young Edward is already keenly aware.Footnote ¹²² The involuntary nature of this doubling is encapsulated in the narrator's dislike of his own name: “a foolishly English name yoked to the unmistakably Arabic name Said.”Footnote ¹²³

Counterposed to the son's agonized position is his father's easy adoption of an American name (“Bill”) and customs, his sustained preference for English over Arabic, and his worldly success, of which the Arabic typewriter becomes emblematic.Footnote ¹²⁴ In a curious echo of Salim Haddad's movements fifty years earlier, Wadie Said had emigrated to Cairo from Palestine to run a successful stationery business. The business looms large in the narrative of Edward's childhood, and is introduced via a list of the American brands it represented: from Scripp Ink, to Monroe calculators, to Royal and Chicago typewriters.Footnote ¹²⁵ “One of [my father's] achievements,” Edward recalls, “was to have transformed the Egyptian government bureaucracy by introducing typewriters, duplicators, copiers, and filing cabinets. . . . With my mother's help, he developed—‘invented’ would not be the wrong word—the Arabic typewriter with Royal.”Footnote ¹²⁶ After the announcement of the typewriter's creation, the narrative unfolds a lengthy discussion of Wadie Said's mathematical prowess and his other inventions, for example the establishment of an annual product catalog for his store.Footnote ¹²⁷

This description of the typewriter crystallizes the text's presentation of linguistic politics and identities within the Said family. Wadie Said required his wife's help because her Arabic education was unusually good, equal to her “perfect” French and English. Her command of classical and colloquial Arabic was remarkable in their Anglophone circle, and far superior to his.Footnote ¹²⁸ Most obviously, this encapsulates colonial and postcolonial Egypt's fraught language politics, by force of which the upper-middle classes spoke English and French as much as, or more than, Arabic.Footnote ¹²⁹ It also makes the Arabic typewriter the meeting-place of several uneasy pairings — not only of English and Arabic, but also of Edward's father and mother. The memoir circles constantly around these parental relationships. In Edward's intense but ambivalent intimacy with his mother and his alienation from his distant, dominant father the text hints at the primal, Oedipal repressions to which the Freudian uncanny ultimately returns. Wadie Said appears in the book more in action than in speech, as the distant but exacting controller of his son's education and time. When he speaks, it is always in English, and usually as criticism.Footnote ¹³⁰ The trilingual Hilda, meanwhile, uses her languages as weapons against her son, her shifts between Arabic and English corresponding to the capricious turns of a relationship that is intimate and hostile by dizzying turns.Footnote ¹³¹ If Wadie Said personifies a bullying and dominant English, neither Hilda nor the Arabic typewriter unequivocally embody the mother-tongue, except insofar as that mother-tongue is, for Edward, several tongues at war.

In fact, the Arabic typewriter is most consistently associated with the English-speaking father figure. Wadie “invents” the Arabic typewriter, sells typewriters as a career, and makes photographic appearances in the text surrounded by typewriters and Royal logos (Fig. 4).Footnote ¹³² After Edward moves to America in 1951, for high school followed by college and graduate school, his father sends him typewritten letters.Footnote ¹³³ When Wadie's store is destroyed in the riots preceding the 1952 Egyptian revolution, Edward reads of the destruction in the New York newspapers, and in photographs of the rubble he sees “fragments of typewriters.”Footnote ¹³⁴ Typewriters are emblems of Wadie's setbacks, but also of his extraordinary international reach and success. The narrator's gentle insistence that Wadie “invented” the typewriter betrays the complex pride which often undergirds descriptions of the character. The same paragraph goes on to describe Wadie as “basically a modern capitalist,” possessing an “extraordinary business genius, developed on his own in a provincial Third World capital still mired in colonial economics.”Footnote ¹³⁵ His typewriter is also reportedly responsible for reforming the Egyptian government: his invention allows him not only to make a home in the country to which his family will be exiled, but to make a name for himself there. His Royal typewriter was of course invented half a century after Haddad's Caligraph, but here it places him ahead of his time and specifically of his geography. If Wadie is “out of place,” it is in a manner very different to his son: he gestures forward to the triumphant placelessness of capital, of global commodity flows.

Figure 4. Image and caption from Edward Said, Out of Place: A Memoir (Alfred A. Knopf, 1999). Copyright of the author.

In general, Out of Place tends to upend familiar histories and geographies of typewriter invention. America has played a significant part in the other narratives discussed here: Haddad went to New York to acquire a patent for his typewriting font and produced his typewriter with American firms; Herzl had his typewriter developed in New York. In such accounts and in contemporary typewriter scholarship, America is the center if not of typewriter invention, then certainly of the typewriter business.Footnote ¹³⁶ In Out of Place, the opposite is true. The book's penultimate chapter describes how, when Edward graduates from Princeton in the 1950s, he returns to Cairo to spend a year working in his father's stationery and typewriter business. He finds himself always in the way; when he is at last assigned a useful task, he makes an error with drastic consequences for the business and his own capacity to work in Egypt.Footnote ¹³⁷ The narrative posits Edward's return to America to attend graduate school at Harvard, and his subsequent meteoric academic career, as the result of his failings in the Egyptian typewriting business. The irony is mischievous. In the aftermath of Egypt's socialist revolution, it is to capitalist America that Edward flees to escape his father's enterprise. He seeks refuge in the Ivy League and an academic career in which he would launch a field called postcolonial studies. His inability to sell typewriters enables him, in this framing, to write—albeit in English.

In the psychodrama of the text, Edward's refusal of a position in the family business and acceptance to Harvard for graduate school is also, and finally, a climactic liberation from fatherly authority.Footnote ¹³⁸ Like Wadie, Edward Said would make his career out of the production of written text, and the typewriter marks the differences between those careers. When Edward appears in photographs it is with books and musical instruments; report cards remarking on his English proficiency are included, handwritten.Footnote ¹³⁹ In the acknowledgments to Out of Place, the author thanks his research assistant for her patience in typing up his manuscript and notes that he himself wrote the entirety of the book by hand.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ In turning away from the father figure Edward also turns away from his father's world, and his way of being in the world. It is a political and ethical decision. Wadie Said, ahead of his time, produced new writing technologies; the son's refusal of them, despite his admiration, might be read as a refusal of the narratives of profit, progress, and advancement that they conventionally represent.Footnote ¹⁴¹ Such a refusal undergirds the text's general avoidance of teleology. In each chapter, as the young Edward moves further from the Jerusalem of his birth to settle eventually on the American East Coast, long passages reflect on the schooldays, holidays, and friendships of the late 1940s and early 1950s. Edward Said visited Palestine on holiday in 1947 and would not go again until the 1990s, but 1947 and 1948 are years to which the narrative returns compulsively throughout.Footnote ¹⁴² It is as if to embrace technological progress and chronological time, as Wadie Said had, would be to give up on Palestine, and to forget the vanishing histories and worlds the memoir seeks to preserve. Wadie Said's invention of an Arabic typewriter is perhaps one response to linguistic and geographic alienation post-Nakba. His son's handwritten postcolonial memoir, charting the affects of exile and the messy imbrications of the personal and the political, is another.

Uncanny Histories

In this article, Edward Said's typewriter bears the weight of the typewriter histories that preceded it. Salim Haddad's 19th-century machine, first in its perceived belatedness and then in its dramatic effects on Arabic script, seemed to confirm the new geographical hierarchies and inequities of the colonial era. As such, it provoked unease and even fear, fear which could seem uncannily prescient with the subsequent announcement of Theodor Herzl's Arabic-Turkish typewriter and his attempt to use it to purchase Ottoman Palestine. Their protagonists would have been strangers, but diverse names and discourses connect them: New York, Orientalism, crime fiction, Abdulhamid II. And the third account, the post-1948 memoir written by that premier theorist of Orientalism, Edward Said, serves to echo and entangle them further. With its meditations on the emotional, physical, and psychological impacts of exile, Out of Place cements the Arabic typewriter in an ongoing tale of linguistic and territorial loss.

Read together, the stories of the Arabic typewriter's invention offer partial accounts of Arabic language reform, of colonial and postcolonial nationalisms, of print capitalism, of imperialism, of the Nahda and the Nakba. The machine embodies interdependencies between these phenomena; to put it at the center of one's analysis is to offer a new perspective on the networks of which it is a part. Rather than extracting a single coherent narrative, one must allow for the interweaving of several histories at once. And in fact, it is in its resistance to historical coherence that the Arabic typewriter perhaps has something else to offer the writing of cultural history. Although this article has attempted only a partial account of one minor machine's invention, to track just a few of the Arabic typewriter's early iterations and affordances has required moving between multiple languages, historical moments, textual genres and, therefore, analytical modes. It reminds us, first, that the study of objects and technologies can require a more protean approach to analysis than classical disciplinary boundaries would allow.

Second, and differently, I have found that across those diverging moments of its creation the Arabic typewriter always seemed to produce uncanny effects. Such effects are often associated with new technologies, but in the case of the Arabic typewriter, they were transformed by the colonial and later postcolonial contexts in which the machine was created. Perhaps as a result, that uncanniness exceeded the individual machines to afflict the story of its invention compiled here, filling it with doubles, coincidences, repressions, and repetitions that hint at, and ultimately refuse, causal explication. In Homi Bhabha's discussion of “the postcolonial uncanny,” he argues that postcolonial novelists worked to raise ghosts in the “House of Fiction,” producing literatures haunted by the violent estrangements of the colonial period.Footnote ¹⁴³ History, he adds, has however failed to come to terms with or even to acknowledge this estrangement: it remains literature's heimlich counterpart, the drive to assess and explicate “events” incompatible with the immediate apprehension of dislocation and horror.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ For Bhabha, the function of postcolonial fiction and art is to bring their “haunting” to history, forcing it to confront what it has failed to represent.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ In his insistence on the divergence between history and literature, Bhabha tends rather to reinforce the bifurcation he critiques. But machines like the Arabic typewriter might remind us that such binaries are fluid. These typewriter tales are stranger than fiction; their recurrences and coincidences are novelistic and at times even farcical.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Recounted as history, they open a space for the disquieting and the inexplicable, making strange the territory of cause and effect, and allowing for a readerly experience of surprise, of suspicion, of doubt. As such, in some minor way, they might help to imagine another historical approach to the 20th century's violent happenings—one that, in restoring a sense of their strangeness, might leave them seeming less inevitable, even less final.