Thus wrote Aḥmad Fāris al-Shidyāq, owner of the weekly al-Jawā'ib, to a member of his family in 1866. Shidyāq, a celebrity of the Arab nahḍa, is remembered for his pioneering literary, scholarly, and journalistic work and his major contribution to his society's awakening. Seldom do we associate his role in Arab cultural history with financial hitches and agent malperformance. Even more rarely do we care to consider the debtors and agents themselves. Yet, hitches, malperformance, and other material and organizational factors were integral features of Shidyāq's literary routine, at once facilitating and encumbering it. They affected the work of all makers of the cultural change, eminent and lesser ones alike. Such constraints had a substantial impact on the scope and pace of producing written works, their dissemination in the region, and their availability to the emerging reading publics. Writers and thinkers who are known to us as trailblazers of modern Arabic thought and literary production were all subject to these checks. They also played an important role in advancing the necessary technical and logistic underpinnings, along with a body of auxiliary personnel of all stripes. Yet, in the rich and expanding literature on Arab cultural development of the time, these banal facets are seldom noticed and the many men involved in them remain largely unknown. Historians have usually focused on ideas, contents, and genres of the writings and on their broader historic implications. This book sets the spotlight on the other, less-known aspects of the story, without which there would have been no literary awakening.

Save for some modest precursors, it was only in the nineteenth century that Arabic texts began to be printed in the Middle East on a big scale, and only in its last third that printing became a considerable industry.

Perhaps the greatest achievement of Aldus Manutius (1449–1515), the most famous of early European printers, was the redeeming of old literary treasures. As a scholar of Greek linguistics and literature, Aldus's priority was to commit works of ancient Greek civilization to print and save them from oblivion. With the help of hired Cretan scribes, he issued Greek dictionaries and grammars; published the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle; printed literary pieces by Homer, Sophocles, and Aristophanes; brought out the histories of Herodotus and Thucydides; and printed other precious works, thus assuring their preservation. The Aldine Press also printed works in Latin and Italian, including ancient writings such as the letters of young Pliny and rhetoric of Quintilian, and literary works by renaissance luminaries such as Dante and Petrarch that had already been considered classics by then. As a secondary priority and on a more limited scale, his press printed writings by contemporaries, most famously Erasmus. To a first-generation printer, these were obvious choices: using the new technology first to bring old treasures to light, and second to make valuable contemporary writings accessible to the public. Business concerns underlay these priorities, above all the drive to produce texts that were in high demand as manuscripts, so as to assure profit. In the process, Aldus and his colleagues also labored to upgrade the appearance of books, setting the mold for their improved future format (some old basic attributes were preserved – the codex format, binding, use of illustrations, and some important aspects of text layout). They made old objects in a new dress: old and familiar in contents, similar but distinct in appearance, and all too novel in production pace, quantities, and attainability.

Early Arab printers similarly relied in their pioneering endeavors on a rich literary heritage. Twelve hundred years of creativity yielded a vast pool of writings in the languages of Islam, in every field of human knowledge. Only a segment of it, an unknown share of the whole but a very considerable corpus in itself, had remained as the Middle East was about to enter the age of printing; the rest had perished under rough circumstances. An extensive account of this remaining corpus is a task for another study, but it is possible here to point out its main categories, which will help us later in the chapter.

New Conduits: Mail Delivery and Distribution Agents

Bookshops and libraries multiplied in the region, but they were not opened everywhere. For many potential readers, the nearest such outlet was in another town, sometimes a remote one, and practically beyond reach. Despite their ongoing expansion, bookshops, libraries, and reading rooms were too few and far between to make printed publications accessible across the region. Looking for new channels to complement the old, publishers had two more options at their disposal, both facilitated by the changes in communications: sending the published items to clients' homes by mail and selling them through itinerant agents, who were positioned in or traveled around faraway places. Both books and journals were thus circulated.

From very early on, books advertised in newspapers were announced to be “available at the paper's office.” The standard formula in book adverts was “yubāᶜ fī …” (on sale at …) or “yuṭlab min …” (to be requested from …) followed by reference to the paper's bureau. Sometimes this was the only way to get the book; at other times, it was obtainable there in addition to some shops or sellers. Let us look at some examples. We will recall that Ibrāhīm al-Najjār's Miṣbāḥ al-sārī, which was sold by several merchants in Beirut, Damascus, and Aleppo, was also available at the office of Ḥadīqat al-Akhbār, the newspaper advertising it. This routine became standard until the end of the century, and occasionally beyond. Journal mediation in bookselling was sometimes expanded into a “sales section,” whereby newspapers publicized lists of printed works, not just single items, available in their office. More ambitious journals, like al-Jinān, Lisān al-Ḥāl, and al-Hilāl, opened what seem to have been full-fledged promotional wings in their offices. Similarly, readers were advised to order books directly from the press that printed them, or straight from the author, whose name was frequently noted without an address. Thus, a book on the history of Damascus, printed in that city in 1879, was available “from the author in Damascus” (ᶜinda al-mu'allif fī al-shām) with no further particulars; a book on religious faith, printed in 1897, “should be requested (yuṭlab) from its author in Manṣūra”; and a religious tract printed in 1899 was to be “ordered from its esteemed writer in Suez.”

Two printed works lie close to each other in the Arabic book section of Firestone library at Princeton University: Buṭrus al-Bustānī's Quṭr al-muḥīṭ (Beirut, 1869) and Abū al-Hudā al-Ṣayyādī's al-Ḥaqq al-mubīn fī abhāt al-ḥāsidīn (Cairo, 1892). They are on adjoining shelves apparently because they were cataloged around the same time. Both were published during the early decades of private Arab printing and share certain physical and technical features typical of the time. There are also differences – in size, contents, and purpose – which make them rather dissimilar. Bustānī's book, a modern dictionary of the Arabic language, comprises two thick volumes, 2,452 pages in all, a work of great scholarly erudition designed for the educated. Ṣayyādī's is a ten-leaf opuscule, simple and concise, which obviously addressed a popular readership. Both are characteristic nahḍa products, each typifying a specific genre within a colorful range of printed works, varying in the routine of their making, material quality, objectives, and, likely, ways of consumption. The Bustānī and Ṣayyādī items may not represent two opposite ends of this range, but they are distinct enough from each other to be considered separately.

In the first part of this chapter, I examine private Arab printing and publishing of the kind embodied in the Bustānī work. This was an extension of the time-honored book-making tradition now continued on a much larger scale by other means, with new products alongside the old. The entry of a new device for a quick making of written texts attracted to the field people who had not usually engaged in writing before, surely not on a massive scale. This important aspect of the change – the popularization of printing – will be considered in the chapter's second part. This chapter deals with printers and publishers, two distinct occupations that were both new to the region. There were printers who were not involved in publishing and publishers who did not print. Many engaged in both.

Before considering the shift ushered in by the two groups, the scene that had preceded it should be laid out in general outlines. Books, book making, and book collecting represented an important facet of the region's cultural history. Accounts on early Muslim state libraries, most famously those of the Abbasids, the Cordoba Umayyads, and the Fatimids, feature dramatic data on their size and contents.

Many of the changes examined in this book are embodied, if we will, in one charming account: that of Sayyid Quṭb, telling about his youth as a book-loving boy in the Egyptian countryside of the early twentieth century (see Chapters 4 and 6). A roving bookseller making his living by vending and lending printed works in the villages, children as a prominent category of book-consumers, a teenager building his own book collection which buys him a local repute, ᶜAntara epics in print, and Sherlock Holmes in Arabic – all of these would have been inconceivable just several decades earlier. They reflected the change in the attitude of Arab society to written texts following the entry of printing into the region and the inception of a far-reaching cultural transformation. During the formative period explored here, tens of thousands of Arabic books and booklets were printed in the Middle East in millions of copies, a periodical and daily press was born and prospered, multiple channels were formed to route the mounting wave of publications to near and far places, and large publics of habituated readers emerged. These processes and practices, and the men and women engaged in them, together represented the foundations of the nahḍa edifice, known to us mostly through the written works of its luminaries.

The introduction of mass printing into the Middle East, like the entry of firearms, railways, or postal services, proved to be irreversible. World War I, a major watershed in the region's political history, did not mark an important turning point in that process of change or, more broadly, in the area's cultural development. Rather, it was an interval after which the momentum resumed with double vigor, an interval conspicuous enough to serve as a convenient cutting point of our story but little more than that. Contending with initial difficulties and overcoming many obstacles, the process continued to expand after the war. Developments which hitherto had taken place mostly in Egypt and Lebanon spread thereafter to other parts, in similar ways and with comparable results. Egypt and Lebanon would remain regional springs of literary resources for the entire area for many decades to come.

Imagine the Egyptian Shaykh Rifāᶜa Rāfiᶜ al-Ṭahṭāwī, who died in 1873, resurrected two or three decades later in his home city of Cairo. Ṭahṭāwī, a highly perceptive observer of human behavior who had spent years in other countries, was certainly a man of the world for his time and place. Still, had he been brought back to life in Cairo in, say, 1900, he would have been mystified by myriad sights and sounds unfamiliar and unimaginable in his own time. Among other phenomena, he would have been baffled by the multiplicity of bookshops, newspaper stands, and street vendors; the city streets being densely inscribed with shop signs, commercial posters, and personal notices; the ubiquity of people reading papers in cafés and elsewhere, silently and vocally; and the sight of money bills, cartes de visite, and tickets of various uses changing hands routinely. Since Ṭahṭāwī's passing away, written items of every form had become standard means for running public systems and for interpersonal interaction. Written messages, of course, can be useful when a significant segment of the people can make them out. And when an area that had been devoid of such signs, like Ṭahṭāwī's Cairo, becomes replete with them in a short time, we may assume a substantial shift in the reading habits of its inhabitants.

The decades around Ṭahṭāwī's passing indeed witnessed the dawn of a major change in Middle East reading, which in time would have far-reaching ramifications. The practice may have been on the rise among certain groups in Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon already prior to the nineteenth century (see Chapter 2), but now the change was markedly enhanced. An analogous transformation in reading habits had occurred during the eighteenth and early nineteenth century in parts of Western Europe and the United States, following a series of social and cultural developments: the accelerated spread of education, the expansion of publishing, and the burgeoning of various access channels. They entailed not only a swelling of the readership but also changes in reading patterns and in the read materials themselves. A reflective focusing on a limited selection of texts, often of religious-spiritual or literary nature, gave way to a lighter, more cursory browsing of writings of many types, including works of ephemeral substance that were becoming more affordable.

The Question of Genesis

The first book in Arabic script to be printed with movable type in any Arabic-speaking country appeared in Aleppo, in 1706. The psalter Kitāb al-zabūr al-sharīf was printed by the Christian deacon ᶜAbdāllāh Zākhir under the guidance of Athanasius Dabbās, the Melkite Patriarch of Antioch. This casual venture in an Ottoman province, though duly recorded in historical annals, has been given less scholarly attention than the printing project launched two decades later in the Ottoman capital by the enterprising Ibrahim Müteferrika, a Christian convert to Islam. In 1727, in the wake of a firman by Sultan Ahmet III, which permitted printing in Arabic script in the empire, Müteferrika was given an imperial clearance to launch his own press. It took him two years to publish the first work, a Turkish rendition of an eleventh-century Arabic lexicon in two volumes, and more printed books followed. Müteferrika's enterprise has been the focus of extensive historical discussion, in which he has often been hailed as “the first Ottoman printer.”

Zākhir and Müteferrika were pioneers, but neither of them could claim the honor of being the world's first-ever printer in Arabic letters. Their initiatives were preceded by printing schemes in Europe, begun in the early sixteenth century. Presses in Italy, France, the Netherlands, Germany, and England produced printed works in several Islamic languages, including printings of the Qur'ān, for religious-missionary, scholarly, and sometimes commercial purposes, copies of which reached Ottoman collections. Zākhir and Müteferrika were also preceded by printers in the empire itself, non-Muslim subjects of the sultan who produced books in their own languages and scripts. Jewish exiles from Spain opened Hebrew printing shops in Istanbul as early as the mid-1490s, and Jews later set up presses in Salonika, Edirne, Izmir, and Safad. A press in Armenian opened in Istanbul in 1567 and one in Greek in 1627. We also know of printing in a Mount Lebanon monastery which produced at least one item, a prayer book in Arabic (in the Syriac/karshūnī script), in 1610, and of several other small plants owned by Jews or Christians elsewhere in the empire. Such sporadic endeavors by non-Muslim minorities aside, it was only in the early eighteenth century that books began to be printed in the languages of Islam under an Islamic-Ottoman rule; to wit, two centuries and a half after Gutenberg.

As the eighteenth century turned into the nineteenth, the Ottoman and Arab benign disregard for printing began to crack and give way to a different attitude. The new century would witness a gradual and eventually extensive Arab adoption of printing, the birth of a publishing industry, and the emergence of massive reading in Arab societies, changes that would further accelerate in the following century.

These developments were central pillars in the historic movement known as the Arab nahḍa, a term that will appear repeatedly in this and later chapters. Before proceeding further, it would be worthwhile to take a brief look at this notion and its relation to our subject. “The Arab nahḍa” is a loose construct with a range of meanings. Used flatly with no additional specification, it is taken as a name for the vigorous “awakening,” or “revival,” of intellectual and literary activity that took place in certain Ottoman–Arab provinces during the latter decades of Ottoman rule. Among its prominent marks were an increase in literary and linguistic creativity and an excited journalistic enterprise. Opening up new intellectual vistas, this enterprise engaged members of the society's educated classes in a vivid written discourse on questions of modernity and cultural identity and encouraged the spread of learning and literacy. “Nahḍa” is also used in a different, essentially political sense to denote the vocal quest for national liberation, political rights, and individual freedom that ensued, or rather emanated from, the cultural ferment of that period. There is no clear division between the cultural and the political; usually they are closely intertwined. Even when considering themes that appear to be purely cultural, political implications are always there. Such, for instance, are questions concerning the role of foreign (as distinct from local) actors in generating the changes, or the share of non-Muslim minority members (vs. that of Muslims) in advancing them, which are essential to the cultural exploration but also bear obvious political allusions. The same is true when the nahḍa's historic time framework, especially its inception, is considered: Did it start at the beginning of the nineteenth century, or even earlier (and hence was the fruit of a local-inner endeavor), or after mid-century (and hence was largely a product of foreign initiatives)?

In the previous two chapters, I examined Arab printers and publishers and their products. Later chapters will look into the consuming public of these works, the readership, which likewise grew dramatically within the same historic period. The proliferation of written works and the growth of their consumer market were two sides of a coin, that of enhanced Arab literary activity during the final Ottoman half-century. As with all coins, in between the two visible sides laid an interlocking layer that joined them together – a vital layer that permitted the flow of products from printers to readers. Its constituents were many: middlemen of all stripes, technological mechanisms, working procedures, and several functional institutions. This intermediary tier has been the focus of inquiry by students of book history in Europe and the West in recent years. But it has been largely overlooked in the Middle East, where it has received still less attention than either the publishers or the readers. An indispensable link with a significant imprint on the quality and rhythm of change, it warrants a closer consideration. In the present chapter and in the next, I will look at some of its main constituents.

A mediating layer of this kind has been part of every system in which written texts were meant to reach an audience. It had existed, on a small scale, during the manuscript era as well, comprising a range of book traders and sellers. But printing, with its massive scope and hurried tempo, vastly increased the need for it as well as its complexity. As Robert Darnton has shown in one of his most quoted studies in book-history, the route from the author's desk to his readers was long and lined up with many stations. Darnton's famous “communication circuit,” largely based on his research of eighteenth-century France, has proven most valuable as an organizing model for the study of diffusion in other times and places. Beyond the writer's door, Darnton has reminded us, were printers, proofreaders, binders, shippers, warehouse keepers, wholesale book dealers and small bookshop owners, distribution agents, post-office personnel, mailmen and local deliverymen, street newspaper vendors, and more.

One noticeable change in popular reading habits which the entry of printing triggered was extending the practice on a big scale into the public domain, outside the privacy of one's home or the quiet of the library. Reading in public places, both silently and aloud, was not new in the Middle Eastern experience. But its extensive dimensions were, as were some social routines that came with it. By the eve of World War I, people reading in public locations were becoming a common sight in many parts of the region. It was seen mostly in urban areas but gradually also in rural ones. The practice had two main forms: individual and silent, of literate people (predominantly men) reading quietly to themselves; and collective-vocal, involving both literate and illiterate people going through a text in groups. Both forms resulted from the expanding availability of printed items and the rising public inquisitiveness about their contents. But each of the two forms had its own course and logic. They will be examined here separately for their cultural significance.

Self-Reading in Public: Café Reading

The growing ubiquity of printed texts drew people to reach out for them wherever they could be found out of the home, especially where they could be accessed free of charge. Library and public reading-room shelves were filling with new books that allured scholars, students, and other curious people; and newspapers, obtainable in public places, attracted everybody with their pertinent and practical contents.

A Khedivial Library operational report prepared in 1888, that is, nearly two decades after the library's inauguration, indicated that during the entire previous year the library had served a total of 331 users. This means six to seven readers per week on average, a rather modest pace. This rate increased in later years, reaching a total of 2,582 in 1903 and 3,331 in 1904, by another account. The last figure suggests a weekly average of roughly sixty-five users, a significant growth over the few of a decade and a half earlier. Some of these visitors must have been scholars, who came to consult works in the collection as members of their ranks had done in the past.

One of the most intriguing changes affecting Muslim societies in modern times has been that in modes of communication. Once relying on oral means for all interpersonal activities, these societies have come to employ writing as a standard implement of social exchange and individual expression. By the mid-twentieth century, mass-produced written and printed messages had come to permeate public communication, supplementing, if not quite supplanting, the age-old oral modes. As ever, the changes evolved differentially in different parts of the Islamic world. But eventually they came to affect most people, relegating those unaffected to the margins of communal activity. The present chapter explores these developments, focusing largely on a medium whose history epitomised the process: the periodical press and its assimilation in Muslim countries, with emphasis on the Middle East.

A late debut

Back in 1800, communication throughout the Islamic world was for the most part spoken, not written. As in most non-European societies of the time – and in Europe itself earlier on – people had little use for written texts in conducting their daily affairs. Official announcements were delivered by mosque preachers and town criers, and news was told by those who brought it from afar, then circulated orally in the community. Pious masters imparted spiritual guidance orally to small or big gatherings of listeners. Education, on its lower level, relied on the spoken word and memorisation more often than on reading and writing. Entertainment was likewise obtained by listening to storytellers and other verbal performers.