personal memories revolutionary states and indian ocean migrations

His publications (described in an essay
by Christoph Neumann) were all in
Ottoman, but his tract justifying the
importance of printing is significant: it
would bring accurate texts to more
people at prices they could manage to
pay. Surely such an enlargement of
general knowledge was an advantage to
the reforming sultan.
The major centers in the
nineteenth century were Cairo, Beirut,
and for a time Istanbul. In Egypt the
initiative came from the state: from
authorities of the Napoleonic
expedition, whose press issued military
announcements and proclamations in
Arabic to a generally hostile population
in 1798-1801, and then in 1819/20,
from the ruler Muhammad Ali, for
whom the presses he established in
Bulaq, still a suburb of Cairo, were a
tool for his reforming projects. By the
end of the century, the Matba`a at Bulaq
had produced a remarkable number of
titles, most of them by typography using
fonts copied from those of the Ottoman
Imperial Press in Istanbul. Lithography
was preferred for religious works, as
with the 1924 Azhar Quran, but most of
the Bulaq publications had another
focus: school books, the first newspaper
in the Arabic world (1828, initially
published in Arabic and Turkish both),
and Arabic classics. A Thousand and
one Nights (Alf layla wa-layla) appeared
in 1835, the volumes of Ibn Khaldun’s
great history Kitab al-`ibar in 1867.
The initiative in Beirut came
rather from non-governmental sources:
the American missionary presses using a
type face that came to be called
"American Arabic," and printing houses
founded by Arab Christians with a wide
inventory – non-governmental
newspapers and periodicals, Arabic
literature, encyclopedias, science
textbooks. The first press sponsored by
a Muslim began in 1874, and
immediately began to publish a
newspaper. Interestingly enough, all
these presses used American Arabic
type. Istanbul is yet a third example, for
86
its publishing achievement in the
nineteenth century was shaped by the
vision of a remarkable Arab intellectual,
the Lebanese writer Ahmad Faris al-
Shidyaq. After editing for a missionary
press in Malta and traveling to England
(where he published his translation of
the Bible in Arabic) and Tunis (where he
converted to Islam), al-Shidyaq was
invited by the Sultan to Istanbul in 1859
to become the major figure in Arabic
editions at the imperial press. He
immediately founded the newspaper al-
Jawa’ib, which became one of the most
widely circulated periodicals in the Arab
world. In 1870 he established his own
press, publishing there his newspaper,
his own writings and those of other
contemporary intellectuals, and
beautifully edited editions of classical
Arabic literature. After his death in
1887, Roper notes, publishing in Turkey
concentrated increasingly on the
Turkish language, but al-Shidyaq’s
efforts helped widen the Arabic reading
public.
This summary of the Arabic
material in Middle Eastern Languages and
the Print Revolution gives only a partial
look at the treasures in the volume.
Ulrich Marzolph’s chapter on
nineteenth-century Iran brings with it an
important discussion of lithography,
used there well beyond religious
literature, and impressive book
illustration, including an 1847 picture of
the lithographic process – from the
preparation of the etching acid to the
working of the press by the bare feet of
a pressman. Moreover, the multiple
languages and locations considered add
complexity and a dialogic character to
the account: in late nineteenth-century
Jerusalem, presses were producing
books in Hebrew, Arabic, Armenian,
Greek, and Turkish.
In certain ways the book
undermines the stereotyped narrative of
"first the progressive West, then the
backward rest." Since Arabic block
prints predate those in Europe by
several centuries and printing with
Vol. 5, Fall 2005, © 2005 The MIT Electronic Journal of Middle East Studies