Introduced to Egypt in the 1820s, printing presses were among the first industrial goods imported into the Middle East. Muhammad ‘Ali sent one of his earliest technical missions to Milan, Italy, to acquire both the knowledge and technology of printing presses. Soon after, the Egyptian government began to publish an official gazette, which was the first periodical published in Arabic. Its primary objective was “to improve the performance of the honourable governors and other distinguished officials in charge of [public] affairs and interests.”²⁹ Between 1842 and 1850, Rifa’a al-Tahtawi, author of the celebrated study of Paris, served as editor of this official newspaper, the Arabic title of which meant “Egyptian Events.” It took several decades before private entrepreneurs began to launch newspapers, though many of these papers came under indirect government control. Print runs were too small for newspapers to be viable without government support. One of the first Arabic newspapers, al-Jawa’ib, was published privately in Istanbul starting in 1861, until it ran into financial difficulties several months later. Sultan Abdul Aziz took the fledgling paper under his wing. “It has been decreed,” the publisher informed his readers, “that the expenses of al-Jawa’ib from now on be covered by the [Ottoman] Ministry of Finance and that it be printed at the imperial press. Under these circumstances, we must pledge loyalty to our master, the great Sultan.”³⁰ These constraints on press freedoms notwithstanding, al-Jawa’ib was remarkably influential, reaching an Arabic-reading audience from Morocco to East Africa and the Indian Ocean. Other papers were soon to follow. Beirut and Cairo emerged as the two main centers for journalism and publishing in the Arab world, and they remain so today. Lebanon in the mid-nineteenth century was in the midst of a major literary revival, known in Arabic as the nahda, or “renaissance.” Muslim and Christian intellectuals, encouraged by the power of the (often missionary-owned) printing press, were actively engaged in writing dictionaries and encyclopedias and publishing editions of the great classics of Arabic literature and thought. The nahda was an exciting moment of intellectual rediscovery and of cultural definition, as the Arabs of the Ottoman Empire began to relate to the glories of their pre-Ottoman past. The movement embraced all Arabic-speaking peoples without distinction by sect or region and planted the seed of an idea that would prove hugely influential in Arab politics: that the Arabs were a nation, defined by a common language, culture, and history. In the aftermath of the violent conflicts of 1860 in Mount Lebanon and Damascus, this positive new vision was particularly important in healing deep communal divides. Newspapers played a key role in diffusing these ideas. One of the leading luminaries of the nahda, Butrus al-Bustani, declared in 1859 that newspapers were “among the most important vehicles in educating the public.”³¹ By the end of the 1870s, Beirut boasted no fewer than twenty-five newspapers and current affairs periodicals. By the end of the 1870s, however, the Ottoman government had begun to exert new controls on the press, which developed into strict censorship during the reign of Sultan Abdul Hamid II (1876–1909). Many journalists and intellectuals moved from Syria and Lebanon to Egypt, where the khedive exercised far fewer constraints on the press. This migration marked the beginnings of the private press in Cairo and Alexandria. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, over 160 Arabic-language newspapers and journals were established in Egypt.³² One of the most famous papers in the Arab world today, Al-Ahram (literally, “the pyramids”), was founded by two brothers, Salim and Bishara Taqla, who moved from Beirut to Alexandria in the early 1870s. Unlike many of the contemporary papers that provided essays on cultural and scientific subjects, Al-Ahram was, from its first issue of August 5, 1876, a true news paper. The Taqlas took advantage of Alexandria’s telegraph office to subscribe to the Reuters news wire service. Whereas the Beirut press, which had no access to the telegraph and was still reliant on the post, ran foreign stories months after the fact, Al-Ahram provided news from home and abroad within days, even hours, of the event. As the Egyptian press grew more influential, the khedives sought to expand state control over the burgeoning media. The Egyptian government closed down those papers whose political views were deemed “excessive.” Following the Egyptian bankruptcy in 1876 and the ensuing European encroachment into Egypt’s political affairs, journalists were active in the coalition of reformers who threw their support behind Colonel Ahmad Urabi. The government responded by imposing a strict press law in 1881, setting a dangerous precedent of constraints on press freedoms. The press restrictions were eased under British occupation, and by the mid-1890s, Lord Cromer no longer invoked the press law of 1881 at all. He continued to provide subventions for those newspapers most sympathetic to the British in Egypt—the English-language Egyptian Gazette and the Arabic Al-Muqattam—but took no action against papers that were openly critical of his administration. Cromer recognized that newspapers circulated among a very small circle of the literate elite, and that a free press was a useful pressure valve to allow the emerging nationalist movement to vent steam. This was the world of newspaper publishing that Ahmad Amin encountered in the early 1900s: an Arab media that emerged from European technology to express the widest range of views, from pietism to nationalism and anti-imperialism.

The nationalism expressed in the newspapers of Ahmad Amin’s day was a relatively new phenomenon. The idea of “the Nation” as a political unit—a community based in a specific territory with the aspiration of self-governance—was the product of European Enlightenment thought that took root in the Middle East, as in other parts of the world, in the course of the nineteenth century. Earlier in the century, many in the Arab world had frowned on nationalism when it was associated with Christian communities in the Balkans seeking to secede from the Ottoman Empire, usually with European support. Egyptian and North African soldiers had answered the sultan’s call and fought in wars against Balkan nationalist movements from the 1820s through the 1870s. However, once North Africa was removed from the Ottoman world, with the advent of European colonial rule, nationalism emerged as an alternative to foreign domination. Indeed, imperialism provided two important ingredients for nationalism to emerge in North Africa: frontiers that defined the national territory to be liberated, and a common enemy against which to unify the population in a common liberation struggle. Mere resistance to foreign occupation does not constitute nationalism—for want of a clear ideological grounding, neither Abd al-Qadir’s war in Algeria nor Urabi’s revolt in Egypt can be considered nationalist movements. Without a background nationalist ideology, once the armies had been defeated and the leaders were exiled, there was no political movement to sustain the drive for independence from foreign rule. It was only after the Europeans had occupied North Africa that the process of national self-definition began there in earnest. What did it mean to be an “Egyptian,” a “Libyan,” a “Tunisian,” “Algerian,” or “Moroccan”? These national labels did not correspond to any meaningful identity for most people in the Arab world. If asked who they were or where they were from, people either would claim a very local identity—a town (“an Alexandrian”), tribe, at most a region (“the Kabyle Mountains”)—or else see themselves as part of a much larger community, such as the Muslim umma, or “community.” Only Egypt witnessed significant nationalist agitation in the years before the First World War. Reformist Muslim clerics, grappling with paradox of Muslims coming under European Christian rule, began to frame an Islamic response to imperialism. At the same time, a different group of reformers, influenced by the Islamic modernists, set out a secular nationalist agenda. Both the Islamic modernists and the secular nationalists influenced Arab thought and inspired later nationalist movements across the Muslim world.