The Press in the Arab Middle East: A History

Arab Studies Quarterly (ASQ), Spring, 1996 by Walter Armburst

Print media involve both elite and popular cultures in novel ways, and carry enormous implications for politics and economics. Few would dispute that media can fundamentally restructure consciousness, although exactly how they do so is hotly debated. For these reasons Ami Ayalon's The Press in the Arab Middle East is an important step toward raising the study of Arab media to the prominence it deserves.

Ayalon surveys the origins of the Arab press, excluding the Maghreb, from 1800 to 1945. The first four chapters give a schematic view of relations between the state and private publishers in a straightforward presentation of what sort of periodicals were produced and where. The book covers an enormous amount of material, much of which (particularly pre- 1800s publications) is difficult to find today. Although from the 1880s on there was an explosion of publishing in Arab cities, much of the material produced was ephemeral. Consequently these chapters depend heavily on secondary sources in Arabic, none of which, however, aimed to be as comprehensive as Ayalon's work. His competent synthesis is most welcome.

Later chapters draw more extensively on primary sources. Topics covered include freedom of the press, readers, "cultural legacy," economics of the press, and professionalization of the press. The analysis is more interesting than that of the first section, but more problematic. Ayalon implicitly holds the Arab press to idealized standards of contemporary Western journalism, particularly in Chapter 5, which documents suppression of free expression. While Ayalon briefly notes parallels with European suppression of expression considered heretical (e.g., p. 109) more often he describes Arab/Ottoman censorship in such terms as "peculiar, [and] almost incredible" (p. 113). The problem is that while the fact of Arab censorship is undeniable, its uniqueness is questionable. Middle Eastern suppression of the press appears neither "peculiar," nor "incredible," if one looks at the problem in a more realistic comparative perspective - not in terms of our own contemporary journalistic standards (which, of course, are themselves subject to such pressures on freedom of expression as growing monopoly ownership of the media, consumer society, and blindness created by "discourse" in a poststructuralist sense), but in terms of how manuscript culture was transformed by print in each society.

An analytic focus on the transformation from manuscript to print culture would have highlighted the differences as well as the similarities between Arab and European book cultures, of which the press was a crucial part. Much of the material needed for such an analysis is in the book. For example, Chapter 8, on economics of the press is full of fascinating detail, and lends itself easily to a discussion of print capitalism, which is frequently cited as a crucial element in the development of nationalism. But Ayalon never explicitly links nationalism and print capitalism, and thereby misses a chance to explore more fruitfully a political aspect of the press that extends beyond the reach of elites whose impact on modern Egypt is already relatively well-known.

Chapter 6, "The Reader," would have been another obvious place to broaden the book's analysis of the press. There are, of course, certain frustrations in dealing with such a topic in a conventional empirical way. Ayalon notes high rates of illiteracy, takes a stab at estimating circulation figures (which he notes is an "elusive" issue (p. 145), and goes on to discuss how people read - orally and collectively rather than as individuals. Ayalon notes the distinction between European silent reading practices and Arab oral recitation, as well as the importance of mass education, advances in printing technology, and the availability of inexpensive texts. But then he makes the surprising claim that "in Arab-speaking society, such developments began later and proceeded more slowly" (p. 154). Arab printing did indeed begin later, but "proceeded more slowly"? The development of modern European reading and publishing took centuries. Silent reading had its roots in medieval European culture, as did the reorganization of the book trade along capitalist lines. The printing press itself was gradually refined from the Fifteenth Century to the late Eighteenth Century. It was Europe that developed the tools necessary for a mass-circulation press over a period of several centuries, whereas Arab societies, after some initial resistance, adopted the new technologies with blinding speed. Since, as Ayalon notes, empirical evidence for judging the extent of mass consumption of texts is lacking, a discussion of the differences between Arabic manuscript culture and the new technologies for producing texts would have been a useful framework for organizing relevant materials from several chapters.

The book would also have benefited from a more extensive discussion of language. Ayalon restates the standard assumption that traditional literary norms of classical Arabic belles lettres were unsuitable for mass-circulation printed texts, and notes that the press played a vital role in developing a leaner style of Arabic that could still be conceptually linked to "classical" culture. Ayalon does not, however, discuss how intriguingly different the development of modern Arabic prose was from that of Europe, where the institution of printing paralleled the emergence of national vernaculars. In Arabic-speaking societies premodern writing was more intrinsically linked to sacred text than in Europe. Consequently printing in the vernacular, rather than the proto-"modern standard" Arabic conventionally emphasized by linguists, was extremely problematic. Ayalon could have broadened this view of politics through such a comparison. Arab writers were predisposed to adopt a pan-Arab "national" vernacular rather than one more locally referenced, thereby contributing to an ambiguity between local and pan-Arab nationalism that lives on to the present. Nonetheless, despite official discouragement of vernacular writing, by the post-world War I era, if not before, there were ways to "vernacularize" the press. For example, publishing houses, such as Egypt's Ruz al-Yusuf and Dar al-Hilal, featured much vernacular expression, despite ideological denials of its importance. Furthermore, if one views periodicals in their totality, as complex objects rather than utilitarian conduits for "information" (pp. 138-39), a discussion of Arab journalism could easily extend to its graphical component, which in periodicals of the above mentioned companies was strongly keyed to vernacular imagery, and highly developed by the 1920s.