Arabs (28 page)

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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.

 

Two men shaped the debate on Islam and modernity at the end of the nineteenth century: al-Sayyid Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1839–1897), and Shaykh Muhammad Abduh (1849–1905). The two men were partners in an Islamic reform agenda that would shape Islam and nationalism well into the twentieth century.

Al-Afghani was a restless thinker who traveled widely across the Islamic world and Europe, inspiring followers and alarming rulers wherever he went. He spent eight years in Egypt, 1871 to 1879, where he taught at the influential mosque university of al-Azhar. Al-Afghani was a religious scholar by training but a political agitator by inclination. His travels through India, Afghanistan, and Istanbul had impressed on him the magnitude of the threat Europe posed to the Islamic world, and the impotence of the heads of Muslim states in addressing the threat. The central focus of al-Afghani’s political philosophy was not that of how to make Muslim countries politically strong and successful, as was the case with Tanzimat reformers in Egypt, Tunisia, and the Ottoman Empire. Rather, he argued that if modern Muslims lived according to the principles of their religion, their countries would regain their former strength and overcome external threats from Europe.
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Although al-Afghani was convinced that Islam was fully compatible with the modern world, he believed that Muslims needed to update their religion to face the issues of the day. Like all observant Muslims, al-Afghani believed the message of the Qur’an was eternal and equally valid for all times. The part that had grown outdated was the
interpretation
of the Qur’an, a science that had been deliberately frozen by Islamic scholars in the eleventh century to prevent dissent and schism. Islamic scholars of the nineteenth century were taught theology by the same books as scholars of the twelfth century. Clearly a new interpretation of the Qur’an was called for, to bring Islamic strictures up to date and address the challenges of the nineteenth century—challenges that medieval theologians could never have foreseen. Al-Afghani hoped to constrain Muslim rulers with constitutions based on updated Islamic principles that would put clear limits on their powers, and to stimulate pan-Islamic unity of action among the global community of Muslims. These radical new ideas enflamed a talented generation of young scholars at al-Azhar, including nationalists Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid and Saad Zaghlul, and the great Islamic modernist, Shaykh Muhammad Abduh.

Born in a village of the Nile Delta, Abduh proved one of the greatest thinkers of his age. Islamic scholar, journalist, and judge, he ended his career as the grand mufti of Egypt, the country’s highest religious functionary. He wrote for the famous
Al-Ahram
newspaper, and like al-Tahtawi he served as editor of the Egyptian government’s official gazette. He was one of Ahmad Urabi’s supporters in 1882 and was exiled by the British to Beirut for his pains.

While in exile, Abduh traveled to Western Europe and met up with al-Afghani in Paris, where they launched a reformist journal that called for an Islamic response to Western imperialism. Abduh built on Afghani’s principles to pronounce a more rigorous course of action upon his return to Egypt later in the 1880s.

Abduh’s call for a more progressive Islam, paradoxically, took the first community of Muslims—the Prophet Muhammad and his followers, known in Arabic as the
salaf
, or forefathers—as a role model. Abduh was thus one of the founders of a new line of reformist thought that came to be called Salafism, a term now associated with Osama bin Ladin and the most radical wing of Muslim anti-Western activism. It was not so in Abduh’s time. By invoking the forefathers of Islam, Abduh was hearkening back to a golden age when Muslims observed their religion “correctly” and, as a consequence, emerged as the dominant world power. This period of Muslim dominance throughout the Mediterranean and extending deep into South Asia, lasted for the first four centuries of Islam. Thereafter, he argued, Islamic thought ossified. Mysticism crept in, rationalism waned, and the community fell into a blind observance of the law. Only by stripping Islam of these accretions could the
umma
return to the pure and rational practices of the forefathers and recover the dynamism that once made Islam the dominant world civilization.

As a student at al-Azhar, Ahmad Amin had to overcome his diffidence to attend classes given by the great Muhammad Abduh. His recollections of Abduh’s teaching give a vivid sense of the Islamic reformers impact on his students. “I attended two lessons, heard his beautiful voice, saw his venerable appearance, and understood from him what I had not understood from my Azharite shaykhs.” Muhammad Abduh’s reformist agenda was never far from his teaching. “From time to time,” Amin recalled, Abduh “digressed to discuss the conditions of Muslims, their crookedness, and the way to cure them.”
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Al-Afghani and Muhammad Abduh made Islam an integral part of national identity as Egypt moved into the age of nationalism. In their concern for the state of Muslim society, Abduh and his followers began to debate social reforms along with the national struggle.

 

In their debates on “the conditions of Muslims,” Muhammad Abduh’s followers began to argue for changes in the position of women in Muslim society. Since their first encounter with Europeans at the time of the Napoleonic invasion, Egyptian intellectuals had been confronted by a very different model of gender relations—and disapproved of what they saw. The Egyptian chronicler al-Jabarti was appalled by the impact Napoleon’s men had on Egyptian women. “French local administrators, together with their Muslim wives dressed like French women, would walk in the streets, take interest in public affairs and current regulations,” he noted disapprovingly. “Women commanded and forbade.”
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This was nothing short of an inversion of the natural order, as al-Jabarti understood it, of a world in which
men
commanded and forbade.

Al-Tahtawi, observing relations between the sexes in Paris thirty years later, also complained about this inversion of the “natural order.” “The men are slaves to the women here and under their command,” he wrote, “irrespective of whether they are pretty or not.”
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Al-Jabarti and al-Tahtawi came from a society where respectable women were confined to separate quarters at home and glided anonymously through public places under layers of clothes and veils. This was still the case in the Cairo of Ahmad Amin’s childhood. Amin described his mother and sisters as “veiled, never seeing people or being seen by them except from behind veils.”
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