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250 Chapter  The Printing Press and Change in the Arab World Geoffrey Roper In 1937 the Arab American historian Philip Hitti published his History of the Arabs, which quickly established itself as a classic; through its many subsequent editions up to the present, it has introduced generations of students and general readers to the broad outlines of Arab history. Its final chapter, dealing with the past two centuries, and the changes brought about by modernization and westernization, opens with a brief account of the import of a printing press by the French into Egypt in 1798. Subsequent pages give prominence to the establishment of other presses in Cairo, Beirut, and elsewhere. Clearly, for Hitti, printing was an essential ingredient of modernization in the Arab world. Nor was he alone in this view: in the following year (1938), the celebrated Arab nationalist historian George Antonius, in his influential book The Arab Awakening, laid great stress on the introduction of printing as a factor in that awakening. “The installation of a printing press equipped to emit books in the Arabic language,” he wrote, “opened out new horizons . . . without [it], the making of a nation is in modern times inconceivable .” But neither they nor most subsequent historians of the Arab world down to the last quarter century explained why printing was so important, nor did they devote any significant space or effort to tracing its progress or This survey covers, in addition to the Arab countries, that is, those where Arabic is the main written language, some aspects of Arabic printing history in the broader sense, involving book production in all languages using the Arabic script, a historic vehicle of Islamic culture. But the many detailed studies of Ottoman Turkish printing history are not considered: for a comprehensive list of publications in this field in the period 1981–95, see M. Bülent Varlık, Türkiye basın-yayın tarihi bibliyografyası (Ankara: Kebikeç Yayinlan, 1995). Nor has it been possible to survey the fewer but significant specialized contributions on Persian, Urdu, Malay, and other Muslim languages. . Hitti, History of the Arabs from the Earliest Times to the Present (1937; 7th ed., London: Macmillan , 1960); Antonius, The Arab Awakening: The Story of the Arab National Movement (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1938), 40. The Printing Press and Change in the Arab World 251 elucidating the effects that it had. Even studies of intellectual history, such as Albert Hourani’s masterly and seminal Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age (1962), despite dealing intensively with printed texts, paid scant regard to the means and processes by which intellectual production reached its readers and achieved its potent effects. The relatively few studies of Arabic book history tended to concentrate their attention on the manuscript production of earlier eras, with printing added, if at all, merely as a postscript. The key work in this field was Johannes Pedersen’s Den Arabiske Bog (1946; translated by Geoffrey French as The Arabic Book, 1984): only the last of its ten chapters considers the printed book, and this deals only with the outline history of the establishment of presses and the nature of some of the texts printed. Among the Arabs themselves , the situation was little better. Khalīl S ābāt’s useful survey of the history of Arabic presses took for granted their historical role and did not attempt to analyze the relationship between the printed output and changes in social and intellectual patterns. In 1979, the date that also marks the appearance of Elizabeth L. Eisenstein’s The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern Europe (PPAC), a major history of the Arabic book by Mah  mūd ‘Abbās H  ammūda allocated a mere 11 of its 280 text pages to the printed book and used them to give no more than a bare chronological summary. As late as 1982, the Tunisian scholar Abdelkader Ben Cheikh, in a report to UNESCO, commented that “discontinuité et rareté des approches caractérisent l’état actuel des recherches sur le livre et la lecture dans les pays arabes.” So Elizabeth Eisenstein’s observation that “almost no studies are devoted to the consequences that ensued once printers had begun to ply their new trades” certainly applied in full measure to the historiography of the Arab Middle East. In 1982, fresh from the excitement of reading Eisenstein , I pointed out, at the annual conference of the Middle...

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