Arabic Literary-Scientific Journals: Precedence for Globalization and the Creation of Modernity

The pioneering Egyptian socialist intellectual Salamah Musa (1887–1958) writes in the first lines of his memoirs:

I saw the 19th century through the eyes of a child. I saw it free of complexities, wearing nothing of the inventions of the 20th century…. The traditions of the 19th century—if not the many preceding centuries—remained static until the beginning of this very century…. I have ridden on a donkey from the Cairo train station to ‘Aabin and I lived in Zaqaziq when street lamps were unknown.¹

In his memories, he conjures up a vision free of any signs of modernity. Just as his donkey walks away from the capital’s train station, his narrative leaves behind radically new forms of communication, transportation, economy, and thought that had reached the Cairene metropole and Egyptian countryside by the late 1890s. His narrative omits technologies and the new political economy of Egypt that emerge even as he is refusing them. Foremost among these technologies were the literary-scientific journal and newspaper, both immensely popular since their inception in the nineteenth century. Musa, himself born in the provincial town of Zagazig, worked or published in journals such as Mustafa Kamil’s nationalist al-Liwa’ (The Brigade) in 1908, Jurji Zaydan’s al-Hilal (The Crescent), Y’aqub Sarruf’s al-Muqtataf (The Harvest), and May Ziyadah’s al-Mahrusah (Cairo, the Protected), among others, as well as starting two of his own journals, al-Mustaqbal (The Future, 1914) and al-Majallah al-jadidah (The New Journal, 1929). He acknowledges that his own education—that is, the awakening of his own political, intellectual, and social consciousness—was radicalized by the thought of nationalist leaders and other “pioneers of the Arab Renaissance” (ruwwad al-nahdah), whose writings were disseminated virtually exclusively through their own literary-scientific journals and newspapers.

The blindness endemic to Musa’s self-reflections—the inability or refusal to see the harbingers of modernity around him—recalls innumerable earlier writings by Arab reformers of the Tanzimat period that pondered the underdevelopment, “feudalism,” and “backwardness” (takhalluf) of the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire. Among the earliest of such ponderings, Salim al-Bustani, son of the renowned social intellectual and encyclopedist Butrus al-Bustani, wrote an editorial in 1870 titled “Why Are We Backward?”² He answers that the “Easterners,” particularly those of the Syrian provinces, lack unity and fraternal love. Consequently, his compatriots surrendered themselves to ignorance, sectarianism, materialism, tribal prejudice, and fanaticism, resulting in national division, internal strife, and vulnerability to foreign economic and political expansion. Salim’s analysis is important not only because he was a prolific thinker but also because he is seen to be among the progenitors of Arab political and social journalism. In fact, the force of his influence must be largely ascribed to the birth of print media, which he and his father forged. Indeed, Salim’s weekly editorial column, titled “Reform,” opened every issue of his groundbreaking journal al-Jinan (The Garden). The commentary, firmly positivist in vision and analysis, engaged virtually every topic imaginable, from women’s rights and consumerism to local, regional, and global political developments. By introducing scientific knowledge and humanist political and social principles, al-Jinan was the prototype for innumerable journals that worked to integrate the Arab world into a new age, the modern age.³

Allegations that the precepts of humanism and ethos of modernity are antithetical to Arab culture, Islam, and the “Arab mind” itself are common in the recent history of the Arab world. Most recently, Thomas Friedman, Dennis Ross, Samuel Huntington, Daniel Pipes, Fareed Zakaria, Bernard Lewis, and Charles Krauthammer have all launched campaigns about how the Arab world has failed to progress and modernize.^4...