This paper presents a preliminary report on the content of an original source found in the National Library in Cairo, Egypt. The document was a photocopy of a handwritten memorandum prepared by the then director of Dar al-Kutub, Mohammed Nadim. Nadim was personally involved in some of the initiatives leading to a reform of Arabic script and printing. The presentation will summarize Nadim’s contributions in light of the discovered document. Nadim prepared his memorandum in 1948, shortly after a committee meeting addressing proposals of script reform. The memo summarizes some of the key events in the history of Egyptian printing prior to the proposal of script reform, and it extensively describes the difficulties of reconciling letterpress printing with the rules of Arabic script and calligraphy. The document provides valuable new insight into the later phases of moveable type printing in Egypt. The Nadim memo speaks to a pivotal and particular moment in the history of Arabic print culture and the Arabic language. The historical and academic value of this document is threefold: First, the history of printing in Egypt remains a subject that has not received as much academic attention as it deserves, and there are few publications in English that address the technical aspects of Arabic printing. Second, the publications available in English or French typically cover the origins of Egyptian printing, starting with the use of the printing press during the Napoleonic occupation and the reforms of Muhammad Ali Basha. Muhammad Ali established the state-run Bulaq Press (El-Amiriya Press) in 1820, but these developments mark only the beginning of a century-long period of experimentation in printing techniques. Printers continued to adjust the new technology for the aesthetic, religious, educational, and political needs of the public and the government. Thirdly, few original sources on the subject are easily accessible for researchers in Egypt or elsewhere. They are scattered in different institutions and often not catalogued, as was the case with this document. It is therefore important to publicize newly discovered materials such as the 1948 memorandum of Muhammad Nadim.

Print culture, and the printing technologies upon which it rests, are far from monolithic. This paper challenges the universalizing tenor of print history by examining Arabic script in relation to a variety of printing technologies. The conflation and confusion of these varied technologies support grand historical narratives, such as a perceived “delay” in Arabic print adoption. But printing arrived in the Islamic and Arabic world through various means. Some print technologies were adopted quickly, while others spread more slowly. In line with the panel, this paper draws upon Muhammad Nadim’s 1948 memo as a starting point. Nadim was writing at a particular moment in print history, and his suggestion to reduce the number of Arabic forms addresses the specific problem of moveable Arabic type. Arabic script maintains a long and troubled relationship with mechanical typesetting. Reducing a rich calligraphic tradition to a limited number of repeatable forms (i.e. a typeface) diminishes the beauty and aesthetic possibilities of the script. The setting of moveable type, however, is only one of multiple printing options. Over a century before Nadim’s memo, lithography began to challenge moveable type as the preferred technology for reproducing Arabic script. Unlike moveable type, lithography can reproduce an entire hand-drawn page, and it was quickly adopted across the Middle East and South Asia after its invention in 1790. By printing images, rather than strings of letters, lithography supported the preservation and distribution of calligraphic specimens. Moveable type, in contrast, distributed standardized and mass-produced texts that were perceived as the foundation of a modern nation state. These competing processes offered different sets of affordances and limitations for Arabic script, and the debates of Arabic print culture navigate the textual and technical spaces that separate these two poles. The paper concludes by extending these debates into the digital realm. Many of the issues raised by Nadim’s memo remain relevant. Digital text encodings, like the moveable type of earlier eras, parcel language into distinct characters. Nadim’s suggestion of a limited number of repeatable forms is mirrored in the programming of the Unicode standard and other encoding schemes. These codes, in turn, influence the possibilities of Arabic search, the display of Arabic text, the separation of text and image-based file formats, and the scanning of Arabic OCR. By reopening and rereading the technical notes of Arabic print history, we reassess the digital present and reimagine the digital future.

The dearth of available printed materials on Arabic typography, in Arabic as well as other languages, itself prompts important questions. This document was discovered in the stacks of Dar al-Kutub in Cairo—we imagine other equally important works are scattered across the archives and libraries of the region. Such documents inform us to what degree national and transnational policymaking shaped the transition from handwritten to printed Arabic. Handwriting remained the primary means of literary reproduction well into the 19th century, and drew largely on the Quranic naskh script as well as other traditions of calligraphy. What sort of previous attempts were there to simplify a type system that was inherently complicated, with hundreds of forms to indicate letters at the beginning, middle, and end of a word? To what extent did the idiosyncrasies of the Arabic typeset limit the typewriter’s use and accessibility? Nadim’s memo suggests that the question of simplification, at both the formal and informal levels, was complex and difficult. Many past and present scholars have insisted that modern literary Arabic retain the style and form of the “pure” or “superior” classical Arabic of the Quran. Some argue, however, that this insistence limits the scope of critical commentary on the language’s evolution, in terms of both written and spoken form. Critical perspectives on Arabic’s literary and spoken forms (i.e. dialects) are likewise difficult to locate. Nadim’s memo hints that a similar phenomenon might have been the case in the debate surrounding the transition from handwritten to typed Arabic. In the eyes of some, any attempt to reform the alphabet was too drastic a departure from a tradition they understood as superior. However, given the advent of computing, the Internet, and virtual type system, literary Arabic has undergone a sort of informalization, in which its evolutions are more readily apparent and dialects are being “accepted” for the first time in written—in this case typed—form. That said, digital type not ended all controversies surrounding Arabic typography. Where is the debate today, and what challenges are in store in the future?

When at the turn of the twentieth century a committee created to redesign fonts for the Egyptian governmental printing house al-Amiriya appointed Muḥammad Ja‘afar Bak to do this task, they could not have envisioned the complications that the hiring of a famous Quranic calligrapher would cause. Muḥammad Ja‘afar Bak insisted that the printed typeface imitate a hand-written script, something the printing house was unwilling and unable to do. My paper, using this event as a point of departure, explores the precarious relationship between religious practice and technology. Specifically, I look at the emergence of print in Egypt and its effects on the production and use of the mushaf, the material book that carries the Quranic text. I examine the ways in which typeset print unsettled some of the stable religious practices surrounding the material carrier of the message and compelled the religious scholars to reexamine the tradition – understood as a body of written and consensual knowledge - in relation to that technological change. One of the problems that surfaced as soon as typeset print became a tool used to disseminate the Quranic text was its incapability to adequately represent the Quranic orthography (al-rasm al-‘Uthmānī) until then skillfully reproduced by the calligraphers. The religious question of adherence to traditional spelling, and suggestions of modifications that accompanied print, had in its background broader, secular discussions. These included the debates of Egyptian linguists and scholars on reforming the Arabic language and creating more practical adaptations of the language to contemporary linguistic norms. At the same time, printing enabled the mechanical reproduction of the Quranic message in large quantities, precipitating a new relationship between the book and its public. The possibility that everyone might own a mushaf created for its users many new ways of deploying the text, which on the other hand required new pronouncements on the part of the ‘ulamā’. By examining these particular entanglements of printing and practice that have enveloped the Quranic text, I attempt to reverse the prevailing anthropological approach in which technology is seen merely as a tool for religious practice. Instead, I suggest considering the contrapuntal ways in which technology shapes and modifies religious processes and practice.