Since printing from Cairo developed circa 1820, European contemporaries complained about the way in which Egypt’s state precluded members of their ranks from printing on the governmental presses. And by the time that Egypt’s private printing industry became prolific in the 1880s, Egyptians themselves wrote of Egypt’s press laws with disdain, sometimes because they were too stringent – and most other times because they were not stringent enough in silencing ‘inappropriate’ voices. Scholarly accounts of printing from Egypt lean on these portrayals of print regulation to support wider points about governance, modernity, journalists’ emigration from Beirut to Egypt, activism, and political repression in the public sphere. But we have yet to study how print regulations in Egypt actually worked structurally. This paper maps out Egyptian print regulations during the period in which local Arabic and Ottoman printing first began, until the British invasion of Egypt. I do this by focusing upon the evolving reasons for why printing warranted regulating, and the various apparatuses that were used to monitor and control the publication of texts. Because the Egyptian printing industry first developed from within the state, print regulations did not need to be formalized. Indeed, the texts produced from the presses themselves indicate what was considered fit for print. The development of Egypt’s private printing industry from the 1850s gave little initial cause for print regulations, since the earliest printers worked alongside the traditional producers and consumers of texts from Egypt, the ‘ulama’, who were themselves part of the establishment. Hence when the first press ordinances were issued in Egypt in 1856/7, they were promulgated from on high by the Imperial Porte and did not reflect the concerns of the Egyptian state. The ensuing disconnect between imperial decree and local need is exhibited by the fact that Egypt’s government began monitoring printings from the 1860s onwards through the office of the Grand Mufti. Using sources like Filib Jallad’s Al-Qamus al-‘Amm and Amin Sami’s Taqwim al-Nil, the fatwas of the Grand Muftis of Egypt, contemporary accounts of Egyptian print regulations, and the very printings that the industry produced, I argue that despite the generalized way in which Ottoman print regulations have come to be understood, the case of Egypt demonstrates that their implementation varied over time and between cities. The history of this process helps us to understand how to interpret the printed sources that we use to access the past.

The last decades of Ottoman rule are often considered as two distinct periods divided by the Young Turk Revolution of July 1908 and marked by diametrically opposed approaches to the freedom of speech. Indeed, the number of newspapers published in Greater Syria during the Hamidian era remained small and highly stable, while the number of titles exploded after the restoration of the constitution. To explain these differences, many scholars recount a narrative of Hamidian authoritarianism versus Young Turk liberalism—without thorough examination of Ottoman legislation or the practices of censorship. This paper therefore approaches this topic through close scrutiny of Ottoman legislation and the circulation of legal texts in Bil?d al-Sh?m. The paper then analyses the practices of censorship on the basis of eight Beiruti and Damascene newspapers between 1875 and 1914. It will establish a) to which extent the distribution of warnings and suspensions corresponds to legal changes; b) to which extent suspensions were actually implemented; c) the reasons cited for official interventions; and d) permissible content through the analysis of what was and what was not reported and in which terms. The paper argues that the final phase of Donald Cioeta’s model press-regime, namely the “enactment of press censorship laws”, came into full force only after 1908. The Young Turks abolished the regulatory, and sometimes repressive, press and printing laws and the restored constitution granted freedom of the press. Yet, the paper will show, no publisher of the numerous new periodicals in Damascus and Beirut failed to obtain the now unnecessary permit for publication. It further demonstrates how the new regime began a new crackdown on an increasingly critical press and how within a single year new regulations were promulgated that introduced a much stricter censorship regime than ever before. Observing that the majority of papers after 1908 was extremely short-lived due to an increasingly effective implementation of censorship laws on the local level, the paper ultimately argues that one encounters an ever-accelerating expansion of the state and its institutions into society from the 1880s onwards with a short interruption of one year, if at all, between July 1908 and July 1909 instead of two periods divided by the Young Turk revolution.

The Young Turk Revolution was brought to life by a combination of different forces. “Young Turk” was an umbrella term that was used to define those forces who shared a common dislike of sultan Abdülhamid II and his autocratic regime. Dissident intellectuals in the Ottoman diaspora (the exile community in Europe), a collection of discontented civil servants and students in the empire, and a militant organization within the Empire, namely the “Committee of Union and Progress” (CUP) were parts of the anti-Abdulhamid opposition. During the first two years following the Young Turk Revolution, the constitutional government grew more and more authoritarian, reminiscent of the reign of Abdulhamid II. Increasing press censorship, arbitrary arrests of intellectuals and political opponents, an empire-wide purge of state employees, increasing European encroachment, economical problems and wars created a lot of disillusionment and therefore caused several people who initially supported the CUP to sour on the revolution. As the dreams of revolution shattered, non-satirical journals in the Ottoman Empire were not able to freely criticize the new government and the CUP due to strict press censorship. On the other hand, satirical journals could circumvent censorship by relying on the ambiguity of cartoons, jokes, satirical stories and puns. Cartoons in these journals also bridged the gap between the literate and illiterate by relying on images to transmit political messages. Existing scholarship on Ottoman press has a tendency to associate censorship with the reign of Abdülhamid II, and accept the Young Turk Revolution as the (re)birth of free Ottoman press. It neglects the shattered dreams of intellectuals and journalists who were disillusioned by the revolution. Through analyzing the weekly journal “Kalem”, this paper demonstrates the crucial importance of satirical journals in reflecting the political debates and post-revolutionary disillusionment in the Ottoman Empire during the Young Turk Era.

With the restoration of the 1908 Ottoman constitution and the reinstatement of the parliament, there was a surge in the private press. This press surge caused the perception that press censorship was lifted, relegated to the Hamidian Era. This rosy sentiment did not last long because the Committee for Union and Progress (CUP) got involved in local politics and reformist individuals and institutions began to counter the CUP’s centralizing policies. Until recently, most attention has been placed on Istanbul and its journalists and newspapers. However, issues of censorship and creative freedom due to ad-hoc practices of local bureaucrats happened all across the empire. Looking to a case from the Iraqi provinces can also illustrate the relative freedom of the press under the CUP. This paper examines press suspension in Ottoman Basra in 1909. Public intellectual Sulayman Faydi opened his al-Iqaz/Ikaz (“Reveille”), a bilingual journal, in Basra in 1909, but several months later it was closed due to censorship. He had published a political incident and included the text of a petition and official complaint to the Basra vali. The decisions of the Basra vali and the Provincial Press director led to the order of censorship. As the editor and license-holder, Faydi petitioned Istanbul to reopen the journal. Upon receiving permission to continue, he wrote about the entire ordeal and published it in al-Iqaz. In this paper, I argue that Faydi’s relative liberties were both an indication of specific local tensions with the Provincial Press Director, and more general problems with corruption of ministers, the disconnect between the center and the provinces, and the clash between the CUP and other individual streams of reform outside of it. While there were ad-hoc decisions within censorship and press regulations, Sulayman Faydi interpreted them as systemic failures and critiques the era of progress. To explore this moment of liberty and tyranny, I utilize Faydi’s memoirs, excerpts of al-Iqaz, and records from the Ottoman Archives.