In 1906, French newspapers in Algeria celebrated the capture of a dangerous activist, the head of a mysterious committee that had been advocating Islamic unity. Yet the culprit, Khoualdia Salah, had been born to a prominent notable family in Eastern Algeria that were loyal servants of the French colonial state. Khoualdia had ended up in this position less because of his political opinions than because of his position with the news system of the early 20th century. This paper traces the trajectory of this unusual character to show the importance of intermediaries in generating the media panic of ‘pan-Islamism’ in the years before the First World War. This was a time when European news markets’ appetite for knowledge about Muslim networks created possibilities for cunning men to find employment. It was also a time when the categories of activist, journalist and spy were blurred. Men like Khoualdia navigated these categories to find an outlet for their political ideas and a form of social advancement commensurate with their intelligence. Like others at his time, Khoualdia was an educated man for whom there were few employment possibilities in French Algeria. For a while, he worked as an interpreter for the French army, a job which saw him sent on his first missions to West Africa. Ambitious, he was unsatisfied with this job, and embarked on a complicated transnational career that led him from Constantine to Conakry, from Khartoum to Constantinople, London and Paris. At various times, he worked for the British, German, French and possibly Ottoman governments, associated with Polish anarchists, German spies and other shady figures. But most of all, we can understand Khoualdia as a kind of newsmaker, both in the sense of producing content and producing stunts, relentlessly pursuing attention through his articles, reports, and activities.

Radio Cairo and Voice of the Arabs are two of the more infamous examples of Nasserist propaganda, known for spreading the message of pan-Arabism, Third Worldism, Socialism, as well as a variety of other isms, across the globe. Yet this effort to broadcast from Cairo was one of many efforts to shape and control the news about and from Egypt. This paper sketches this broader information infrastructure through the career of Muhammed Abd al-Qadir Hatim, one of the initial Free Officers, who became a leading architect for Egypt's information regime. Using both his prolific writings and periodicals which he edited, this paper explores how Hatim's ideas about news media and public opinion informed the creation of Egyptian institutions, starting with his founding of the Middle East News Agency in 1954 as way of challenging the domination of Reuters and AP. Hatim's success with MENA was followed with a series of promotions, culminating in his tenure as the first Minister of Information in 1959 and then as the head of the Ministry of Information, National Guidance, and Culture from 1962 to 1966. This paper traces his various endeavors, from his role in establishing Egyptian television and state publication houses, as well as the faculty of Information Sciences at Cairo University, to his largely unsuccessful attempt to create an 'Army of Truth' through Egyptian publications in the early 1960s. Though Hatim was sidelined in the late 1960s, under Anwar Sadat he served again as Minister of Information and then as a deputy Prime Minister during the October War, after which he published his most well known book, Information and the Arab Cause in 1974. While Hatim is often mentioned in his histories of this era, he has remained a largely marginal figure in these narratives. This paper focuses on Hatim as a way to historicize the intersection of decolonization and news media in Egypt, illuminating how news and information became a state project, how propaganda and public diplomacy became intertwined, and how public relations and ideas of public opinion became professionalized and institutionalized in modern Egypt, which in turn served as a model for the rest of the Third World.

When the Palestinian journalist Muhammad Ali al-Tahir passed away in Beirut in August 1974, the PLO organized a military funeral that was attended by countless Arab dignitaries, including representatives of Moroccan king Hassan II and Tunisian president Habib Bourguiba. Ahmed Ben Souda, director of the royal Moroccan cabinet, expressed “great sadness and much pain” about the passing of “the Great Arab Moujahid” in a telegram to his family. But who was the man whose death brought together countless freedom fighters and politicians like few other events in recent history? And why has he been written out of the historiography of the modern Middle East? My paper argues that the life of Muhammad Ali al-Tahir both shaped and mirrored the decolonization of the Arab world. Beginning in the 1920s, his Dar al-Shura publishing house in Cairo became an institutionalized meeting point for anticolonial activists from across the entire region. His influential newspaper al-Shura, although mainly focused on Palestine, was the first to regularly bring news from the colonial Maghrib to a readership in the Mashriq. He introduced two generations of North African nationalists—including Habib Bourguiba and Allal al-Fassi—to their counterparts from across the world; even Pakistanis and Indonesians frequented his office. In 1956, he toured the newly independent Maghribi nations and was showered with highest honors. The political elites of Morocco and Tunisia—most of whom had been actively engaged in the liberation struggles—never ceased treating him like a hero. Yet after the revolution of 23 July 1952, the new Egyptian regime no longer appreciated the perceived moderation of his journalistic and diplomatic anticolonialism, instead embracing truly revolutionary action embodied by the PLO and others. Forced into exile once again, and stripped of his Egyptian citizenship, he spent the rest of his life in Damascus and Beirut. As Nasser and his sympathizers shaped the regional political discourse, the journalist quickly descended into oblivion. The life and death of al-Tahir allows us to excavate multiple forgotten strands of Arab political history: the close cooperation among Maghribi and Mashriqi activists in Cairo; the ways that the Middle Eastern press shaped nationalist activism in North Africa; and how the rise of a second, more revolutionary wave of anticolonialism during the 1950s marginalized the activities of its predecessors. Al-Tahir’s absence from the historical record thus inadvertently tells the story of the Arab world during the 20th century.

From the summer of 2015, as Europe faced what the media termed at first the ‘migration’ and later the ‘refugee crisis’, a cemetery of unknown persons in south-eastern Tunisia started gaining in fame. Journalists, researchers, documentary film makers, photographers, and activists began travelling to the coastal town of Zarzis specifically to report on a makeshift cemetery for the victims of the European Union’s border. These foreigners were welcomed by local Red Crescent volunteers, and in particular by Chamseddine, an unemployed ex-fisherman who over the years became deeply involved in the burial of unknown persons. Aiming to improve the state of the cemetery, he facilitated their access to the terrain and provided them with his own narrative of what had been and was still unfolding in the Mediterranean, and who in his view was to take responsibility for these deaths. The story of Chamseddine particularly captured the attention of European journalists, who almost unanimously focused on his personal engagement to tell the story of the cemetery. Told through one man’s charitable commitment to provide dignity to those who died at the EU’s liquid border, the cemetery was framed as a place epitomising both the deadly effects of migration policies in Europe, and the compassion of simple citizens in the face of its horror. By the summer of 2017, the cemetery and its self-appointed guardian Chamseddine became the headline story coming out of Tunisia aimed at European audiences. It is also through relations with Chamseddine that different local and international actors started organising to materially fix the cemetery, by launching crowdfunding campaigns and by travelling to Zarzis to plant trees, donate body bags, and clear the land of rubbish. Based on two years ethnographic fieldwork research in Zarzis (2015-2017), this paper will explore the conceptual and practical acts of ‘fixing’ that arose from Chamseddine’s interactions with a variety of visitors at the cemetery. These acts resulted in this ad hoc cemetery becoming a focal symbol triggering a vast array of moral and political discourses of empathy and hope, but also of blame and responsibility allocation, bringing to the fore the colonial and neo-colonial legacies of the so called ‘migration/refugee crisis’.