This paper will use the India Office Records to explore how the British Empire was concerned with radio usage throughout the Arabian Peninsula during the 1930s, which resulted in the first BBC Arabic broadcasts in history. I situate these broadcasts within the context of shifting British colonial authority during the 1930s and 1940s, when territories in the Peninsula went from being governed as western extensions of the Indian Empire to being ruled directly from London as as a part of “His Majesty’s Territories in the Near and Middle East.” Radios and other sound-playback media became popular throughout the Peninsula during this time, being imported from Europe, India, and Japan. As a result, Great Britain became an audible empire in order to counter broadcasts emanating from Nazi Germany and the Kingdom of Italy on wireless sets throughout Arabia. The British Broadcasting Corporation was contracted to organize an Arabic language broadcast that provided news about other Arab countries and cultural content such as history lectures, religious sermons, and Arabic music to sway radio users from Axis broadcasts. In this paper, I argue that British efforts to cater to the musical tastes of listeners in Arabia uniquely highlights the region’s precarious position situated between networks of the Indian Ocean, colonial or otherwise, and the colonial geography of the “Middle East” during this time. After realizing that Italian radio engineers had hired Egyptian musicians to perform live from Bari, British intelligence officials scrambled to find their own musical content. The strategy to cater to listeners in the Peninsula seems to have taken two initial trajectories that occurred simultaneously during 1937 and 1938. The first was to broadcast Egyptian music, which was held in higher regard by British colonial officials, either through live performances or gramophone records. The second was to curate culturally “appropriate” musical content for what were British racial stereotypes of tribal Arabs and bedouins. Ultimately they opted for neither tactic and turned instead to the local recording industry and its agents, which had been active with the circulation of gramophone records and musicians between Baghdad, Aden, Bombay, and Java since the 1920s. As a critical analysis of colonial archival sources, this study reads them against the grain of historical and biographical Arabic literatures, research in sound recording archives, and interviews conducted in Gulf Arab States with musicians and record collectors.

From the inception of radio in Palestine, the interaction between the technology, its operators, and its listeners was extremely fraught. The development of radio in Palestine was embedded in British colonial attempts to modernize and educate the population and was shaped by the increasing tension between the Zionist and Arab national movements. The first Palestinian radio station, which broadcast in English, Arabic, and Hebrew, was inaugurated by the government only two weeks prior to the eruption of the great Arab revolt in 1936, and hence was received by the listeners with much ambivalence. Radio became more prevalent during the years of the Second World War and the postwar period when listeners attempted to distinguish between propaganda and reliable news. While scholars have studied the development of broadcasting during this period from the side of the transmitters, much less attention was given to the part of the listeners. This paper examines the interaction of Arab Palestinian listeners with radio and the development of listening patterns. Based on a wide range of archival documents, published accounts, and interviews, the paper aims to reconstruct the practice of radio-listening within the daily lives of Arab Palestinians. Radio sets became more prevalent in Palestinian cities and villages from the mid-1930s; they were distributed both by the government and private sellers. However, the size and price of radio sets, and their reliance on electricity or batteries kept them beyond the reach of most Palestinians, and made radio listening a predominantly collective experience. The common practice of listening to the radio in cafés and public spaces broadened the ability of middle- and lower-class men to join the audience, but at the same time excluded women from taking part in this activity, demonstrating how social context impacted participation. Nevertheless, public listening provided crucial mediation between the literary Arabic broadcasts and uneducated listeners. This paper explores how the pre-existing practices of entertainment, leisure, and cultural consumption facilitated the introduction of radio into the public spaces of Palestinian society. It demonstrates how access to the radio in Mandate Palestine developed unequally and was determined by geography, class, and gender. Finally, it shows that, although radio was a new medium and allowed unprecedented communication possibilities, radio did not undermine social hierarchies during the Mandate period, but mainly reproduced them. In this way, the paper points to the reciprocal relations between technology and society in Mandate Palestine.

Scholars have long acknowledged the centrality of the practice of companionship (suhba) in modern and pre-modern Islamic education (Makdisi 1981, Berkey 1992, Ephrat 2008, Silverstein 2008). According to these studies, suhba refers to a process of learning by which a teacher and student build a personal bond that allows the student to absorb the instructor’s virtuous dispositions (akhlaq) and knowledge (‘ilm). Most often, a student will practice suhba by remaining in the presence of the shaykh as much as possible -- studying, talking, eating, and worshiping with him. In this paper, I examine a new dimension to the contemporary practice of suhba at al-Azhar mosque, the preeminent institution of Sunni Islamic learning located in Cairo. While in-person suhba remains an important component of contemporary Islamic educational practices at al-Azhar, social media sites, such as Facebook and YouTube, have come to play a role in how young Muslim Cairenes practice suhba with their shaykhs. Based on a year of ethnographic research at al-Azhar, which included participant observation and interviews with students and religious scholars, this paper examines the ways in which social media sites have expanded and reconfigured not only the practice of suhba but Islamic education more generally. In particular, it explores how the religious scholars and their students conceptualize the relationship between Islamic education and this new cyber realm. I argue that although the religious scholars and their students increasingly rely on social media for important aspects of Islamic education, such as suhba, the religious scholars are developing new epistemologies that seek to delimit the possibilities of Islamic education online. By exploring the tension between contemporary practices of Islamic education and social media in Egypt, my paper presents a new perspective on the relationship between Islam and modern technology more generally.