Majmu' Fawayid (1851-1856) received praise as the first Arabic newspaper in Beirut. A project of the American missionaries, Tarrazi records in History of the Arab Press that it addressed "geographic, historical, scientific, and religious matters, and other useful topics." Aside from this oft-cited description for the annual periodical, the role of this publication in the development of the Arabic newspaper industry of the Levant and in the emergence of lughat al-jara'id (newspaper language) has yet to be studied. Looking at its physical and discursive aspects, this paper first questions how text was assigned and space quartered within the periodical, and what role the anonymity of its authors played in producing information. Next, the linguistic features of the periodical are subjected to scrutiny to reveal what lexical and syntactic conventions, in addition to translation practices, were adopted to create and disseminate knowledge, and why. Lastly, this study will discuss the organizing principle for the annual publication—“useful knowledge”—and examine how these fawayid were constituted and selected for presentation to the mid-nineteenth-century reading audience. In focusing on this missionary foray into journalism, this paper offers a new understanding for this collection of miscellany. Studying the material composition of Majmu' Fawayid and the language style employed within its textual borders sheds light on the production of knowledge and the relationship of knowledge to language valuation, during the early years of the Arab Nahda in Beirut, a period characterized as a literary, social, and cultural renaissance.

This presentation examines the relationship between technology and what can be termed “Euro-Egyptian imperialism” in late nineteenth-century Egypt. I focus on the forgotten journal Jaridat Arkan Harb al-Jaysh al-Misri (The Journal of the Egyptian Army's Chief of Staff), published between 1873 and 1877 in Cairo. This was a periodical of the Chief of Staff in the army of Khedive Ismail and it was only distributed to members of the official corps. The journal was printed in Arabic, instead of Turkish, and thus contributed to the Arabization of the army. It was the main intellectual platform of the Egyptian army because it contained both translated and original articles about military technologies, strategies, and engineering plans, often with an educative goal. It regularly published current news concerning changes in foreign armies and also historical recollections of the Egyptian campaigns led by the sons of governor Mehmed Ali in the early nineteenth century. Thus Jaridat Arkan Harb, I argue in this paper, built up a relationship between technological expertise and a victorious past on its pages. The material distribution of knowledge gains an additional importance if we consider this period as the age of Khedive Ismail’s expansionism, in which American, French, and British officers joined his army to conquer new territories in Africa. The civilizing mission and technological expertise in Arabic mutually constituted the ideology of Euro-Egyptian imperialism, expressed in ideas of Jaridat Arkan Harb al-Jaysh al-Misri.

This paper examines the broader socio-political significance of the visual and textual dimensions of the early Arab medical journal, Al-Tabib: Majalla Tibbiyya ‘Ilmiyya Sina‘iyya Zira‘iyya that was edited by famed-Arab intellectual Ibrahim al-Yaziji, alongside physicians Bishara Zalzal and Khalil Sa‘ada. This short-lived journal (published between 1884-1885 in Beirut) had its origins in the 1870s, as Akhbar Tibiyya, which was published and edited by the American Missionary and medical practitioner, George E. Post, with involvement by Shahin Makariyus in Beirut in 1874. Under al-Yaziji’s direction, Al-Tabib's scope changed to address a broader audience (beyond medical practitioners). The establishment of medical programs within various institutions in Beirut, including the Syrian Protestant College and Saint Joseph University, contributed to the interest in such journals. However, periodicals like Al-Tabib were not solely concerned with medical practice, but rather engaged the contemporaneous interest in encyclopedic knowledge as it related to science and society. In fact, the debates and discussions within this journal extended to local and European perspectives on universalism, technology, and racial identity. This paper explores the largely unexamined aesthetic dimensions of the issues of Al-Tabib, including its layout design, drawings, etchings, and diagrams. This study thus sets out to gain an understanding of how these different elements contributed to a formulation of views on medical knowledge, as well as their association with views on language, race, and science—in the context of the Arab Nahda. While concerned with issues of medical practice, the readers, producers, and benefactors of this periodical were also local medical professionals and often members of literary and scientific societies, who constituted an elite coterie of modern intellectuals and readers. The examination of this journal’s materiality and circulation reveals that the views included within Al-Tabib were an extension of broader social and political debates of the time, when perspectives on medicine were linked to those on racial and national identity.

This paper explores the links between the emergence of Modern Standard Arabic, or fuṣḥā, and the proliferation of periodicals after the introduction of print technology in the nahḍa. I assume that cheap access to news and periodicals transformed the modes of knowledge production and defined the limits and contents of the known. This paper outlines how news (which is a particular genre of knowledge production) was mediated: how it was enabled and through what constraints. As I argue, the material particularity of the nahda periodicals gave rise to a structural relationship between standard Arabic and forms of translated knowledge. One way of examining news as a novel form of knowledge production is to analyze the relationship that linked the emergence of fuṣḥā with the heavy reliance on translation in the nahda. As an imported technology that translated knowledge of the world (including the world of local Arab provinces) from Western periodicals, the nahda periodical proliferated translation as the cardinal tool for mediating and commoditizing forms of knowledge. My specific focus on how periodicals mediated the relationship between translation and fuṣḥā maintains methodological interest in a text’s materiality as it shapes and affects language-use.I am interested in how the changing materiality mediated the world: what it enabled, what it constrained. I borrow the analytical concept of mediation from the history of science and specifically from the work of Clifford Siskin and William Warner to show that fuṣḥā emerged as a protocol of control that was consequent upon the wide spread proliferation of the periodical as a defining aspect of this genre’s materiality. Through analyzing the periodical as a tool of knowledge, I will first describe the changes in writing news about the present and will then closely read selected news items that were published in the nascent nahda periodicals. My paper will primarily unpack the well-known polemical language debate between two main figures of the early Levantine nahda, Ahmad Faris Shidyaq and Ibrahim al-Yaziji. As I show, in this debate, which unfolded in a series of exchanges in Al-Jawaib and al-Jinan in the early 1870s, the stakes of the argument for controlling language-use show the extent to which translation became the cardinal mediation paradigm for knowledge of the world. As I show, periodicals proliferated this cardinal mediation which in turn produced linguistic effect, in the form of fuṣḥā as a grammatical protocol of control.