The Nahḍah, in light of these recent studies, might more precisely be understood as a period of dynamic social and literary change, which oriented its modernity simultaneously inward, toward a classical heritage, and outward, in the direction of Europe. Indeed, Samah Selim has gone as far as to suggest abandoning the singular term Nahḍah, in order to “speak of two intertwined literary Nahḍahs”: “one that, partly looking backwards to an antediluvian ‘golden age,’ was invested in an act of genetic and linguistic recuperation (re-naissance) and another that was strictly materialist in the play of its textual and social articulations.”37 That is, one Nahḍah that recovers a literary past and another that represents, in varying degrees of realism, a material present, which included goods and people from both inside and outside the Arabic-speaking world, or the “Arabs and their non-Arab peers” of Leg over Leg’s subtitle, or those disconnected and newly connected by steamships and railways, to paraphrase the Fāriyāq.
Al-Shidyāq’s — and the Fāriyāq’s — steamship fare to England was, of course, paid by missionaries. The missionary presence in the Middle East, mostly American and British, began in Egypt and the eastern Mediterranean in the early nineteenth century and was aimed mainly toward the conversion of Eastern Christian sects such as the Maronites in Lebanon and the Copts in Egypt (and, to a lesser extent, Jewish Ottoman subjects). While they failed to convert many — in 1830, the entire “Protestant community” of the Ottoman empire reportedly consisted of six people38—they did establish important institutions of learning and foster intellectual relationships with several influential literary figures. Yet missionary societies are just one example of international contact in the Middle East; far more influential and commonplace than the “Biblemen,” as they were sometimes called — or “bag-men,” as al-Shidyāq satirizes them, because they, like itinerant merchants, would hawk their wares in the spiritual marketplace — were European merchants and manufacturers, who appeared more often in the region during the nineteenth century.
During this period, economic ties between European countries and the larger Ottoman Empire (of which modern-day Syria and Lebanon were a part) deepened: beginning in the 1840s with a series of laws called the tanẓīmāt, Istanbul rapidly opened its empire to foreign investment and trade. In Egypt this meant that European banks began to establish themselves in Alexandria as early as the 1850s, lending money to the soon-to-be bankrupt Egyptian government.39 In Lebanon the consequence of these changes was the rapid growth in the export of agricultural products in the 1850s and 1860s; the silk-thread trade alone accounted for over eighty percent of the region’s exports to Europe.40 At the same time, the quantity of European manufactured goods consumed in the region increased: the Middle East became incorporated into the new world economic system as a dependent region, with prices and exports determined by demand in Europe, and with locally-based European merchants reaping much of the profit.41
Foreign travel and immigration to the Middle East rose apace; the silk trade brought French capitalists and merchants (especially from Lyon) to Mount Lebanon to set up silk factories, and a booming cotton industry and transport construction lured workers and investors to Egypt. (The number of Europeans who came into Egypt alone rose from between 8,000 and 10,000 in 1838 to 30,000 in 1861 and 80,000 by 1865.)42 At the same time that foreign travel and immigration to the Middle East became more frequent, so did Arab migration and travel to Europe. While it was once a scholarly commonplace to consider Muslims and Arabs as generally uncurious about Europe — a view popularized, at least in academic contexts, by Bernard Lewis in Islam and the West and The Muslim Discovery of Europe—recent work has made lesser-known travelogues of the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries known and available to English readers.43 Putting this period’s travel literature into the long history of Arab contact with Europe makes it clear that there was no sudden nineteenth-century “discovery” of Europe.
Nonetheless, a new dimension to this contact emerged in the nineteenth century — national consolidation, with the goal of strengthening Arab scientific and military capabilities in the wake of European encroachment. After Napoleon’s short-lived occupation of Egypt, from 1798 to 1801, Egypt’s ruler, Muḥammad ʿAlī, launched his own scientific campaign to Europe by dispatching educational missions in various disciplines.44 First sending a group of students to Italy to train as printers and type-founders, he later sent missions to France and England to study shipbuilding, engineering, medicine, law, diplomacy, and languages. During what Muḥammad ʿAlī envisioned as a cultural and technical revival, these missions stood at the core of a national education project — as they not only brought home valuable skills and information, but also disseminated them through university teaching and the translation of technical textbooks.45 Printing presses, then, including the press that Napoleon brought to print his military bulletins and the still-operating Bulāq Press (founded in 1821), were instrumental to Muḥammad ʿAlī’s modernizing agenda, as they published official news and the scientific and academic works that Egyptian delegates translated upon their return.
Not all publishing, however, was produced in the service of the state. Any author could have a book printed at Muḥammad ʿAlī’s press, provided that the costs were paid, and private presses began to compete with state publishing houses for the emerging print market.46 By mid-century, there were more than a dozen presses operating in the Levant alone, with six privately owned commercial presses opening in the 1850s.47 In addition to missionary presses like the CMS Press in Malta, authors themselves also became printer-publishers, founding their own presses and publishing their own writing or journals. In Cairo, Alexandria, Beirut, Baghdad, Mosul, Aleppo, Damascus, Jerusalem, and Valletta, authors and translators published a range of texts for the emerging commercial market.48 The nineteenth-century Arabic print sphere emerged as one that was profoundly heterogeneous, producing editions of classical Arabic texts as well as translations from English and French literature. Alongside these, original Arabic prose works appeared, some in neoclassical style, and others written in a form called riwāyah, the word now used to mean “novel” but which then signified a category more fluid, such as “narrative” (literally, it is the verbal noun for “telling”), as well as works in between.