The Press in the Arab Middle East: A History.

• Author: Armburst, Walter

Reviewed by Walter Armbrust

Print media involve both elite and popular cultures in novel ways, and carry enormous implications for politics and economics. Few would dispute that media can fundamentally restructure consciousness, although exactly how they do so is hotly debated. For these reasons Ami Ayalon's The Press in the Arab Middle East is an important step toward raising the study of Arab media to the prominence it deserves.

Ayalon surveys the origins of the Arab press, excluding the Maghreb, from 1800 to 1945. The first four chapters give a schematic view of relations between the state and private publishers in a straightforward presentation of what sort of periodicals were produced and where. The book covers an enormous amount of material, much of which (particularly pre- 1800s publications) is difficult to find today. Although from the 1880s on there was an explosion of publishing in Arab cities, much of the material produced was ephemeral. Consequently these chapters depend heavily on secondary sources in Arabic, none of which, however, aimed to be as comprehensive as Ayalon's work. His competent synthesis is most welcome.

Later chapters draw more extensively on primary sources. Topics covered include freedom of the press, readers, "cultural legacy," economics of the press, and professionalization of the press. The analysis is more interesting than that of the first section, but more problematic. Ayalon implicitly holds the Arab press to idealized standards of contemporary Western journalism, particularly in Chapter 5, which documents suppression of free expression. While Ayalon briefly notes parallels with European suppression of expression considered heretical (e.g., p. 109) more often he describes Arab/Ottoman censorship in such terms as "peculiar, [and] almost incredible" (p. 113). The problem is that while the fact of Arab censorship is undeniable, its uniqueness is questionable. Middle Eastern suppression of the press appears neither "peculiar," nor "incredible," if one looks at the problem in a more realistic comparative perspective - not in terms of our own contemporary journalistic standards (which, of course, are themselves subject to such pressures on freedom of expression as growing monopoly ownership of the media, consumer society, and blindness created by "discourse" in a poststructuralist sense), but in terms of how manuscript culture was transformed by print in each society.

An analytic focus on the transformation...