An End Overcome by a Beginning: The Diminishment of the Khedivate, the Fading Away of Its Print Culture, and the Rise of Debates Over Society’s Direction in Colonial Egyptian Print

What is typically seen as the flowering of print culture in Egypt circa the 1880s and 1890s—i.e., newspapers and periodicals and authorship and eventually novels, and political and religious debates in print—in fact marks not a flowering, but the collapse of the first print culture that existed there. This original print culture arose and functioned via the mediation of the khedival government. It therefore necessarily came undone with the challenge to the regime's authority posed by the British occupation of Egypt in 1882, or the beginning of British colonial rule under the veiled protectorate. Indeed, in my interpretation, the dynamism that eventually billowed out from the Arabic press marked the contentious fallout over the collapse of the government, the standing social order, and the original print culture that these two pillars propped up. Those who remained involved in printing in Egypt thereafter competed to fill the void poised by this revolutionary upheaval, battling for legitimacy in speaking out to, and on behalf of, the public regarding how society could regain its footing.