Stranger Publics

This chapter discusses the Arabic literary circulation and how the exclusive distribution of prints disconnected people. Qiṣṣat Rūbinṣun Kurūzī and the other Church Missionary Society publications were printed annually in small quantities and distributed by agents of the church by hand. The forms of Arabic literary circulation that existed when al-Shidyāq began his career in print were mainly restricted to religious and government publications, which were focused on liturgical and scientific texts, and only occasionally produced editions of poetry or narrative fiction. Literary societies served smaller and more selective audiences still. The chapter mentions the Syrian Society for Arts and Sciences, the Oriental Society of Beirut, and the Syrian Scientific Society. Those “disconnected” peoples that al-Shidyāq imagined connecting via the printing press would have been limited to a small group of readers. Al-Bustānī's “Khuṭba,” proposed a comprehensive plan for the renovation of the Arabic letters and sciences that hinged on the creation of a reading public. He called for reforming Arabic lexicography through the elimination of “dead words” “weighing down” Arab authors, increasing literacy through the founding and funding of schools, and above all investing in print. Reading print required too much translation, as al-Khūrī put it: writing for the public was not only like translation but entailed translation. It was, for him, not a sphere but an “abyss.” The modern reader, and that institution of literary modernity the public sphere, emerged as a problem of translation.