Within a few years of 1820, Muslim-owned printing presses were established under state sponsorship in Iran, Egypt, and India, marking the true beginning of printing in the Islamic world. Printing projects had been initiated before this period—most famously by Ibrahim Müteferrika (1674–1745) in Istanbul—but these were isolated and unsustained ventures.Footnote ¹ None gathered the joint momentum of state support and technological transfer to compare with what emerged simultaneously in Tabriz, Cairo, and Lucknow. In attempting to understand the common processes behind this “triplet” birth of Muslim printing, this article reconstructs the small circle of individuals whose at times discordant projects collided in creating a sustainable Muslim print tradition in several distinct centers around 1820.Footnote ²

Moving the spotlight from the Mediterranean setting that has long dominated discussion of early Muslim printing, here the focus turns toward Iran. The reasons for this are partly heuristic: in the travelogue of Mirza Salih Shirazi (d. after 1841) we have an incomparable firsthand account of the circumstances surrounding the transfer of printing to Iran that we lack for Egypt or India.Footnote ³ However, there are also substantive reasons for this Iranian focus in that the development of Muslim printing in Tabriz preceded by several years that of Egypt's better-known pioneers at Bulaq and the less famous state press of Nasir al-Din Haydar at Lucknow. More importantly, the Iranian case highlights the emergence of patterns that appeared in the other Muslim printing zones around the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean.

A REVOLUTION'S HUMAN AGENTS

If we have pointed to a divergence with earlier scholarship on the timing and geography of Muslim printing, it is also worth clarifying this article's relationship to the existing literature on printing and modernity. The most important influence here has been Elizabeth Eisenstein's work on the printing “revolution” in Europe, which frames a set of discussions placing the printing press as a technological agent of change in not only the dissemination but also the nature of ideas.Footnote ⁴ Eisenstein has had two principal influences on the historiography of Muslim printing. The first of these is a search for correspondingly “modern” or “Protestant” responses to the impact of print on traditional epistemological or otherwise religious forms by way of the privatization of reading, the rejection of traditional religious authorities, and the emergence of individualizing religious trends.Footnote ⁵ The second has been a penchant for the kinds of longitudinal surveys by which patterns of change become “visible” over extended periods of time.Footnote ⁶

Although certainly addressing the distinct forms of modernity present at the birth of Muslim printing, this article adopts the somewhat different approach of focusing in detail on the short period of key convergences and the human agents (and motives) behind the spread of the technology around 1820. In contrast to the longitudinal approach, this helps isolate a distinct “modernity” in illo tempore and prevents us from merging it into longer-term trajectories (or teleologies) of the modern. What emerges from this sharper focus is a less familiar modernity predicated on the transnational networks of technologically astute evangelical Christians and “transcultural” Asian middlemen. A focus on how printing did (rather than did not) spread among Muslims also helps move discussion from a tired debate emphasizing the “obstacle” to technological change posed by either Islam in the abstract or the ʿulamaʾ in the concrete, allowing us to account for the mutability of religion and culture as negotiable and transformable forces in the lives of the actors directly involved in early Muslim printing.Footnote ⁷

Although still dealing with the relationship of printing to the familiar abstractions of “modernity” and “religion,” the method here is to approach the beginnings of Muslim printing through the more tangible criteria of technology transfer: the movement and interaction of a definable circle of men and their machines.Footnote ⁸

Here the article draws on recent models of the cultural analysis of technology transfer that emphasize human-scale “microsites,” “enclaves,” and “microcultures.”Footnote ⁹ Its primary focus—and argument—is on the emergence of a distinct class of cultural and technological middlemen, typically in government employment, who used the new diplomatic relations that emerged from the Napoleonic “global war” to travel to specific European cities and acquire there both the printer's skills and machines. In looking at several of these journeymen—a word used in its literal sense as apprentice printer and figural sense as working traveler—the article draws attention to the repeated presence of transculturalism as the necessary qualification for success.Footnote ¹⁰ These processes were already taking shape in the “experimental” period of Muslim printing: Müteferrika was, after all, a Hungarian Christian convert to Islam who migrated to Istanbul, drew on the ambassadorial secretary Saʿid Shalabi's 1741 tours of Paris's printing houses, and imported his own press from France.Footnote ¹¹ Müteferrika's Istanbul press therefore represented the Mediterranean prologue for the global expansion of Muslim printing around 1820, in which other journeymen and middlemen played the key roles.

Although focusing primarily on the Iranian evidence for such middlemen, the article also considers the birth of Egyptian, Lebanese, Indian, and Malay Muslim printing to demonstrate the larger patterns that the Iranian case foreshadowed. The answer to how these traveling middlemen succeeded is found in the small scale of the circles in which they moved in Europe, circles in which their transcultural “qualifications” afforded them access to printing as well as to other elements of the “new sciences.” Here the article draws out the distinctive and often contradictory agendas of printing's demand side (of middlemen and statesmen) and supply side (of entrepreneurs and evangelicals). The patterns that emerge from the numerically small but global circles that fostered Muslim printing point toward the ambiguously connected forces that helped nurture a multisited and contemporaneous modernity.

JOURNEYMEN, MIDDLEMEN: THE CULTURE OF THE TRAVELING TECHNICIAN

Because early 19th-century European science was embedded in a cultural and indeed Christian framework, it was necessary for men like Mirza Salih to presage their technological training with strategies of self-transformation aimed at rendering them middlemen equipped to move between not only different knowledge systems but also the distinct social circles in which this knowledge circulated in England and Iran. It is worth emphasizing here the importance to the foundation of Muslim printing of our emblematic journeyman, or traveling printer's apprentice. By sending a person to acquire skills as well as machines, the state sponsors of men like Salih addressed a perpetual problem in the transfer of technology: the uselessness of machines without men trained to use them.Footnote ¹² This human dimension to technology transfer is apparent in the discussion that follows of Salih's access to the small social group that controlled Arabic-script printing in England, pointing again to the microhistorical scale on which the abstractions of “modernity” and “science” should be understood.

We now turn to the substance of our investigation by reconstructing the profile of one of the two founding figures of Iranian printing, Mirza Salih Shirazi. Although Salih has long been known as cofounder of the Iranian printing industry and founder of Iran's first newspaper, the circumstances in which he learned about printing have remained sufficiently obscure for him to garner little more than a mention before details of the later and better-documented period of Iranian publishing.Footnote ¹³ The son of a local notable from Shiraz, Salih was probably born around 1790 and in his youth became attached to the court of the modernizing Qajar prince, ʿAbbas Mirza (1789–1833), governor of Iran's threatened northwestern provinces along the Russian border.Footnote ¹⁴ Although it was in London that Salih eventually learned the skills of the printer, his first exposure to Europeans and their “new knowledge” (ʿilm-e jad īd) came in Iran when, in 1810, he acted as secretary to Henry Lindsay-Bethune (1787–1851), infantry commander of ʿAbbas Mirza's new model army.Footnote ¹⁵ In 1812 he was attached to the embassy of Sir Gore Ouseley (1770–1844), traveling with the British party for part of its journey through Iran and recording its stages in an informational travelogue that he presented to Sir Gore's brother and secretary, the pioneer orientalist Sir William Ouseley (1767–1842).Footnote ¹⁶ During his time with the embassy, Salih compiled an example of what, along with the travelogue, became the key literary genre to emerge from the international collaborations that disseminated print, namely, the language guide.

In Salih's case, this meant the composition of a set of Persian sentences—questions one might address to a servant (nawkar), clerk (munshī), or gardener (bāghbān) and the corresponding answers one might (hope to) receive; they were given English equivalents by William Ouseley's assistant, the East India Company scholar William Price (1780–1830).Footnote ¹⁷ On his return to England, Price published two editions of these Persian Dialogues in joint Roman and Arabic type, featuring the Iranian's name (“Mirza Sauli”) as coauthor.Footnote ¹⁸ Through his work on a hybrid English and Persian “middle text,” which belonged to a new genre forming the literary expression of the middlemen's transculturalism, the collaboration that underwrote the emergence of Iranian printing thus saw Salih involved in printing projects that spanned an axis linking Iran with India and England. Collaborating in Iran with Britons trained in India, he wrote a Persian manuscript that was carried to England and printed there in Persian type developed a generation earlier in Calcutta.Footnote ¹⁹

Already exposed to the ways of the English, Salih made an excellent candidate when Prince ʿAbbas Mirza decided to send students to England to pursue the new sciences he saw as essential to the defense of the realm. In 1815, Salih set off with three fellow students under the protection (mihmāndārī) of Joseph D'Arcy (1780–1848), who as part of the new military order (niẓām-e jadī d) had been training ʿAbbas Mirza's army.Footnote ²⁰ By building on clues in Salih's journal of his residence in London, the following sections reconstruct the circumstances surrounding his acquisition of print technology and his transfer of it to Iran.Footnote ²¹ In a travelogue intended to be instructive, Salih makes clear the cultural transformations and compromises his mission required. Given the framework of modernity in which discussions of printing are typically placed, the religious nature of Salih's apprenticeship is, however, surprising.

It seems that Salih originally intended to study at Oxford, probably not realizing prior to his actual visits to Oxford and Cambridge in 1818 and 1819 that, as the training grounds of clergy and squires, the universities held in patrician disdain the mechanical arts in which Salih's sponsors were interested.Footnote ²² Before realizing this, Salih embarked on learning Latin, partly because it was a requirement for university entrance and partly because it still held such sway over European learning and the classes among which it circulated. More surprising is Salih's study of Anglican theology, in particular the fashionable writings of William Paley (1743–1805), which were also becoming a central part of the university syllabus. According to a report in The Times from 1818, “Saleh .–.–. has read Paley's Natural Theology; and both [Salih and his fellow student Mirza Jaʿfar] are curious in their inquiries as to this department of our literature, as well as that of ethics.”Footnote ²³ As rationalizing theologians like “watchmaker” Paley attempted to square the new episteme of observation and reason with the doctrines of the church, England's scientific modernity was still intimately entwined with theology.

Salih's fellow traveler, Mirza Jaʿfar, sent to study engineering in England, was exposed to a no less religiously embedded science. His mentor and mathematics teacher at the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich was Dr. Olinthus Gregory (1774–1841). In addition to his mathematical and astronomical writings, in the year of the students' arrival he published Letters to a Friend, on the Evidences, Doctrines, and Duties of the Christian Religion, in which he attempts to refute the rationalizing turn of Paley's Natural Religion.Footnote ²⁴ Salih's journal records both students being regularly chaperoned by Gregory, blending their exposure to scientific principles with a peculiarly evangelical twist.Footnote ²⁵

The circles in which Salih acquired his Latin, English, and theology are still more revealing of the cultural preamble to his access to print. His journal records how between 1816 and 1817 he studied under a “Mistar Bissit” in Croydon.Footnote ²⁶ The teacher in question was the Reverend John Bisset (d. 1852), a provincial clergyman who ran a private “gentlemen's academy” in the small town of Croydon, to the south of London, where he was also master of the Whitgift School.Footnote ²⁷ From descriptions of Bisset's Academy, as well as Salih's own description of adopting English dress and his knowledgeable “how-to” account of English manners, it becomes clear that the qualifications for his entry to the social circles of scientific learning involved mastering the accomplishments and protocols of the English gentleman.Footnote ²⁸ This was, after all, the whole point of Bissett's Academy, an institution that afforded provincial middle-class English youths access to the universities and professions through a program of acculturation to dominant social norms that was fundamentally similar (if less radical) to that it gave Salih. The program was a success: English-newspaper reports praised the polish of Salih's manners, and the letters he wrote his British friends show a fine command of English prose even by the eloquent standards of the age of Hazlitt.Footnote ²⁹

FROM CULTURE TO TECHNOLOGY: ACCESSING AND TRANSFERRING PRINT

With the Ouseley embassy in 1812, Salih and his sponsors had made contact with some of the leading patrons of Arabic-script printing as it was developing in London in the early 1800s.Footnote ³⁰ Through his monographs and journal, The Oriental Collections, Sir William Ouseley was an important promoter of Persian typography; in 1815 Sir Gore Ouseley was instrumental in printing the revised Persian New Testament and distributing it in Iran, where it was shown to Fath ʿAli Shah, who offered “a decided testimony” in its favor.Footnote ³¹ When Gore Ouseley became the vice president of the British and Foreign Bible Society (henceforth the Bible Society) in 1816 after his return from Iran, Salih found himself acquainted with the most important institutional sponsor of Arabic-script printing of the age.Footnote ³² Indeed, Gore had rescued from Iran Henry Martyn's Persian translation of the New Testament and carried it to Saint Petersburg for printing. In England, Salih also established contact with Cambridge professor Samuel Lee (1783–1852), who was designing Arabic and Persian type for his evangelical translations of tracts and scripture.Footnote ³³

Through their connections to the Bible Society, Lee and Ouseley played a central role in Salih's access to print. In addition, during his time in Croydon in 1816, Salih also met scholars from the East India Company's military seminary in neighboring Addiscombe and briefly studied with John Shakespear (1774–1858), whose Dictionary, Hindustani and English appeared in 1817 using the new Persian type.Footnote ³⁴ These connections link Iranian modernity to an axis of personnel and technology that through the evangelical and administrative enterprises of an emerging imperial order materialized between London and Calcutta in the early 1800s.

In 1817 and 1818, Salih visited several of the industrializing mills and factories that were appearing in towns like Bristol (where printing was also “very extensively done”Footnote ³⁵). At one point, he inspected a paper mill outside Oxford that contained one of the earliest examples of the Fourdrinier machine, which by industrializing paper production enabled the vast global expansion of newspapers from the 1820s.Footnote ³⁶ Then, in what must have struck his aristocratic English friends as the eccentric step of abandoning his aspirations of study at Oxford, in early 1819 Salih became the understudy of a London printer, to whose premises he described himself traveling daily.Footnote ³⁷ Having reached London a Persian mīrzā and left Croydon an English gentleman, Salih now transformed himself into one of the revolutionary tradesmen of the industrial age.

One of the key problems with Salih's journal is the varied transliteration of English names in its different editions, variations that result from the unclear orthography of the original manuscript. These issues surround the identification of the printer to whom Salih apprenticed himself in 1819: Ghulam Husayn's edition has “Mistar Dans,” but other editions give the name as Vans/Wans or Vals/Wals.Footnote ³⁸ From the hundreds of printers known to have been active in London in 1819 whose names and trading details are recorded, only one name fits both the orthography and Salih's statement that his printing master had printed translations of the New Testament in Persian, Arabic, Hindustani (i.e., Urdu), and Syriac.Footnote ³⁹ This was the oriental language printer, typesetter, and type-caster Richard Watts (d. 1844).

Although not suggested by the modern editors of Salih's journal, the name Watts is no less consistent with the original manuscript than the other suggested readings.Footnote ⁴⁰ The other main printers in London at this time who worked with Persian type were William Bulmer (d. 1830) and Vincent Figgins (d. 1861), and we can discount any connection with either because they printed secular works rather than Bibles. Watts is thus the only identification that fits with the extensive evidence on the London print trade. By 1819 he had already made his name as a printer of the Bible in the languages Salih listed. Indeed, Watts was the oriental printer for the Church Missionary Society (CMS, founded 1799), the Bible Society (founded 1804), and the Prayer Book and Homily Society (founded 1812); he was closely associated with Salih's friend Gore Ouseley, who, as vice president of the Bible Society and a scholar of the languages in which Watts printed, was in regular contact with the printer.Footnote ⁴¹ He also worked closely with Salih's two university associates, John David Macbride (1778–1868) of Oxford and Samuel Lee of Cambridge. With its location at the junction of the Strand and Fleet Street, Watts's Oriental Type-Foundry on Temple Bar was on the same street as Northumberland House, the home of Salih's other friend, Hugh Percy (third duke of Northumberland, 1785–1847), with whom he recorded spending a good deal of time in the months of his apprenticeship.

If Salih's cultural skills had allowed him to develop the necessary social connections to fulfill his goals, it is worth pausing to consider the motives of Watts. Here we need to look at his background and the nature of his trade. Watts began his career at Cambridge, where between 1802 and 1809 he held the office of university printer.Footnote ⁴² Cambridge was already a center of the emerging evangelical movement: the Persian translator of the gospels, Henry Martyn (1781–1812), had turned missionary in its evangelical circles, in which Salih also moved during his own Cambridge visit of 1819. It was amid this pious atmosphere that Watts made his name when, in 1806, he and his successor as university printer, John Smith, issued the Bible Society's launch book, a cheap New Testament in Welsh.Footnote ⁴³ Through Cambridge's small evangelical circle, Watts came into contact with professor Samuel Lee, who had a tradesman's background before his extraordinary language skills brought him to Cambridge under CMS sponsorship.Footnote ⁴⁴ After his tutelage with Welsh, Watts established his reputation not only as a meticulous scripture printer but also as a caster of non-Roman type, beginning with Greek and progressing through Syriac and Arabic to “Ethiopic” and an eventual total of sixty-seven type sets.Footnote ⁴⁵ In 1809 he left Cambridge to set up his own workshop in Broxbourne and in 1816 established himself in the premises where Salih knew him on London's Temple Bar, a short walk from the Bible Society's headquarters at Bible House. From here in 1818 he used his Persian type to print Henry Martyn's Hindustani/Urdu prayer book for the Homily Society, a project that may have attracted Salih to him.Footnote ⁴⁶

In 1819, the very year in which Salih was apprenticed on Watts's premises, the latter published an Urdu New Testament using an expanded version of his Persian type.Footnote ⁴⁷ The work was done under the supervision of Watts's and Salih's mutual associate, Professor Lee.Footnote ⁴⁸ Another mutual associate, Professor Macbride, oversaw an Arabic Psalter through publication by the Bible Society with Watts as the printer.Footnote ⁴⁹ Then in 1821 Watts printed an Arabic translation of the New Testament with the title Kitab al-ʿAhd al-Jadid, which was also corrected by Lee.Footnote ⁵⁰ Because there is evidence that Salih may have been involved in Lee's biblical translations, it is possible that Salih may have played some role in Watts's editions of Lee's Persian Psalter and New Testament, which finally cleared the press in the early 1820s.Footnote ⁵¹ He would not have been the only one of ʿAbbas Mirza's new men brought into such projects: on his way back from Iran in 1815, Gore Ouseley had persuaded someone by the name of Mirza Jaʿfar to correct the Persian New Testament, which he then helped the Russian Bible Society print in 1815. (This was possibly the Azeri scholar Mirza Jaʿfar Topchibashev [1790–1868], although it is worth noting that in 1824 Salih is also reported to have sent a Mirza Jaʿfar to bring a lithographic press from Saint Petersburg.)Footnote ⁵²

It is unfortunate that Salih recorded few details of his dealings with Watts other than that he went to his premises every day for the last six months of his stay in London. Although we can reconstruct in detail the mechanical aspects of Salih's apprenticeship, from oiling and repairing the press to preparing the paper and setting the matrices, this is less relevant than the other work in which Salih may have engaged with Watts.Footnote ⁵³ Given that in taking on an apprentice a master printer expected help in return for training, we can assume there was something in the arrangement for Watts as well as Salih. Here his skills as one of the ahl-e qalam, men of the pen, would have proved useful. As Leslie Howsam noted, the Bible Society drew London's transient foreign population into its projects: “The community of foreigners in London extended to reliable translators, editors, and printers who could be entrusted with work that the English-speaking members of the Committee were not qualified to oversee.”Footnote ⁵⁴ We know that other “transcultured” Muslims were occasionally employed in Watts's workshop, as in the case of Sullivan Law Hyder, the son of a writing master at the East India College, Ghulam Haydar (d. 1823), and an Englishwoman.Footnote ⁵⁵ On his father's death, Sullivan (also known as Sulman, i.e., Sulayman) was apprenticed to Watts for five years before being sent to work as a printer in Calcutta in 1831. With the skills in Persian orthography Sulivan had learned from his father, he must have been a useful understudy for Watts, who was always in need of skilled calligraphers to prepare the originals for his type.

Such collaboration is scarcely surprising, because for all his technical skills as an oriental printer, Watts could not actually read any of these languages and often relied on scholars like Lee and Macbride to check the accuracy of his copy.Footnote ⁵⁶ However, on a day-to-day level, the professors were not at hand in Watts's workshop when such familiarity with the language being printed was no less crucial. Here it is helpful to differentiate between two distinct elements of printing, namely, presswork (which requires technical skill but no familiarity with the language being printed) and typesetting (which requires the compositor to have at least basic familiarity with the language, especially with cursive scripts like Arabic).Footnote ⁵⁷ In other words, in an echo of the language books like Salih and Price's Persian Dialogues, such printing ventures typically demanded collaborative effort.

One solution to the problem of finding such collaboration was to outsource oriental printing to locations with easier access to native scholars, a decision that in turn helped further disseminate printing into Muslim regions. With the establishment of the CMS's Arabic press in Malta and the Bible Society's collaboration with the Serampore Baptist Press near Calcutta, this was exactly what happened.Footnote ⁵⁸ However, during Salih's years in London, such opportunities were still limited through the concentration of Arabic-script printing technology in London. We cannot be sure whether Salih helped Watts as Sullivan Hyder did, but with Watts working on several Arabic-script publications during Salih's apprenticeship, it is hard to imagine him not making use of the skills of the mīrzā (secretary, notable) by way of recompense for his training.

Although Salih did describe Watts as a Bible printer, he did not mention that he worked on behalf of the new missionary organizations.Footnote ⁵⁹ In terms of scale, the Bible Society was the most important promoter of Arabic-script printing anywhere in the world at this time.Footnote ⁶⁰ Before a single book had been printed in Iran, 5,000 Persian New Testaments were printed by the Bible Society in Saint Petersburg in 1815; by 1825, more than 20,000 Persian, Arabic, and Urdu scripture books had been issued from London.Footnote ⁶¹ The Bible Society was at this point pushing Arabic-script printing to levels of precision and production that far outstripped even the East India Company's printers. The Bible was not only a huge book but also one to be typeset and printed with the most scrupulous care.

We should bear in mind the economic impact of the Bible trade on London's publishing industry: in the year of Salih's apprenticeship, Leigh's New Picture of London (printed at number 18 the Strand, a few doors away from Watts's office) celebrated the fact that in the previous year the Bible Society had published no fewer than 123,247 Bibles!Footnote ⁶² The foreign Bible industry into which Salih was inadvertently drawn was very big business indeed.Footnote ⁶³ In terms of print runs and numbers of pages Salih thus found himself in what was in 1819 the biggest center of Arabic-script printing in the world. Far from the old story of religion disabling technological progress from the Muslim side, this presents a more complex picture of Christian religious zeal enabling Islamic print modernity in a period more usually associated with the “secular” imperialism of Napoleon. Although the later role of Protestant missionary societies in the history of printing in the Arab Middle East is well known, Salih's time in London predates even the earliest such ventures with the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions.Footnote ⁶⁴ The connection between an Iranian middleman and two professors, a diplomat, and a printer all associated with the Bible Society is clear evidence of the evangelical circumstances in which print technology was transmitted to Iran.

Let us now widen our focus to see Iranian printing in the context of the rapid global spread of printing in the early 19th century, when a whole series of Asian, American, and Australasian regions acquired printing presses for the first time. The early 19th century was a period of intense industrial competition between England and its rivals, in which the export of both machines and trained apprentices was subject to state control. This regulation of technology—and its subversion through smuggling and illegal emigration—was an important factor in the dissemination of industrial technologies in the early 1800s, not least in the spread of new technologies to North America, a factor placing Iran's modernizing ventures in a global context.Footnote ⁶⁵ Although Salih makes no explicit confession of smuggling in his journal (we can hardly expect that he would), the circumstances he describes exporting his printing press suggest he might be considered alongside other traveling industrial “smugglers” of the period, such as the pioneer American mill owner Francis Cabot Lowell (1775–1817).

This is how Salih's journal records events. A cheap printing press and Arabic type were purchased on his behalf by Watts and Gore Ouseley. Then, although the press was acquired in London and Salih shortly embarked from London's docks, he did not collect his press and other scientific equipment (including a telescope, the result of meeting the astronomer and lens grinder William Herschel) until several days later at Gravesend on the coast, at which point he immediately set sail for the continent and his voyage home.Footnote ⁶⁶ The seaside transaction crops up in the journal because Salih complains that the man who delivered the equipment charged far more money than arranged, leading to a costly argument. The episode thus begs the question of why Salih did not save himself the trouble and expense by loading his machines in London in the first place. In view of the legal context, one answer is that he deliberately bypassed the customs house at the port of London by employing a smuggler to bring his machines to the coast, an arrangement with shady characters that had the predictable consequence of costing more money than expected.

If state regulation formed a potential check on technology transfer, developments in technology enabled printing presses to circulate more efficiently. Having looked at the social and political dimensions of the birth of Islamic printing, we must now turn to the technological dimensions of Salih's and his contemporary journeymen's success. This technological factor also helps explain the importance of the years around 1820 to Islamic printing. The key development here was Lord Stanhope's invention in 1800 of the freestanding and portable iron handpress and the rapid and repeated improvement of his prototype by imitators over the next two decades. (Stanhope deliberately left his invention without patent.) The new handpresses revolutionized printing by simplifying the range of required skills and speeding up the printing process. Mass production reduced their cost, and these durable all-in-one machines could be purchased and transported whole rather than constructed on location. With an industrial infrastructure capable of producing such cast-iron presses on a profitable scale, early 19th-century England became printing's world center of industrialization, tying London to a new global network of not only printers but also designers of printing equipment.

Again, the American dimensions to this process place Iranian printing in its proper global context. In the same year that Salih was apprenticed to Watts in London, the Scottish traveler John Duncan was exploring the industrializing towns of the United States and employing a style of technological diary keeping that reflects Salih's accounts of England's mills and factories.Footnote ⁶⁷ Just as Salih recorded in detail the print runs of London newspapers, in Philadelphia Duncan took notes on the city's newspapers, book trade, and “the finest and most accurate specimens of typography that have yet appeared in America.”Footnote ⁶⁸ In addition to Duncan connecting Philadelphia printers with London, in 1817 the city's most important print mechanic, George Clymer (1754–1834), moved to London to register the patent of his Columbian handpress and use England's greater commercial and industrial base to expand his business.Footnote ⁶⁹

Salih did not detail which brand of press he exported, but based on the types of portable iron handpress available in London at the time, it is likely to have been one of the various versions of the Stanhope or else a Columbian.Footnote ⁷⁰ Such new iron handpresses formed the technological dimension of the rapid global expansion of printing in the early 1800s as versions of them were carried to Malta, Egypt, Lebanon, Iran, the Crimea, India, and the Malay peninsula as well as (and in some cases before) Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and Canada. It is no coincidence that fifteen years after Salih left Watts's workshop for Iran, Watts's later apprentice William Colenso (1811–99) sailed to New Zealand under the auspices of the CMS. Like Salih, Colenso also carried a portable Stanhope press and within a few months of his arrival in 1835 printed in Maori the first ever book in New Zealand, the Epistles to the Ephesians and Phillipians.Footnote ⁷¹ To complete the small global circle of these printing pioneers, the basis for the Maori translation and type had been laid by Salih's collaborator Samuel Lee in a Maori grammar printed in 1820 by Richard Watts.Footnote ⁷²

The case of another transcultural Middle Easterner who entered the same circle in which Salih was moving illustrates the global collusion of evangelicalism, travel, and the new technology. In spring 1819, as Salih worked daily in Watts's workshop, an Arab traveler claiming to be the Syrian Arab archbishop of Jerusalem appeared in London to ask for help in printing Christian texts. An assembly gathered in response at the Freemason's Arms tavern off Covent Garden (a ten-minute walk from Watts's workshop): there were Samuel Lee; the president of the Bible Society (and former governor general of India), Lord Teignmouth; and the Philadelphian inventor of the Columbian press, George Clymer. Together they pledged support that included one of Clymer's new handpresses, which the “archbishop” was able to transport to the Levant.Footnote ⁷³ In technological terms, the timing of the rapid diffusion of printing in the Islamic world around 1820 had much to do with the invention of such robust, portable, and relatively inexpensive presses and their production on an industrial scale. However, mechanical ingenuity needed evangelical enthusiasm to spread the new portable presses to Asia.

A converse side of the rapid technological change of the early 1800s also contributed to the diffusion of the handpress—the device's swift obsolescence in industrial centers like London with the rise of steam-powered machine printing in the 1810s and 1820s. In the first two decades of the 19th century, Stanhope and his imitators had manufactured thousands of handpresses for book and newspaper publishers in London and exported many others under license to Europe. However, London's major publishers began to switch over to steam-powered machine presses, with The Times newspaper leading the way in 1814.Footnote ⁷⁴ As other publishers made the same switch in the 1820s and later, hundreds of redundant handpresses flooded the London market and were shipped to the continent and beyond. In the autumn of 1819 Salih stood at the cusp of this wave and so recorded his purchase through Watts and Ouseley of a used handpress for what struck him as a surprisingly good price.

CONFLICTING PROJECTS OF PRINT MODERNITY

Having followed how print technology was transferred to Iran, we now address what this transfer of technology was intended for by considering the overlapping and at times conflicting projects of the small circle from which modern Arabic-script printing emerged. Immediately striking about this collision—and perhaps collusion—of agendas is how a state-sponsored Iranian mission to acquire new knowledge was enveloped in a British project to turn technology toward the conversion of the Islamic world through Bible printing on a massive scale. We have already seen the likelihood that, like other native-language assistants, Salih offered service to the printer Richard Watts as a reciprocal part of his training. The details in Salih's journal of meetings with Lee and Macbride, the leading translators of the Bible into Arabic and Persian, suggest that like other Muslim scholars in Britain at the time (such as Mirza Khalil of the East India College), Salih was also drawn into translation work.Footnote ⁷⁵ The men Salih described as helping him acquire his skills and printing press—the Bible Society's vice president Gore Ouseley and its printer Watts—may have harbored hopes that Salih would continue their efforts in Iran. As we have seen, Gore Ouseley had already persuaded Mirza Jaʿfar in Saint Petersburg to correct Henry Martin's Persian gospel, and the Bible Society later sponsored him to translate the Old Testament.Footnote ⁷⁶ We hear hints of such collusion in Salih's case in the memoirs of the evangelical “bluestocking” Hannah More (1745–1833), whom he visited in the hamlet of Barley Wood near Bristol. An English memoir of the meeting records how

This recorded conversation suggests Salih was not above making the evangelicals promises he did not keep. As to whether such promises also underwrote his entry to Watts's workshop, we can only speculate. However, the overall picture of Salih being drawn into an evangelical printing agenda is clear.

What can we say in return about the aims of Salih and his state sponsors in acquiring print technology? Here, too, the picture is more complex than may first appear given a long-standing historiographical trend identifying Iranian printing with an agenda of secularizing modernism.Footnote ⁷⁸

There is evidence to support the idea of newspaper printing (i.e., a government gazette) as a major Iranian aim in acquiring printing; after all, Salih earned his fame by founding the first Iranian newspaper in 1837 called simply Kaghaz-e Akhbar (newspaper).Footnote ⁷⁹ Salih's travelogue shows a keen awareness of the newspaper's power. After shocking a crowd in Cambridge as he apparently rose from the dead after a carriage crash, for instance, Salih wrote to the local newspaper asking its editor to refrain from printing any account of the embarrassing episode.Footnote ⁸⁰ Such was the rarity of an Iranian visitor to England that Salih and his three fellow students had already been featured in the English press, which a few years earlier had garnished every hint of society gossip about the Iranian ambassador, Mirza Abu al-Hasan.Footnote ⁸¹ Salih also spent his apprenticeship with Watts on the edge of Fleet Street as it entered its golden age as the home of England's newspaper trade.Footnote ⁸²

For his part, Salih's state sponsor, ʿAbbas Mirza, regularly received positive coverage in The Times, and evidence suggests that Salih played some part in this. On 12 April 1819, for example, an article in The Times praised ʿAbbas Mirza's “intercourse with learned Europeans; his speaking the English and French languages very fluently.” All of this suggests ʿAbbas Mirza's awareness of the newspaper as a useful political tool and Salih's familiarity with the international public sphere that the newspaper formed seem to have helped him become ʿAbbas Mirza's private secretary after his return home.Footnote ⁸³ Salih's travelogue shows his (and presumably his sponsor's) desire to gather facts about newspapers: he wildly estimates the number printed every year in Britain at 25 million and describes how up to sixty “advertisements” (an innovation for which he borrowed the English word) could be placed alongside journalistic content to provide revenue to proprietors and the government through taxation.Footnote ⁸⁴

Yet it was not until January 1837, eighteen years after he apprenticed himself to Richard Watts, that Salih issued Iran's first newspaper. Published from Tehran, Kaghaz-e Akhbar lasted for only one issue, although five months later he launched Akhbar-e Vaqaʾiʿ (Current News), which became Iran's first regular newspaper. When it too ceased publication after three years, no newspaper took its place for another eleven years.Footnote ⁸⁵ The earliest surviving record of either newspaper is a sample issue of Akhbar-e Vaqaʾiʿ from Muharram 1253 (April/May 1837) that Salih sent to the Royal Asiatic Society in London, reflecting his friendship with several of its founders (including Gore Ouseley) as well as a desire to advertise Iranian “progress.”Footnote ⁸⁶ Its contents demonstrate the ends to which Salih—by this time still in government service—put the skills he learned among England's evangelicals. Because of state usage of the press, most of the content concerned foreign and domestic politics, with an emphasis on Iran's international relations: the return of an ambassador from Istanbul, the arrival in Bombay of a steam-powered British warship (kishtī-ye jangī), and a party at the British embassy in Tehran for the birthday of William IV.Footnote ⁸⁷ However, the evangelical origins of Iranian printing remained present in a report that Mirza Sayyid ʿAli of Shiraz, the unpaid munshī who helped Henry Martyn translate the gospel, was to receive a belated gift of a hundred pounds sterling from the Bible Society.Footnote ⁸⁸ If the evangelical connections of Iranian modernity have since been forgotten, they were present—indeed newsworthy—for its actual participants.

If newspaper and scripture suggest a neat dichotomy at the birth of Iranian printing between a religious British agenda and a secular Iranian agenda, the true picture was more complex. By turning back to the very first items printed in Iran at the time of Salih's apprenticeship, we see how Iranian printing also belonged to the distinctly religious modernity of the early 19th century. It is unfortunate that, for all Salih's efforts, bibliographers have been unable to recover any book issued from his printing press except a possible Gulistan of Saʿdi reported by one scholar to have been printed in Tabriz in 1828.Footnote ⁸⁹

To examine the purposes to which the first Iranian printing presses were put, we must turn instead to his contemporary, another government servant called Zayn al-ʿAbidin, who in 1816 brought a press from Saint Petersburg, where he had likewise been sent by ʿAbbas Mirza to study printing. Although al-ʿAbidin left no travelogue of his own, evidence suggests he too was exposed to the same economy of Bible printing that characterized Salih's apprenticeship. In the years directly before al-ʿAbidin's journey, British evangelicals founded the Russian Bible Society in Saint Petersburg, where we have seen Henry Martyn's Persian New Testament being published with a print run of 5,000 copies in 1815.Footnote ⁹⁰ Bible Society records show how it was eagerly distributed to the eastern fringes of the Russian Empire, including the Iranian cities of Rasht and Tabriz, where Iranian merchants bought it in large numbers.Footnote ⁹¹ Bearing in mind the utter novelty of a Persian printed book before any such thing was printed in Iran—and the Bible Society's trademark less-than-cost price—we can easily appreciate the merchants' alacrity. Because al-ʿAbidin was sent from Tabriz to Saint Petersburg just after the New Testament appeared in Tabriz's markets, it may have been a decisive factor in ʿAbbas Mirza's dispatching him to the city where it was printed (as stated on the frontispiece), a possibility of travel enabled by improved diplomatic relations after the Gulistan Treaty of 1813. Without the Persian New Testament, it is difficult to make sense of the logic of ʿAbbas Mirza sending al-ʿAbidin to Saint Petersburg, where Arabic-script printing had an extremely limited history that could not compare with the more accessible Bombay, Calcutta, or even Müteferrika's Istanbul, and where even non-Arabic printing continued to rely on immigrant German printers and book importers.Footnote ⁹²

Whatever the evangelical role in Zayn al-ʿAbidin's apprenticeship, in 1817 the first book was issued from the press brought from Russia.Footnote ⁹³ This, the first Persian book printed in Iran, was the Risala-ye Jihadiyya (Treatise on Holy War), a collection of Shiʿi fatāwā on the legitimacy of war against Russia.Footnote ⁹⁴ Similar religious concerns underwrote two of the earliest works to bear al-ʿAbidin's own imprint, issued in 1823 and 1824, respectively: the Muharriq al-Qulub (Purifier of Hearts) by Mahdi ibn Abi Dharr al-Naraqi (d. 1795), on the martyrdom and miracles of the Shiʿi imams, and the Hasaniyya (On Hasan) of Mulla Ibrahim (fl. 850), on Shiʿi martyrology, both printed on Italian paper.Footnote ⁹⁵ In a similar vein, the first Iranian lithographed book was a Qurʾan printed in Tabriz around 1832–33.Footnote ⁹⁶ When al-ʿAbidin printed the Risala-ye Abila-Kubi (Treatise on Smallpox Vaccination) by ʿAbbas Mirza's personal physician (ḥakīm bāshī), Irish doctor and East India Company servant John Cormick (d. 1833), the nascent Iranian publishing industry did turn toward the scientific books with which it has long been associated.Footnote ⁹⁷

However, the birth of printing in Iran was no leap of the full-grown secular from Zeus's side, still less an affront to the ʿulamaʾ. Indeed, the latter were consulted en masse in cities like Tabriz and Shiraz to gather the opinions that made up the Risala-ye Jihadiyya.Footnote ⁹⁸ In a period in which, as in England, scientific modernity had not yet been conceived as the antithesis of faith, we see instead an adaptation of the new technology to Iran's own cultural setting, albeit one in which the state was emerging as a dominant participant.Footnote ⁹⁹

A TYPE CAST: REPEATED PATTERNS IN EARLY MUSLIM PRINTING

Having examined the roles of travel and transculturalism and industrialized evangelicalism and state publishing in the birth of Iranian printing, we now look briefly at the repeated play of these forces in the spread of printing to other Muslim regions around 1820. Let us consider the first sustained Muslim-controlled Arabic printing press: the Bulaq Press founded in Cairo in 1820.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Here, as in Iran, a modernizing government recovering from European invasion sponsored a journeyman's apprenticeship in Europe. In 1815—the same year Salih arrived in London—Muhammad ʿAli (r. 1805–48) dispatched Niqula al-Masabiki (d. 1830) to Milan, where he spent four years studying printing.Footnote ¹⁰¹ The choice of al-Masabiki was no coincidence, for as a Christian Arab from Lebanon, he was already a cultural middleman. Italians there knew him by a suitably Italianate name, Nicolà Mesabichi.Footnote ¹⁰² Like Salih in London, in Milan and Rome al-Masabiki was able to tap into a timely confluence of missionary Christianity and industrialized printing. As a Maronite, he entered the expatriate Maronite community of Rome that had been using Arabic printing for several centuries; in Milan the Collegio Ambrosiano had been issuing Arabic works since the 17th century.Footnote ¹⁰³ In Milan, al-Masabiki attached himself to the mechanical entrepreneur Giuseppe Morosi (1772–1840), who, as one of the fathers of Milanese industrialization, served as a counterpoint to the technicians Salih interviewed in England.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Prior to meeting al-Masabiki, Morosi himself had made a long government-sponsored viaggio tecnologico, written a travelogue, and inspected, copied, and imported British-made machines.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

As in the Iranian case, European religion was a key factor in technology transfer, but as a Christian al-Masabiki had no need to accommodate himself. Unlike Salih, he could draw on an older Catholic program of sponsoring printing among Arab Christians, and through his cultural mediation, he passed technology to Muhammad ʿAli's government. Al-Masabiki returned to Egypt in 1819, the same year that Salih left London, likewise bringing with him a transportable printing press and the skills to use it. Italian eyewitnesses (including Milanese Giuseppe Forni) reported that the press al-Masabiki brought with him was the same modern kind used at the Stamperia Reale (Royal Press) in Milan, a new institution dating from Milan's years of Napoleonic rule.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ When we combine this fact with al-Masabiki's training under Morosi, who traveled widely in search of the newest equipment and techniques, it seems highly likely that this was one of the new iron handpresses.

In 1822, the year that al-Masabiki issued Bulaq's first book, the Italian traveler Giovanni Battista Brocchi (1772–1826) described a meeting with “Mesabichi” in his journal. Brocchi noted how on his return al-Masabiki had managed to cast both Arabic and Turkish type before teaching others in Cairo to do the same.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Among the first books to be issued from the press was a Turkish manual on military reform, reflecting the concerns with niẓām-e jad ī d that motivated ʿAbbas Mirza in Iran. However, in a reflection of the language-learning “middletexts” that we have seen issuing from the other transnational social exchanges that enabled technological transfer, the first Bulaq book was an Arabic–Italian dictionary, through which Muhammad ʿAli hoped his new Egyptians could access European knowledge without going to the expense of studying abroad.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ In an echo of Salih's language book with William Price, the Arabic–Italian dictionary was prepared by Don Raffaele de Monachis at Bulaq. Don Raffaele was an Egyptian Melkite Christian whom Napoleon had earlier brought to Paris to teach Arabic at the École des Langues Orientales and who now taught Italian at Muhammad ʿAli's college at Bulaq.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

The spread of printing beyond Bulaq was enabled by other such cultural middlemen, like Mose Castelli (Musa Kastilli, 1816–84), who in 1832 moved from Florence to Egypt to set up his publishing house, the Matbaʿa Kastilli, in Cairo. Although not a Christian Arab like al-Masabiki, Castelli was in a similar interstitial position as an Italian Jew.Footnote ¹¹⁰ In Egypt as in Iran, we see again the collusion of travel, transculturalism, and state sponsorship.

This same blend is seen in the career of arguably the most important “Muslim” print entrepreneur of the 19th century, Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq (1804–87), whose itinerant career linked Lebanon, Malta, and Egypt with Cambridge, Paris, Tunis, and finally Istanbul.Footnote ¹¹¹ A Maronite Christian by birth like al-Masabiki, Shidyaq was introduced to Arabic printing through the British evangelical expansion into the Mediterranean in the wake of the earlier Indian and Iranian missions. From around 1822 he was employed at the Arabic press established that year on Malta by the CMS. Because the early Arabic type used at the Malta press was cast by Richard Watts in London, the tools with which Shidyaq learned his trade were identical to those used by Salih three years earlier.Footnote ¹¹² The CMS press in Malta was the precursor and transmission point for the various American mission presses that spread to Lebanon after 1834. Its foundation in the early 1820s points again to this date and its evangelical context in the diffusion of Arabic printing to the eastern Mediterranean.

Shidyaq's apprenticeship at the CMS press, and subsequently with the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (founded 1812), likewise brought its cultural requirements: he converted to Protestantism and adopted the dress and manners of his British and American collaborators. As in the Iranian and Egyptian cases, this transculturalism found parallel literary expression in an Arabic travelogue (riḥla) and a set of language-learning French/Arabic “dialogues” written with the missionary and Arabic printer George Badger (1815–1888), with whom Shidyaq also compiled a voluminous English/Arabic lexicon.Footnote ¹¹³ Just as Salih was drawn into the evangelical Cambridge circle of Samuel Lee, Shidyaq worked with Lee and his Cambridge successors, Reverend Henry Griffin Williams and Thomas Jarrett, on a new Arabic translation of the Psalms. It was published in London by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in 1850.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Like Salih in Iran, Shidyaq subsequently helped found Arabic journalism. From about 1830, he spent several years as editor of the first Arabic newspaper, Al-Waqaʾiʿ al-Misriyya (Egyptian Affairs, founded 1828), published from al-Masabiki's press at Bulaq. When he later moved to found other newspapers in Tunis and then Istanbul, Faris al-Shidyaq underwent a final self-transformation by converting to Islam and taking the name Ahmad.

There is no space here to trace in detail these processes in India and Malaysia, where they also appeared. Suffice it to note that in 1820 the nawab of Awadh established the first Muslim printing press in Lucknow, whence in 1801 Mirza Abu Talib had traveled to London and described its printers and newspapers in his Persian travelogue.Footnote ¹¹⁵ In 1822 the East India Company servant Ram Mohan Roy (1774–1833), who like Salih also wrote a native grammar and later met several of Salih's collaborators in England, founded the earliest Persian newspaper, Mirʾat al-Akhbar (News Mirror), in Calcutta.Footnote ¹¹⁶ In the Anglicized munshīs and English technicians at work in Lucknow in the 1820s and 1830s, as in Roy's connections to the Baptist missionary printers of Serampore and his travels in the service of the nawab of Awadh to England (where he met several of Salih's associates), we see the same pattern of travel, transculturalism, and government service.Footnote ¹¹⁷

The emergence of Malay printing in Arabic script (jā wī) followed a similar course, with the first Malay text printed in Malacca in 1817 by the London Missionary Society before the technology eventually passed into Muslim hands through the collaboration of the Bible Society printer Reverend Benjamin Keasberry (1811–75) and his munshī and translator, ʿAbdullah bin ʿAbdullah ʿAbd al-Qadir (Munshi Abdullah, 1796–1854).Footnote ¹¹⁸ From this collaboration, too, there emerged another printed linguistic “middletext” reflecting those of Don Raffaele and Mirza Salih.Footnote ¹¹⁹ With his English clothes, modern ideas, and employment in the bureaucracy of the colonial state, the middleman ʿAbdullah became the founder of indigenous Malay printing. His own written output comprised a travelogue and an autobiography, the first Malay book printed through the new technique of lithography. Further afield, similar processes were at work in the emergence of printing in Afghanistan, when at the turn of the 20th century the Turkish zincographer Mehmed Fazlı was brought to Kabul to teach printing before being dispatched to acquire new color-printing techniques in Paris.Footnote ¹²⁰ Perhaps the most extraordinary of these middlemen had appeared in Istanbul as early as 1779. When an attempt was made to reinvigorate printing after the collapse of Müteferrika's press, the key figure was the Scotts “renegado” formerly known as Campbell but now living in Istanbul under the name Ingiliz Mustafa.Footnote ¹²¹