On 17 January 1871, Cairo's al-Matbaʿa al-Kastaliyya (Kastali Press) completed an unusual printing.Footnote 1 Musa Kastali (b. 1816),Footnote 2 the Italian-born Jewish owner and founder of the press, almost certainly had a hand in this affair. For the printing was an eighty-three page defense of Musa's claims against the Azhari Shaykh Hasan al-ʿIdwi al-Hamzawi (1806–86), who, Musa argued, initiated the dispute when he failed to pay for the books that he commissioned from Musa's press. The matter had twice been heard at the majālis al-tujjār (merchant courts) and decided in Shaykh Hasan's favor. With little chance for judicial recourse, Musa now presented his case to the court of public opinion through the vehicle of print. His publication mixed the drama of a business transaction gone sour with the intricacies of Cairene private printing and the nuances of Egyptian, Ottoman, and European law. Indeed, it called for the reform of Egypt's legal system. Its anomalous content matched its unconventional title: “This is a Treatise [risāla] Written by the Lawyer Katiski on the Suit between Cavalier Musa Kastali and Shaykh Hasan al-ʿIdwi. And in It Is Proven the Falsity of the Two Verdicts as They Are Permeated with the Flaw[s] of Violating Boundaries, Lack of Equity, and of the Terms of Elective Legal Power,Footnote 3 Requête Civile,Footnote 4 and Political Mediation.”Footnote 5
This article uses Musa and the Risala as entry points for exploring the political economy of Cairo's Arabic private printing industry during the third quarter of the 19th century. The private printing industry of Cairo connected several cities, produced texts in multiple languages, operated alongside manuscript copying, and interacted closely with Egypt's governmental printing industry.Footnote 6 However I focus exclusively on the basic functioning of Cairo's Arabic private printing industry here to challenge conventional depictions of Islamicate print. These tend to approach printing in a generalized way through the lens of technology, denying the congruity between print and manuscript cultures and projecting the idea that the one supplanted the other. They also construct a continuous history for separate instances of printing, and in so doing overlook the fact that these were each the product of discrete historical contexts. Moreover, these depictions take the western experience of the technology as their model insofar as they portray the expansion of Islamicate printing and the revolutionary impact it supposedly had on society as inevitable.Footnote 7 Along these lines, printing in Egypt is usually presented as having caused a literary efflorescence during the second half of the 19th century after the linear progression of the early modern presses of minority religious groups across the Ottoman Empire, the printing presses brought to Egypt during the 1798–1801 French invasion, and the establishment of the Bulaq Press under the wālī (governor) of Ottoman Egypt Mehmed Ali (r. 1805–48) circa 1820.Footnote 8
Moving away from this framework of print as an overarching phenomenon, I focus on the Arabic private printing industry of Cairo as a distinct structure that emerged among people living in a particular place and time. In doing so, I encourage scholars to examine how printing functioned in specific environments before associating print with the major themes of Middle Eastern modernity which it has been considered to have shaped, if not caused, such as the nahḍa (cultural awakening) and nationalism. My approach highlights what little is known about instances of Middle Eastern printing, peoples’ experiences of them, and how exactly they influenced the past. It renders print the contingent byproduct of peoples’ means, goals, and practices, in contrast to the characterization of Middle Eastern print as a deterministic force that swept through the region and upended earlier ways of life. It emphasizes the precise social, cultural, and legal structures through which printings passed, and with which their producers intended their material and intellectual content to engage. And it invalidates assumptions that the Islamicate world was somehow deficient during the period in which manuscripts purveyed its written output, or that technologies such as the printing press sparked the advent of a new era.Footnote 9
The Arabic private printing industry of Cairo holds particular significance to scholars of the Middle East because it produced many of the texts that we rely upon to access the past. Developed in the 1850s, it distinguished Cairo as one of the first Ottoman cities to incorporate print into its textual culture. Yet little is known about how the business of private printing arose or functioned because systematic records for it are not known to exist.Footnote 10 I fill this gap by using the constituent printings of the industry to reconstruct the political economy that guided its operations. Doing so evinces that private printing developed from manuscript practices, specifically that of commissioning whereby presses worked on order to produce texts that were chosen and funded by members of the public.Footnote 11 Commissioning was central to private printing, and demonstrates the crucial role that commerce played in determining what got printed.
Significantly, my focus on political economy also highlights what little is known about printers in modern Middle Eastern scholarship. The practices, fortunes, aims, and limitations of these men are integral to the very existence and nonexistence of particular texts. But while printings have long been appreciated for their worded content, for what they tell us about their authors, and for the broader development of print technology,Footnote 12 they have yet to be examined for what they tell us about the work of those who constructed them physically. Against this, one reason for the Risala’s import is that it is, so far as I am aware, the only extant account of a private printer's business practices. It contains singular details about the costs and structuring of deals and how they may have been regulated. Moreover, it explicitly links these details to the wider legal, financial, and cultural dynamics that characterized Ottoman Cairo during this period. Indeed, it appears that Musa printed the idiosyncratic text in an attempt to influence such forces. I therefore reconcile the Risala’s text with the political economy from which it emerged to argue for the paramountcy of situating printings within their socioeconomic contexts in addition to their intellectual ones.
Musa counts as one of Cairo's earliest private printers, and he played an important role in the professionalization of his craft. Accordingly, I chart the development of the Arabic private printing industry and the rise of Musa's work through the texts that he and others like him produced. Next, I turn to the Risala for the details that it gives regarding the business of print as told from the perspective of a printer. I conclude with a discussion of how Cairo's political economy of private printing provides scholars with novel and indispensable insights into the history and historiography of the modern Middle East.
MANUSCRIPT CUSTOM AND THE EMERGENCE OF ARABIC PRIVATE PRINTING IN CAIRO
Private printing occurred in Egypt before the mid-19th century. Short-lived Jewish presses printed Hebrew texts in Cairo during the early modern era,Footnote 13 and European presses printed in western languages in Alexandria from at least the first decades of the 19th century.Footnote 14 But in contrast to these presses that printed for their distinctive communities, the tradition of printing to which Musa belonged emerged in the 1850s to produce Arabic texts from Cairo for the mainstream population.Footnote 15
Little information exists about these early Arabic private presses beyond the very printings that they produced. These texts show that the presses expanded into print via the spaces, norms, and practices of the manuscript industry.Footnote 16 They functioned for profit and based themselves around al-Azhar mosque, Cairo's long-standing center for textual production.Footnote 17 They reproduced texts lithographically almost exclusively until around 1860 by hand copying them onto transfer paper, pressing this onto a lithographic stone, and then taking an impression from the stone. In this they differed from the city's governmental presses, which used the metal typefaces of typography.Footnote 18 They usually did not list press names, and these were not stable between printings in cases when they did. And they operated through what appear to be shifting groups of people, or consortiums, that may have taken turns on lithographic stones, as opposed to fixed businesses with brick and mortar printing facilities.Footnote 19
The colophons, or closing statements, of the printings that these men produced give us some indication of their roles within this process. Unlike the colophons of contemporary manuscripts that usually include the date when the copying of the text was completed and on occasion the name of the copyist,Footnote 20 the colophons of these printings also frequently list the names of those involved in producing them practically and financially.Footnote 21 Hence they include the names of their commissioners, who were commonly referred to as multazimūn (contractors), or designated after the phrase ʿalā dhimmat (at the expense of). The clusters of names that appear within these colophons allow me to venture that approximately ten consortiums operated in Cairo until the early 1860s. They also show that printing developed among an interconnected group of local tradesmen who came from the same place of origin or belonged to the same family, and whose ranks included members of the stationers’ guild.Footnote 22 In turn, these tradesmen collaborated frequently with Azhari ʿulamaʾ.Footnote 23
The closeness of some members of the ʿulamaʾ to the development of printing at the governmental presses in Cairo and the private presses of other regions such as Central Asia has been observed.Footnote 24 So too has the relationship between the clergies of Ottoman religious minorities and the private press.Footnote 25 This makes sense given that religious scholars long produced and consumed texts.Footnote 26 However, scholars have overlooked the merger between tradesmen and the religious establishment that characterized the early private press of Cairo. Their collaboration produced a particular form of printed output that reflected mainstream Cairene literary tastes generally. Thus printings from the period tend to comprise short works from traditional genres with popular and religious themes, such as amusing writings by Yusuf bin Muhammad al-Shirbini (d. 1687), sections of commentaries from al-Azhar's Ibrahim bin Muhammad al-Bajuri (d. 1859/1860), and chapbooks such as Qissat al-Qadi maʿa al-Harami (The Story of the Judge and the Thief).Footnote 27
The conventional nature of these texts is no coincidence, for private printing developed as a speculative endeavor that applied to the printed domain the manuscript custom of commissioning a single text. Cairenes who desired handwritten texts either copied the texts themselves or commissioned someone else to copy them. These copyists worked on order.Footnote 28 Though they may have teamed up with booksellers, they neither formed a guild,Footnote 29 nor identified themselves as specialized professionals: they were students and teachers who comprised the city's ʿulamaʾ, and literate artisans who subsidized their wages with piecemeal earnings on the side.Footnote 30
Commissioners of manuscripts customarily supplied copyists with the texts that they wanted copied.Footnote 31 Then the copyist and commissioner brokered the terms of the project, which required the commissioner to set their expectations for the end product, and the copyist to bargain a wage accordingly. In the 1830s the English Arabist Edward Lane (1801–76) recorded that for three Cairene piasters, or seven pence English, one could order a quire, or an unbound booklet folded together from five sheets of paper, “of twenty pages, quarto size, with about twenty-five lines to a page, in an ordinary hand . . . but more if in an elegant hand, and about double the sum if with the vowel points, etc.”Footnote 32 Once the copyist and commissioner struck their deal, they took a binding oath (yamīn mughallaẓ) to ensure the realization of their arrangement.Footnote 33
Those who developed Cairo's private printing industry applied this model to the printed domain. Yet the move from manuscript to print injected a new element into the mix: risk. The multiplicity demanded by the act of printing raised the stakes of commissioning because it required further expenditures such as those of locking up paper and storing and selling multiple copies of single texts. Thus whereas a manuscript commissioner and a copyist would be matched one-to-one in a chain that linked a text to its consumer and producer directly, a print commissioner assumed the uncertainty associated with unstable demand for the text that they paid to reproduce.Footnote 34 As we shall see through Musa and Shaykh Hasan's dispute, the costs at stake were considerable. For this reason commissioners tended to form groups of two or three to back single printings, which allowed them to raise sufficient capital and spread risk. The potential for failure also explains why commissioners had ties to the industries of trade and religious scholarship, for these endeavors provided insight into the funding, producing, vending, and consumption of texts.
Musa's work helps to elucidate how the professional private printer crystallized out of this flexible environment of consortiums. I examine the contours of his printing career before turning to his legal battle with Shaykh Hasan for further details on the business of private printing.
AL-MATBAʿA AL-KASTALIYYA: THE FORMATION OF ONE OF CAIRO'S FIRST PRIVATE PRESSES
Musa's family printing business developed from this context of consortiums. The Castellis, or Kastalis according to their publications, were not Cairene by birth. Their link to Egypt began when Musa (Mosé or Moïse) arrived in Cairo from Florence as a teenager sometime around March 1832.Footnote 35 The details of why Musa traveled to Egypt and what he intended to accomplish there are unknown, however his migration places him within the broader passage of Europeans, including Jews, to the Ottoman province during the 19th century.Footnote 36 Approximately twelve years after Musa reached Cairo, he married a first-generation Italian-Egyptian from Rosetta named Fortunata Pesaro. Together they had eight children of whom at least two, Cakamawa (Giacomo) and Ancalu (Angelo), would eventually work for their father.Footnote 37 How and where Musa learned to print, and when he began doing so, also remain unknown. He may have started a lithographic press in Cairo that printed one extant text, a Haggadah service book for Passover in Hebrew and Judeo-Arabic, in 1834. But it is more likely that this occurred in 1851,Footnote 38 especially given that, according to Olga Pinto, Musa produced his first dated Arabic publication in 1852.Footnote 39 Pinto's dating makes Musa one of Cairo's earliest Arabic private printers, if not the earliest. This distinction is supported by a 19th-century source that claimed that Musa “fought against” the wālī ʿAbbas (r. 1849–54), Mehmed ʿAli's grandson, to uproot the Egyptian government's monopoly on printing.Footnote 40 From 1852 onward Musa printed in Arabic from al-Matbaʿa al-Kastaliyya. His shift to Arabic required him to embed himself in mainstream Cairene society and textual culture, and it accounted for al-Matbaʿa al-Kastaliyya's growth over the following decades.
Musa likely owned his for-profit press outright given that its eponymous name was noted in every printing. He therefore departed from the consortiums in the way that he presented and perhaps even ran his press. His printings ranged from those which he may have funded himself, such as the Ottoman trade laws,Footnote 41 to those which were commissioned by members of the Azhari printing circles that dominated Cairene textual production. In the early 1860s, for example, he took commissions to print texts directly from shaykhs such as Hasan al-Rashidi, Husayn al-Khashshab, and Muhammad al-Samaluti.Footnote 42 Such commissions were not new to manuscript textual production or to early Cairene printing endeavors. But significantly, Musa was an Italian-born Jew. These two attributes must have impacted how his potential clients esteemed him. However, they do not appear to have detracted from his business outwardly. In fact, he promoted them within the colophons of his printings, and could emphasize one over the other when it suited him to do so. As we will see throughout the Risala, for example, he used his connections to Italy to his legal advantage without making mention of his faith.
The thirty-year lag between Musa's arrival in Cairo and the ascendance of his press suggests that he used this period to become integrated into the city's social fabric. His printings were in the language spoken by the residents of his new hometown, and engaged local establishment figures. They also exhibited a mastery of the Islamic corpus through titles such as al-Fatawa al-Hindiyya (The Indian Fatwas), an exhaustive Hanafi legal compilation from the late 17th-century Mughal Empire, Qisas al-Anbiyaʾ (The Stories of the Prophets), and Futuh al-Sham (The Conquests of Syria) by al-Waqidi (d. 822).Footnote 43 Moreover, Musa's press appears to have expanded into both lithography and typography in local ways. It employed copyists who worked with other consortiums to write out their lithographs, such as Ahmad Hijazi Ismaʿil.Footnote 44 And it acquired its typographical equipment from the government's sell-off of its own supplies to Egyptian subjects in the early 1860s.Footnote 45
Yet despite Musa's connections to Cairo’s textual culture, his particular gift in printing derived from his merging of Cairene and European norms. In addition to printing traditionally popular texts such as the chapbook Qissat al-Tajir ʿAli Nur al-Din (The Story of the Trader ʿAli Nur al-Din) and the astrological calendar book al-Muhaqqiq al-Mudaqqiq al-Yunani al-Faylasuf al-Shahir (The Accurate Critical Greek Judge, the Famous Philosopher), his press also printed new genres such as the periodicals al-Kawkab al-Misri (The Egyptian Star), al-Maymun (The Lucky), and Jurnal ʿUmumi li-Kafat al-Iʿlanat (General Journal for Announcements).Footnote 46 It even printed the renowned Abu Nazzara Zarqaʾ (Man with the Blue Spectacles) of James Sanua (1839–1912), which I will return to in my conclusion.
Moreover, Musa made his printings visually enticing in a distinctive way. His books were bound in such vibrantly stamp-painted papers that they sometimes verged on garish, with for example bright orange leafs that floated atop wave-patterned lines of black.Footnote 47 Within his chapbooks even more exciting decorations awaited the eyes, such as tiny woodcuts of human and animal figures, and lithograph drawings of lush wreaths that filled the page.Footnote 48 The general style of Kastaliyya printings subscribed to Cairene aesthetic themes with headpieces, floral designs, and titles written in triangular formations. But these motifs were exaggerated to make something that was at once familiar and avant-garde.
Finally, Musa advertised his business and wares between different types of printings. This self-promotion was quite traditional in presentation but novel in content. In accordance with textual etiquette, the colophons of Kastaliyya books contain information standard to Cairene printings such as the date and city of production, and short invocations to God. But Musa exceeded this custom by consistently providing the name of his press, and oftentimes its location. The detail offered varied between printings. Sometimes it was noted merely that the press operated in “the alley of the Jews” or “the alley of the Israelites.”Footnote 49 Other times, the Kastalis gave their readers directions to their press shop, open from as early as 1870: “whoever wants to obtain [this book] by purchasing one copy of it, or more, should head to New Street, which leads to the Imam Husayn [mosque]. Passing by the right you will find the bookstore [dukkān al-kutub] connected to [this book's] commissioner [Ancalu Kastali].”Footnote 50 This press shop was itself an innovation insofar as it carried Kastaliyya printings only, thereby departing from the way in which manuscripts and early printings were vended together by booksellers in Khan al-Khalili. Yet it practically abutted Cairo's traditional row of stationers by al-Azhar, and al-Matbaʿa al-Kastaliyya was a mere five minutes’ walk from Khan al-Khalili.
Musa's unique ability to blend new tactics into Cairene textual culture helps to explain the survival of al-Matbaʿa al-Kastaliyya until 1902.Footnote 51 The longevity of the press is all the more remarkable given the protracted dispute between Musa and Shaykh Hasan, which held significant financial and reputational repercussions for Musa's business. Only when the dispute began in the late 1860s did Musa emphasize his connections to Italy, referring to his press in his printings as “the Italian press, known as al-Kastaliyya.”Footnote 52 In 1869, he even donated a collection of its publications to the Italian Crown.Footnote 53 King Vittorio Emanuele II (r. 1861–78) knighted Musa for this gift, and from then on Musa distinguished himself with the title al-kavalīr (cavalier) in his colophons.Footnote 54 Musa's foreign overtures may have been part of a strategic effort to secure his stature and to derive extraterritorial legitimacy. If so, they were a far-reaching outcome to a local struggle that bubbled up over the commissioning of printings.
SHAYKH HASAN AS A PRINT COMMISSIONER
For as much as Musa was emerging as a new type of Arabic private printer, and indeed one of Cairo's first professional private printers, Shaykh Hasan wielded textual authority in the more traditional ways that we encountered under the consortiums. Shaykh Hasan was one of the most active commissioners of Cairene lithographs and typographies during the third quarter of the 19th century. Khayr al-Din al-Zirikli's (1893–1976) entry for him in the biographical dictionary al-Aʿlam (The Luminaries) notes that he was a Maliki jurist from the town of al-ʿIdwa, that he studied and taught at al-Azhar, and that he died in Cairo. The entry also attributes seven printed books to Shaykh Hasan comprising eleven volumes.Footnote 55 In fact, he had a hand in at least seventeen more titles.Footnote 56
Shaykh Hasan commissioned printings of texts that were authored by others, but he also commissioned texts that he authored himself.Footnote 57 A sense of his involvement in bringing his compositions to press and promoting them is apparent from observations made by his contemporaries. In the 1880s, the Hungarian orientalist Ignac Goldziher (1850–1921) translated a portion of the Egyptian journal al-Hijaz which noted that Shaykh Hasan courted imperial favor for his publications “by sending [Abdülhamid II, r. 1876–1909] the ‘king of kings, the Sultan of Arabs and non-Arabs, the master of the sword and pen, the earthly shadow of Allah, the sword that cleaves injustice etc.,’ a copy of each of all his works. This is how he addressed the Sultan in the letter accompanying these books.”Footnote 58 Shaykh Hasan's commitment to promoting his work is also evinced by the colophons of his books. The second edition of his three-part text on bodily death and spiritual afterlife entitled Mashariq al-Anwar fi Fawz Ahl al-Iʿtibar (Daybreaks Concerning Salvation for Those Who Take Heed), for example, boasted that he composed his text in May 1848 and that the wālī Saʿid (r. 1854–63), ʿAbbas's successor, had commanded that it be printed from the governmental press at Bulaq.Footnote 59
Musa and Shaykh Hasan certainly knew of one another's work by March 1861 when al-Matbaʿa al-Kastaliyya printed yet another edition of Mashariq al-Anwar.Footnote 60 The title had by then already appeared in 1,500 copies over three editions,Footnote 61 two typographic and one lithographic. Its movement from manuscript to print via the governmental and private presses speaks to the fluidity of textual production during this period. But it also highlights the role of the individual in shaping what got printed insofar as this process required initiative. Although the figure of 1,500 copies may not seem very impressive, it demonstrates that just ten years after the time when copyists produced texts for the public one-by-one, men such as Musa and Shaykh Hasan dared to lock up significant sums in expectation that hundreds of people would purchase a title at once. The treatise sheds further light on these two men's personalities and the riskiness of their collaboration, albeit through the lens of the breakdown in their relations.
PRIVATE PRINTING ON THE GROUND, AS DEPICTED
BY THE RISALA
Over the 1860s Shaykh Hasan commissioned, and occasionally corrected, more texts from Musa's press.Footnote 62 But by the completion of the Risala’s printing in January 1871, the relationship between these two men had soured such that the treatise may be characterized as a piece of advocacy. It was written ostensibly by Musa's lawyer (al-avūkātūwā) Katiski in Italian,Footnote 63 and translated into Arabic by Marqus bin Qariyaqus al-Kabis.Footnote 64 However, I proceed with the understanding that Musa played a foundational role in its production since his press went to the expense of having it printed.Footnote 65
Katiski began the treatise by stating that it was an attempt to put to rest the rumors and suspicions surrounding Musa's case. He declared that the Risala will appeal to those passionate about studying law, al-mubāḥith al-sharʿiyya wa-l-sīyāsiyya, but that the luckiest readers of all will be Europeans living in Egypt for this text will make them aware of the legal Capitulations, imtiyāzāt, to which they are entitled.Footnote 66 Katiski went on to point out that Sultan Abdülaziz I (r. 1861–76) was in the process of establishing the foundations of Ottoman jurisprudence, iḥkāmiyya, such that it could be depended upon throughout the empire.Footnote 67 He therefore conjured Musa's story as an evolving legal matter that held vital importance for all legal scholars and Europeans resident in Ottoman Egypt, instead of an elaborate dispute over payments between a printer and commissioner in Cairo.
Katiski foregrounded the case by describing its litigants to the Risala’s readers, thus furnishing us with a sense of how Musa's press worked, how a printer hoped to be esteemed by Cairene society, and what might have made for a successful commissioner:
Al-kavalīr Kastali continues to be in possession of a press that he founded in Cairo to print and publish Arabic books, by which his name became famous in the land of Egypt and beyond in [other] regions [aqṭār] and the countries [bilād] of Europe . . . through books which were little known there before this era. This press reached many Egyptians either by way of purchasing some of its printed books, or by way of commissioning [tawṣiya] its proprietor to print others. Among them is Shaykh Hasan al-ʿIdwi, one of the ʿulamaʾ who characterizes himself as being a servant of knowledge at al-Azhar mosque in Cairo. He is a man of high station, and he has a rank and standing [iʿtibār] among the prominent [al-khāṣ] and the masses [al-ʿāmm] because he is one of the few ʿulamaʾ who speak at the minbars of mosques in the presence of Muslims, such that among them he became a possessor of reverence [ḥurma] and dignity. Prestige and standing came to him from the people because he knew well one of the ways to attract the hearts of listeners and to awake in them the fervor [ḥamāsa] of religion [i.e., by printing]. The Shaykh had purchased previously numerous books from mister [al-khawāja] Musa Kastali that were printed by his press. Indeed he also commissioned him more than once to print numerous books and famous compositions, and this was the origin of all of the amounts that had caused Shaykh Hasan to become indebted to [Musa], however the Shaykh was not interested in paying back what was owed of him.Footnote 68
Putting aside the origins of the dispute for a moment, this passage highlights the integral role that commissioning played in Musa's business. It also suggests the significance that reputation and fame held for the private printing industry. Shaykh Hasan and Musa possessed two very different claims to prominence, one based on prestige and the other on functional recognition. Both men appear to have cultivated these estimations which, in the speculative world of print, likely generated enthusiasm for printings and assured potential clients that a press's output would be sound and its dealings fair.
The passage indicates that the nature of Shaykh Hasan's indebtedness to Musa was complex because the men continued conducting business together despite Shaykh Hasan's outstanding bills. They came to an arrangement that included Shaykh Hasan transferring land to Musa and issuing bond notes to him in exchange for the continued printing of books.Footnote 69 The costliness and speculative nature of the printing industry therefore linked it to other economic sectors such as land ownership and banking. And costly it was. After adjusting for these installments, Musa claimed that Shaykh Hasan's debt amounted to 3,984 Egyptian pounds.Footnote 70 This was a considerable sum given that an English guidebook from 1875 noted that one Egyptian pound equaled approximately 195 qirsh (piasters), with one dozen eggs commanding 5–6 qirsh and a dragoman's daily wage fetching 5–7 qirsh.Footnote 71
Shaykh Hasan's alleged debt included costs from six titles that were in various stages of production. Of books already printed, he owed Musa: 176,550 qirsh for Kitab Muslim ʿala al-Nawawi (Muslim [bin al-Hajjaj's] Book According to al-Nawawi); 200 Egyptian pounds for 600 copies of Kitab al-Shifaʾ (The Book of Healing); 60 Egyptian pounds for 60 copies of Hashiyat al-Bajuri (The Annotations of al-Bajuri); and 957 Egyptian pounds for 1,000 copies of Kitab Hadith al-Bukhari (The Book of Hadith of al-Bukhari). Of books that Shaykh Hasan commissioned that were in the process of being printed, he owed Musa: 260,000 qirsh for 602 copies of Hashiyat al-Dasuqi ʿala al-Sharh al-Kabir (The Annotations of al-Dasuqi on the Large Commentary) on expectation that each copy would comprise approximately 400 quires at the rate of 650 qirsh per quire; and 130,000 qirsh for 1,413 copies of Hashiyat al-Dasuqi ʿala al-Saʿd (The Annotations of al-Dasuqi on Well-Being) on expectation that each copy would comprise approximately 200 quires at the same rate.Footnote 72
Musa sought to recoup Shaykh Hasan's debt for all of these printings. But his legal case was sparked by the last two titles that were in the process of being printed. Crucially, the up front costs of books were built upon approximations. It was impossible to predict exactly how many printed quires would correspond to a manuscript text. Therefore a commissioner of texts from al-Matbaʿa al-Kastaliyya would agree to pay the press an advance according to the estimated number of printed quires “more or less.”Footnote 73 This was evened out once the printing was completed and the actual number of quires produced became known, whereupon the commissioner then owed the printer the remainder of the fee for each quire actually printed.Footnote 74 The contingent nature of this arrangement was to hold legal repercussions for Musa because it meant that the papers signed by him and Shaykh Hasan were not contracts but receipts that could be adapted (muḥāsabāt).Footnote 75 When Musa discovered that he had underestimated the quires of the books in press by about seventy, the two men amended their original agreement from the summer of 1866 in a new receipt comprising the figures above.Footnote 76 But they would come to fight over the arrangements, deadlines, and higher costs imposed by these revisions.
The receipts, which are included in the Risala, and their explanations by Katiski tell of how the Kastalis brokered the commissioning process. The documents hearken back to the binding oaths of the manuscript industry by holding both parties to mutually determined conditions. For the commissioning of Hashiyat al-Dasuqi ʿala al-Sharh al-Kabir and Hashiyat al-Dasuqi ʿala al-Saʿd, Shaykh Hasan was promised by Musa that he would use particular typefaces and paper as agreed upon from the example of another printed specimen (urnīk) to produce texts that were void of errors.Footnote 77 In exchange, Shaykh Hasan was to pay Musa 180 qirsh during the printing process for each of the estimated quires to cover the costs of materials such as paper and labor such as typesetting, printing, and gathering.Footnote 78 He was also responsible for correcting (al-taṣḥīḥ) the texts, and eventually for contributing reams of molded paper (rizmat waraq qālibīn) to the project when this was later negotiated to offset his debts.Footnote 79 Upon completion of the work Shaykh Hasan was to pay Musa the balance of the 650 qirsh ultimately due for each quire actually printed.Footnote 80
Moreover, Musa was not to give Shaykh Hasan the finished printings until he received his payment in full.Footnote 81 This detail suggests that Musa, and perhaps other printers like him, had come to anticipate trouble in collecting their fees from clients. That it fell upon Shaykh Hasan to pick up his printings in order to distribute them also highlights the fact that commissioners played roles that are associated with publishing, such as the funding and vending of texts. Indeed, Shakyh Hasan had already secured four buyers for 647 copies of the two books before they were even printed.Footnote 82 Another important aspect of the receipt was its temporality, insofar as it listed loose deadlines that Musa and Shaykh Hasan were obliged to keep. For example, Shaykh Hasan's payments and provisions of paper were expected to correspond to the timing of the printing process.Footnote 83
But Shaykh Hasan purportedly missed his deadlines. Regarding one in particular, he explained that he had been delayed because of an issue that arose between him and the Shaykh al-Azhar (ḥaḍrat al-ustādh shaykh al-jāmiʿa).Footnote 84 This last reference is important to the political economy of private printing because it likely alludes to the state's regulation of print. Details for how the state performed this monitoring, upon whom, and for what reasons remain obscure. Yet the fact that some form of monitoring existed is demonstrated by the twenty-two fatwas on the permissibility of printings among the 13,500 contained in Muhammad al-ʿAbbasi al-Mahdi's (1827–97) al-Fatawa al-Mahdiyya (The Mahdiyya Fatwas).Footnote 85 Al-ʿAbbasi served as Grand Mufti from 1848 to 1897 with a break between the years 1887–89,Footnote 86 and his first term coincided with his fatwas on print that range from September 1866 to February 1884.Footnote 87 The queries that prompted these fatwas came to al-ʿAbbasi from governmental sources. Eighteen originated from the police, two from the governorate of Cairo, and two from the interior and supervisor of the state gazette, al-Waqaʾiʿ al-Misriyya (Egyptian Happenings). These origins, when paired with the contents of al-ʿAbbasi's rulings, suggest that functionaries in the Egyptian government screened petitions from members of the public for permission to print titles of their choosing. Titles that carried the potential for demeaning religion were elevated ultimately to the Grand Mufti, who issued his opinion on whether or not they did.
The petitions to print that were included in al-ʿAbbasi’s compilation were filed by Muslims in all cases except for one.Footnote 88 The standing of these hopefuls ranged from a commissioner of a printing at the press at Bulaq, to a teacher, to craftsmen such as the shaykh of the stationers’ guild, a press owner, printers, and “the head of the presses.”Footnote 89 This latter reference indicates that private printers had formed some sort of association by 1871. Of the one hundred book titles that fell under al-ʿAbbasi's consideration, he permitted one on the condition that its deficient parts be omitted and otherwise rejected twenty of them.Footnote 90 His reasoning tended to be informed by whether the text in question demeaned or posed dangers to Hanafism, and whether he felt that its reproduction would be fruitless. Regarding the titles that al-ʿAbbasi rejected, in 1869 he dismissed Kitab Shams al-Maʿarif (The Book of the Sun of Gnosis) on sorcery and spirituality by al-Buni (d. 1225) because it went against Hanafi law and would pose harm to God's creatures and amount to a loss of money without causing benefit. In this ruling, al-ʿAbbasi's opinion overrode that of the Shaykh al-Azhar who permitted the printing of the text. Three years later, when another petitioner requested permission to print the same text, al-Abbasi rejected it again.Footnote 91 He also rejected the petitioner's five other proposed titles: two because they would cause a loss of money without any gain; one entitled Qissat ʿAli al-Tajir (The Story of ʿAli the Trader) because it is “nothing but untruths, not worth the labor . . . [and] the loss of time without benefit” posed by its printing; and two whose printing would have otherwise been permitted had the men involved been Muslims. Al-ʿAbbasi wrote that the names of the booksellers (kutubiyīn) in this petition suggested that Jews and Christians would be involved in selling, buying, and especially printing the texts. He believed that this would demean Islam because the texts, which contained hadith, Qurʾanic verses, and exalted names, would therefore be scattered through the streets and taken into pubs.Footnote 92 He rejected another eleven titles in a petition of fifteen because he presumed them to be stories.Footnote 93 And he also rejected the attempt of the head of the stationers’ guild to print Alf Layla wa-Layla (One Thousand and One Nights) and another short story.Footnote 94
There is much research to be done on the topic of print regulation in Egypt.Footnote 95 Observing the fatwas of the Grand Mufti from an imperial view, it remains unclear how this process operated alongside the Porte's successive press laws issued in Egypt.Footnote 96 However, for our purposes the implications are that in order for a title to be printed by a private press, it had first to be taken up by a commissioner, and then made to withstand or avoid the regulatory process. The Kastalis do not appear in al-ʿAbbasi's collection by name, and it is possible that they were able to operate outside of these regulations given their Italian origins.Footnote 97 As mentioned, they printed Qissat al-Tajir ʿAli Nur al-Din, a title that al-ʿAbbasi had forbidden. But the Risala’s reference to the Shaykh al-Azhar's delay is interesting because if Shaykh Hasan was indeed awaiting permission, this suggests that even a foreign printer's work could be constrained by the commissioning model. For an Egyptian subject's involvement in bringing a text to press would tether the foreign printer to local regulations. This consideration holds implications for Cairene private printing during this period, especially with regard to the vast reproduction of conventional and uncontroversial Arabic texts. Local and foreign printers whose businesses worked on the commissioning model would at least theoretically be restricted to reproducing titles that Egyptian authorities recognized and considered to be useful and acceptable.
While al-ʿAbbasi's fatwas include reference to titles that Shaykh Hasan had composed or previously commissioned,Footnote 98 they do not mention the titles at stake here, namely Hashiyat al-Dasuqi ʿala al-Sharh al-Kabir and Hashiyat al-Dasuqi ʿala al-Saʿd. Whatever the source of Shaykh Hasan's delays, Musa continued working. He finished the printing of Hashiyat al-Dasuqi ʿala al-Sharh al-Kabir which came in at 85.5 quires more than the 400 predicted. But he halted the printing of Hashiyat al-Dasuqi ʿala al-Saʿd after only thirty quires because he suspected that Shaykh Hasan no longer intended to honor his commitment to pay up.Footnote 99 By August 1869, Musa was still without proper remuneration so he again pressed the issue of payment with Shaykh Hasan to no avail.Footnote 100
Musa therefore turned to the Egyptian authorities (al-ḥukūma al-maḥaliyya) to help collect his payment. On 29 August he submitted his official claims to the police department of Cairo, and on 20 September he submitted them to Cairo's majlis al-tujjār which agreed to take on the case.Footnote 101 The acceptance of the case by the majlis al-tujjār tells us that commissioning was considered an official commercial transaction by law, insofar as the printer, the commissioner, and the printings were categorized under merchant activity and the circulation of goods rather than the private transactions of laypeople.Footnote 102 The majlis, whose active members comprised a president, a vice president, and four merchants of whom two were Egyptians and two were Europeans,Footnote 103 took the records and testimonies of Musa and Shaykh Hasan. And shockingly, if we are to believe the Risala, Shaykh Hasan claimed that Musa in fact owed him money.Footnote 104 Since Shaykh Hasan had not received the books that he had commissioned and made payments towards, he asked that Musa be ordered to pay him their value in addition to compensatory damages.Footnote 105
The case did not proceed in Musa's favor. The majlis disregarded his testimony and most of the receipts that he had submitted as evidence of Shaykh Hasan's debts. Instead, it admitted only the more recent documents in accordance with Shaykh Hasan's testimony due to his influence and prestige (taʾthīr fī al-ʿaqūl wa-l-hayba). And on 17 June 1870 the majlis rejected Musa's claims against Shaykh Hasan and ruled that Musa now owed Shaykh Hasan the sum of 1,342 Egyptian pounds.Footnote 106
Musa next called on the muḥāfiẓ (governor) of Cairo to elevate his case to an appeal at the majlis al-tujjār of Alexandria. But Shaykh Hasan demanded that before the case be appealed, the head of appeals (ṣāḥib al-abīlū) first receive on deposit the full sum that Musa had been ordered to pay.Footnote 107 For his part, Musa claimed that he did not have that kind of money freed up.Footnote 108 The amount was roughly the cost of 1,500 copies of a 200-quire text, indicating that even a successful printer could lack access to the funds required for producing a book.
It was at this juncture that Musa introduced a different tack, arguing that “a ruling of a foreign majlis [i.e., that of Egypt] has no power over him.”Footnote 109 Thus even though Musa had up until then worked and exercised his rights according to the laws of Ottoman Egypt, he now asserted that his identity as a foreigner put him beyond Egypt's authority. This approach involved the Italian Consulate in the dispute, leading Shaykh Hasan to request of the consulate that Musa be ordered to place his deposit with them before his appeal could be heard. The consulate granted Shaykh Hasan's request.Footnote 110 But because Musa lacked sufficient funds to fulfill the deposit, he was threatened with the confiscation of his “entire press which he founded in Cairo and it is a press whose value exceeds the amount that was ordered of him.”Footnote 111 Indeed, the consulate apprised al-Matbaʿa al-Kastaliyya at 642,356 qirsh for the site (maḥall) itself and the supplies (muhimmāt) that it contained.Footnote 112 This vast figure suggests that only those with access to great sums of money could open a private press, and that press owners were financially well-off if only in fixed assets.
The consulate agreed to hold the press on deposit on 10 September 1870.Footnote 113 But three days later Shaykh Hasan wrote to the muḥāfiẓ rejecting the plan. He wanted the deposit to be available “without handicap” in the form of “trinkets or jewels.”Footnote 114 Al-Matbaʿa al-Kastaliyya's lack of appeal to Shaykh Hasan is surprising given its value and apparent utility to a man so involved in commissioning books. It suggests that press ownership was not highly prestigious, and that the burdens of operating or liquidating a press were considerable. Shaykh Hasan's uncooperativeness led the Italian Consulate to revise their position in favor of Musa, who had not wanted to hazard his press, such that he ultimately put up 700 Egyptian pounds of land that he owned in Minya instead.Footnote 115
When Shaykh Hasan rejected the idea of the press as deposit, he also noted that he found the notion of the appeal unfair because by then, the statute of limitations had passed.Footnote 116 On 19 October 1870, Musa's appeal at the majlis al-tujjār of Alexandria was heard and thrown out for this reason.Footnote 117 The treatise's account of the dispute between Musa and Shaykh Hasan stops here. Its endpoint likely represented the latest news on their legal battle by the time that Katiski finished writing the Risala in December 1870 and al-Matbaʿa al-Kastaliyya completed printing it the following month.Footnote 118 Musa's case unfolded for at least another decade thereafter. Indeed, the judicial framework in which it was heard changed when it passed to the newly established Mixed Courts in May and November 1876.Footnote 119 On 26 February 1880, this dispute over commissioning even set legal precedent when “El Edui c. Moise Castelli Bo. C. A. 427 10” gave rise to an article of the Appellate Court of the Mixed Court mandating that: “when one party enters as truth a fact that they know is false and by this mendacious allegation it fooled (surpris la religion) the magistrate and obtained success, they will have committed fraud veritably by nature such as to motivate requête civile.”Footnote 120 Seemingly, Shaykh Hasan was found guilty of giving false testimony to the courts. But it is unclear whether Musa ever won the moneys that he believed were due to him.
THE IMPORTANCE OF THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF PRIVATE PRINT
Arabic private printings from Cairo during the third quarter of the 19th century embody the political economy from which they arose, and the significant role that commerce played in their construction. The Risala exemplifies this point in particular because its content details the obscure work of the private printer, someone who is largely unknown to the historiography of the modern Middle East. Its rare exposition of printing, and of one litigant's experience of the law,Footnote 121 exists as an aberration to the historical record because Musa was a private printer with a public grievance. He had both a cause to promote and the means to do so when his argument over commissioning reached the majlis and grew to become something beyond his personal control from there.
This combination of financial and communicational purpose demonstrates that printings are socioeconomic products just as much as they are intellectual ones. And they not only exhibit markers of the particular political economy from which they emerged, but they also shaped that political economy in turn. By way of concluding, I will explore this point through a fragment of James Sanua's Abu Nazzara. Al-Matbaʿa al-Kastaliyya printed the famous periodical on commission from Cairo before Sanua was exiled to Paris in June 1878 for insulting Saʿid's successor, the wālī and later khedive, Ismaʿil (r. 1863–79). The seventh issue of the broadsheet carried a story in which its eponymous protagonist chatted with friends in a coffee shop. When they asked Abu Nazzara about the books that he had with him, he responded that one title in particular “has written in it the case of my friend Kastali . . . [without whom] I'd never be able to ply my newspaper [jarīdatī].” The group concurred. One of his friends clarified that Musa's appeal had been thrown out by the majlis al-tujjār “before the opening of the Mixed Court [al-ṭārbūnāl], when the idea was to defame his behavior, whereas now, God willing, [he'll] come out ahead of them since [the case was judged unfairly] [al-ḥaqq naṭṭāḥ] and people stopped chattering.” To this Abu Nazzara replied that Musa “spent forty-six years here and served the government, the people of distinction, and the ʿulamaʾ with the utmost integrity, and he is famous in Europe and possesses great knowledge, and his medals of honor amount to forty.”Footnote 122
This story shows that Musa continued going to the trouble of printing news of his plight throughout the 1870s to gain advocates for his cause, and perhaps also to defend his reputation in a business built around trust. Clearly he was a resourceful person. He cross-advertised his case across his multiple printings in the same way that he cross-advertised his very printings in the 1860s. This initiative likely accounted for his professional success. But it also influenced the development of Arabic private printing in Cairo, for Musa's innovations in establishing business practices such as press names and print shops to sell his wares laid the groundwork for others to adopt these conventions from then onwards.Footnote 123 His Italian origins probably inspired these techniques to some extent. They may have also allowed Musa space for maneuvering legally, as he could adapt his identity in order to activate different nodes of the justice system, and to defy printing regulations when he was not working on commissions from Egyptian subjects. But this outsider status was mainly something that Musa overcame as he adopted Cairo's textual traditions and inserted himself into the city's structures of power.
The story also demonstrates that the trajectory of Cairene printing was shaped by Musa's struggle. We have already seen this occur through what came to be printed, but it may also be detected through absence. Unsurprisingly, the two titles that Shaykh Hasan and Musa fought over do not appear to have ever been fully completed or sold.Footnote 124 And Musa's pending verdict left him at the mercy of the local authorities for years, such that Abu Nazzara stopped being printed from Cairo when “the Government had managed to obtain from the Italian consul the banishment of James Sanua from Egypt, and to persuade M. Castelli, the printer, to turn the Man with the Blue Spectacles [i.e., Sanua] out of his office, by threatening to shut up [i.e., shut down] his printing establishment altogether.”Footnote 125 More broadly, the output of al-Matbaʿa al-Kastaliyya appears to have suffered in the decade after the early 1870s as it printed far fewer books than the at least 256 produced during the previous ten years.Footnote 126 Its troubles likely gave space for other presses to thrive during this decade famed for the rise of private printing and the press.Footnote 127
The evolving relationships between Musa and Shaykh Hasan within the Risala, and Musa and Sanua with Abu Nazzara, underscore the point that private printings resulted from the mutual dependence between the printer and those who commissioned from him. Printers worked closely with the people whom historiography holds dear, and they produced the very texts for which these intellectuals are famous. Yet we know little about early private printers.Footnote 128 It is true that they were mere craftsmen who formed only a tiny fraction of Cairo's population. Their biographies did not feature in the works of contemporary writers such as ʿAli Mubarak (1823–93), nor in later biographical dictionaries. However, much of our access to the ideas of the 19th century depends upon the labor of these men. They fashioned a new occupation by incorporating a novel technology into longstanding practices, and their backgrounds and work connected various places, faiths, languages, and topics.Footnote 129 Our limited understanding of their work has caused them to be mislabeled when they do figure in scholarship. For example, the Kastalis have been referred to as “public intellectuals” and “progovernment journalists” who worked against “such antikhedivate activists as . . . Sannuʿ.”Footnote 130 But they were neither public intellectuals, nor journalists, nor progovernment agitators. They were for-profit printers. And the bulk of their business was forged through commissions from men such as Shaykh Hasan who speculated in the traditional corpus.
Commissioning was central to the functioning of Cairo's printing industry during the period under study. It helps to explain how Arabic private printing originated and expanded, and suggests that it took off because members of the public grafted a manuscript custom onto the printed sphere in a way that was active and familiar. Indeed, the main difference between a manuscript and a printing during this era was whether or not someone with means deemed a text to be worth the financial risk of reproducing in hundreds, if not thousands, of copies at once. It is this consideration which should inform our estimation of texts generally. Printings did not come to fruition on account of their literary merit alone. They were business ventures, each of which reflects relationships, reputations, constraints, and a significant amount of investment and effort. Hence printed versions of texts that were composed in earlier periods should be esteemed as important contemporary social products. Manuscripts left unprinted during the 19th century should not be assumed to have been neglected.Footnote 131 And novel printed genres ought to be viewed as the products of avid businessmen as much as intellectual visionaries. Sanua, and even Musa with regard to his treatise, took enormous gambles when they paid to print texts that lacked local precedents.
The Risala and the anecdote from Abu Nazzara indicate that Musa sought to address the rumors surrounding his case that had spread throughout Cairo. Whether these rumors did indeed exist or were instead conjured to convince readers to buy Musa's printings and to take note of his plight is one matter. Of greater historical import is that these printings used current events to critique the legal system and to appeal to public opinion. In so doing, they mark early instances of the construction of a rhetorical civil society that bound Egyptians to one another through the printed word. Hence Musa's print work not only helped to establish the private printer's business practices. It also laid the groundwork for the conventions that began appearing from the 1870s onwards, as printings came to claim a wide readership and therefore to speak for the population to which they appealed. However, it is important to note that private printing from the very beginning required the collaboration of the printer, the commissioner, the writer, and the target public. This real and imagined inclusiveness suggests that an earlier and deeper connection existed between print and mass cultural identity than has been acknowledged previously in studies of Egyptian collective belonging.Footnote 132 For speculating in any printed text was built around the assumption that it would appeal to many.
The political economy for Arabic private printings that I have outlined here resulted from a specific context which should not be presumed generalizable. Cairo was an important city within the Ottoman Empire that was ruled by a newly forming dynasty which sought to shore up its authority during a period of increasing European presence. Musa's life and output show that presswork operated according to the patterns, allowances, and strictures of these particular forces. Appreciating printing as having developed from such forces departs from the emphasis on it as a causal instrument rooted in western culture. Scholars have invoked printing as an inevitable agent of social change in the Middle East, a marker and maker of state modernity, and a foreign disruptor of tradition.Footnote 133 But the work of men like Musa demonstrates instead that printing may be more accurately situated within discrete socioeconomic and intellectual contexts that are defined by human agency, historical continuity, and contingency. Localized political economies of print therefore play an integral role to our understanding of, and access to, the people and ideas that constitute the history and historiography of the modern Middle East.
