page_title: Nahda
section_title: Newspapers and journals
hierarchical_section_title: Nahda / Dissemination of ideas / Newspapers and journals
caption_attribution_description: English: Logo of the Arabic magazine Al-Urwah al-Wuthqa, written in Thuluth script, with the slogan "la infisama laha" or "there is no break in it." العربية: شعار مجلة العروة الوثقى العربية مكتوب بخط الثلث ومكتوب "لا انفصام لها"
context_page_description: The Nahda, also referred to as the Arab Renaissance or Enlightenment, was a cultural movement that flourished in Arabic-speaking regions of the Ottoman Empire, notably in Egypt, Lebanon and Syria, during the second half of the 19th century and the early 20th century.
  In traditional scholarship, the Nahda is seen as connected to the cultural shock brought on by Napoleon's invasion of Egypt in 1798, and the reformist drive of subsequent rulers such as Muhammad Ali of Egypt. However, more recent scholarship has shown the Nahda's cultural reform program to have been as "autogenetic" as it was Western-inspired, having been linked to the Tanzimat—the period of reform within the Ottoman Empire which brought a constitutional order to Ottoman politics and engendered a new political class—as well as the later Young Turk Revolution, allowing proliferation of the press and other publications and internal changes in political economy and communal reformations in Egypt and Syria and Lebanon.
  The renaissance itself started simultaneously in both Egypt and Greater Syria.
context_section_description: The first printing press in the Middle East was in the Monastery of Saint Anthony of Qozhaya in Lebanon and dates back to 1610. It printed books in Syriac and Garshuni (Arabic using the Syriac alphabet). The first printing press with Arabic letters was built in St John's monastery in Khinshara, Lebanon by "Al-Shamas Abdullah Zakher" in 1734. The printing press operated from 1734 till 1899.
  In 1821, Muhammad Ali of Egypt brought the first printing press to Egypt. Modern printing techniques spread rapidly and gave birth to a modern Egyptian press, which brought the reformist trends of the Nahda into contact with the emerging Egyptian middle class of clerks and tradesmen.
  In 1855, Rizqallah Hassun (1825–1880) founded the first newspaper written solely in Arabic, Mir'at al-ahwal. The Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram founded by Saleem Takla dates from 1875, and between 1870 and 1900, Beirut alone saw the founding of about 40 new periodicals and 15 newspapers.
  Muhammad Abduh and Jamāl al-Dīn al-Afghānī's weekly pan-Islamic anti-colonial revolutionary literary magazine Al-Urwah al-Wuthqa (The Firmest Bond)—though it only ran from March to October of 1884 and was banned by British authorities in Egypt and India—was circulated widely from Morocco to India and it's considered one of the first and most important publications of the Nahda.
caption: Despite colonial authorities' banning of Al-Urwah al-Wuthqa, it circulated widely in the Islamic world, from Morocco to India, disseminated through an elaborate network including Arab businessmen in Bombay.[21]
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