Islam, technology, circulation, and the global humanist imaginary in ʿAli Mubārak's ʿAlam al-Dīn (1882)

Abstract

In the nineteenth century, steamers, trains, and telegraphs altered the social experience of space and time, leading to the development of a sense of simultaneity and proximity among previously disparate parts of the world (Kern 1983). In Egypt technologies of travel and communication such as trains, steamers, and telegraphs were implemented shortly after the inauguration of the first Arabic press in Bulāq, Cairo in 1822. Both modernization efforts and colonial interests accelerated the proliferation of telegraph poles and train connections in the country (Barak 2013). Previous studies illustrate how those new technologies facilitated political centralization and enabled the development of a nascent public sphere that informed new notions of nationhood in Egypt (Fahmy 2014, 20). Less commonly known, however, is the impact of those technologies of travel and communication on cultural and artistic innovations in nineteenth-century Egypt. In the fictional account, ʿAlam al-Dīn, written by the Egyptian modernizer ʿAlī Mubārak pasha (1823–1893), the intertextual link between technology and information shapes his approach to narrative writing. ʿAlam al-Dīn’s style and content are emblematic of the innovative ways in which nineteenth-century Egyptian authors deployed ArabIslamic knowledge to address the unprecedented sense of simultaneity and proximity that resulted from the proliferation of new technologies heralding a new stage of global human history. In this essay, I analyze how ʿAlam al-Dīn illustrates the links between the embryonic nineteenth-century Arabic narrative discourse and the proliferation of new media that expanded the reach of networks of circulation in Egypt and the Arab world. I argue that Mubārak’s pseudo-fictional translation project in the text underscores the new links between materiality, textual representation, and the concern with information in the Egyptian-Arabic context. ʿAlam al-Dīn reflects the development of a new realist mode of narrative representation that privileged verifiability and plausibility over the distinctive style of classical Arabic narrative modes that relied on artistic wizardry and linguistic craftsmanship (El-Sherif 2018). And yet, despite its concern with information, ʿAlam al-Dīn reflects the influence of indigenous Arabic literary forms such as the epic [sira] and the picaresque [maqāmmah] that, according to Mohamed-Salah Omri, shaped Arabic and other Middle Eastern novels in the modern period (2007, 323). In Alam al-Dīn’s frame narrative, new technologies of print media, telegraphic transmission, and steamers inform the dialogs between the two main protagonists, an