A Latin Alphabet for the Arabic Language: Romanizing Arabic in Late Nineteenth-Century Egypt and Beyond

Abstract

This article explores early attempts to romanize the Arabic language in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Egypt and situates them within a global history of script reforms in the modern period. I focus on the models to write Arabic in the Latin script developed by the Cairo-based magazine al-Muqtataf between 1889 and 1897 (which, to the extent of my knowledge, have never been examined before), relating them to the responses they elicited from the magazine's readers and some of the romanization practices found in advertising, commercial displays in the streets, and governance at the time. I demonstrate that, in this period, romanized Arabic was envisioned as an original way to pursue financial profit and technological efficiency, confront European knowledge production, and redefine the standing of Arabic within transregional publishing networks that encompassed different languages and alphabets. This analysis thus offers an alternative geography of script reform that supersedes the national framework.