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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 July 2023
Little is known today about the Arabic typewriter. American typewriters revolutionized clerical labor and became literary icons, but the Arabic typewriter is largely absent from scholarship and popular culture. Only one story about it recurs, namely that of its origins. It was reportedly invented multiple times: in 1890s Beirut by, among others, a portrait painter named Salim Haddad; in 1900s Vienna by Theodor Herzl, founding father of political Zionism; and in 1940s Cairo by Wadie Said, father of the pioneering postcolonial theorist Edward Said. Bringing three competing accounts of the machine's invention together, I find that in each the Arabic typewriter was turned to very different purposes. Consistently, however, it was co-opted into intensifying struggles over territory and language. Repeatedly, it exceeded its representations, unsettling the narratives into which it was written and provoking a sense of strangeness, even unease. And across the accounts, diverse names and places reappear: New York, Palestine, Sherlock Holmes. Taking seriously the doublings and coincidences that connect the typewriter's origin-stories, I ask finally whether they might alert us to the possibility of another mode of cultural history—one that is itself uncanny and estranged.
1 The British Museum acquired a 1920s Smith Premier machine in 2016. Its catalog entry states that the Arabic typewriter was invented in 1914 by Philippe Wakid and Salim Haddad; in fact, Haddad patented his typewriter font in 1901 and was selling the machines by 1907. The British Museum, “Typewriter,” museum no. EA87549, acquisition date 2016, https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/Y_EA87549.
2 See, for example, Kittler, Friedrich, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 186–91Google Scholar.
3 McLuhan, Marshall, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 206Google Scholar; Kittler, Gramophone, 199. For Martin Heidegger, indeed, the typewriter's intercession between human hand and written word equaled a transformation in the relation of Being to man. Heidegger, Martin, Parmenides, trans. Schuwer, Andre and Rojcewicz, Richard (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1998), 85Google Scholar.
4 Kupferschmidt, Uri M., “On the Diffusion of ‘Small’ Western Technology and Consumer Goods in the Middle East during the Era of the First Modern Globalization,” in A Global Middle East: Mobility, Materiality and Culture in the Modern Age, 1880–1940, ed. Lozma, Liat, Schayegh, Cyrus, and Wishnitzer, Avner (London: I. B. Tauris, 2015), 240Google Scholar.
5 On their use in clerical work see Nemeth, Titus, Arabic Type-Making in the Machine Age: The Influence of Technology on the Form of Arabic Type, 1908–1993 (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 76–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar. A rare example of Arabic typewriter art is Mizuko Yakawa, Arabic Typewriter #5, 1999, mixed media, Birzeit University Museum, Birzeit, West Bank.
6 This was a machine that had had more profoundly revolutionary effects on various European scripts. See Kittler, Gramophone, 183, 223–28.
7 Osborn, J. R., Letters of Light: Arabic Script in Calligraphy, Print, and Digital Design (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 2017), 93CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
8 See for example Kokoschka, Alina, “‘The Script Does Not Respond’: Arabic Script's Difficulties in the Digital Realm; A Visual Approach,” CyberOrient 14, no. 2 (2020): 38–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 45, doi: 10.1002/j.1804-3194.2020.tb00002.x. Philological arguments are frequently dubious, but forgive this one: it seems to hold.
9 Osborn, Letters, 11.
10 For a full history of responses to the many prior innovations in Arabic script, see Osborn, Letters.
11 Ibid., 10. Osborn details the variety of scripts developed in Arabic over the centuries both prior to and after the 10th-century establishment of al-khaṭṭ al-mansūb, a formalized system for establishing letter proportions. This system was a script “revolution” long preceding lithograph printing and movable type.
12 For details see, for example, Nemeth, Arabic Type-Making, 74–76.
13 Herzl, Theodor, The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl, vol. 3, trans. Zohn, Harry (London: Herzl Press, 1960–61), 2220Google Scholar; Penslar, Derek, Theodor Herzl: The Charismatic Leader (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press 2020), 10Google Scholar.
14 Kupferschmidt, “Diffusion,” 238.
15 Said, Edward, Out of Place: A Memoir (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), 90Google Scholar.
16 Ibid., 289.
17 Gitelman, Lisa, Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 3, 6Google Scholar.
18 Kupferschmidt, “Diffusion,” 238–39.
19 See Ahmed Allaithy, “The Untold Story of the Arabic Typewriter,” YouTube video, recorded lecture, 19 April 2018, 1:20:14, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDpMbFLmaV8.
20 Osborn, Letters, 139–45.
21 Nemeth, Arabic Type-Making, 73–74.
22 Although it will address some early translations of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.
23 For example, Ayalon, Ami, The Arabic Print Revolution: Cultural Production and Mass Readership (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a subtler analysis of Arabic print capitalism see Elizabeth Holt's excellent Fictitious Capital: Silk, Cotton, and the Rise of the Arabic Novel (Fordham, NY: Fordham University Press, 2017).
24 See for example Homi Bhabha, “The World and the Home,” Social Text, 10, no. 31/32 (1992): 141–53; Castle, Terry, The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1995)Google Scholar; and Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” in Writings on Art and Literature, ed. James Herz (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 1997), 193–233.
25 The patent was specifically for the simplification principle by which he had created his typewriter font. For the patent itself, see Nemeth, Arabic Type-Making, 75.
26 See for example the journal al-Muqtataf, which had a regular section on “News, Discoveries, and Inventions” (Akhbar wa Iktishafat wa Ikhtiraʿat, although the title changed over the years). During its first year of operations, it published five enthusiastic articles on the telegraph.
27 Inalcik, Halil, “Application of the Tanzimat and Its Social Effects,” ArchivumOttomanicum 5 (1973): 97–127Google Scholar; Fahmy, Khaled, All the Pasha's Men: Mehmed Ali, his Army, and the Making of Modern Egypt (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2002)Google Scholar; Mundy, Martha and Smith, Richard Saumarez, Governing Property: Making the Modern State Law Administration and Production in Ottoman Syria (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
28 Ayalon, Ami, The Press in the Arab Middle East (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1995)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Baykal, Erol A. F., The Ottoman Press (1908–1923) (Leiden: Brill, 2019)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Printing had been controversial, but became a booming industry; see Mitchell, Timothy, Colonising Egypt (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991), 155–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
29 In other words, the language was to be made more suitable to the demands of the press and more translatable to other languages. On this process see Sheehi, Stephen, Foundations of Modern Arab Identity (Gainesville, FL: University of Press of Florida, 2004)Google Scholar; and Patel, Abdulrazzak, The Arab Nahdah: The Making of the Intellectual and Humanist Movement (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On parallel discourse in Ottoman Turkish see Ertürk, Nergis, Grammatology and Literary Modernity in Turkey (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
30 Jakes, Aaron G., Egypt's Occupation: Colonial Economism and the Crises of Capitalism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2020)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
31 Yosmaoğlu, İpek K., “Chasing the Printed Word: Press Censorship in the Ottoman Empire, 1876–1913,” Turkish Studies Association Journal 27, no. 1/2 (2003):15–49Google Scholar.
32 See Sheehi, Stephen, The Arab Imago: The Social History of Portrait Photography,1860–1910 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
33 He is absent, for instance, from Jurji Zaydan's Tarajim Mashahir al-Sharq (1910), but an article discussing his work can be found in al-Muqtataf 20 (1895-96), 228. Cited in Sheehi, Arab Imago, 39.
34 On Wakid see Allaithy, “Untold Story.”
35 On al-Yaziji's creation of printing fonts see Zaydan, Jurji, Tarajim Mashahir al-Sharq, vol. 2 (Cairo: al-Hilal Press, 1922), 124Google Scholar. On reports of his involvement with the typewriter see for example “Ibrahim al-Yazigi” (from George Antonius, The Arab Awakening, Putnam, 1946), al-Hakawati: A Digital Public Library of Arabic and Islamic Culture, http://al-hakawati.net/en_personalities/PersonalityDetails/7413/Ibrahim-alYazigi.
36 Auji, Hala, Printing Arab Modernity: Book Culture and the American Press in Nineteenth-Century Beirut (Leiden: Brill 2016), 2–3CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
37 Al-Muqtataf, article cited in Kupferschmidt, “Diffusion,” 238–39. See also for example al-Diyaʾ 4 (September 1901), 31; and 7 (July 1904): 45. Also, al-Hilal 6 (15 July 1898): 864; 7 (15 December 1899; 1 March 1900; 15 September 1900); and 9 (14 May 1901): 470.
38 Al-Hilal 6 (15 July 1898): 864. The machine's popularity stemmed from “the ease of its employment, and the proliferation of its uses” (li-suhūlat istikhdāmihā wa kathrat fawāʾidihā). Of course, Nahda linguistic reform debates had many other concerns and contours, but there is not space here to trace them all.
39 Though by no means all. See for example Sheehi, Foundations, 6–10; Salim, Samah, Popular Fiction, Translation and the Nahda in Egypt (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan 2019), 5–6CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
40 See al-Hilal 6 (15 July 1898): 864. Initially, the article notes, it had used exclusively a Latin alphabet, but the Germans had demanded a Gothic script, to be followed by Russian, Hebrew, Greek, Siamese, Telegu, and “even” Indian languages. The term waṭan is here translated as “nation” or “homeland,” but historically was defined simply as a place of birth or stay. In the modern period it came more specifically to denote the geographical home of the umma or Islamic community, and later the nation or homeland; in the 19th century, it was very much a concept in flux. On the history of the term see Ulrich Haarmann, “Waṭan,” Encyclopedia of Islam, 2nd ed., 2012, http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_islam_SIM_7891.
41 It also has implications for the delineation of the term waṭan. Given the pan-Arabist leanings of al-Hilal's editor Jurji Zaydan, its geography here seems to be an expansive one, encompassing the homelands of all Arabic speakers.
42 See for instance Said, Edward, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 2003), 149–50Google Scholar.
43 See Hannah Scott Deuchar, “Nahda: Mapping a Keyword in Cultural Discourse,” Alif 37 )2017(, 50–84.
44 On Barak, On Time: Technology and Temporality in Modern Egypt (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press 2013), 2.
45 “Al-Ala al-Katiba,” al-Manar 20 (1899): 275; “Alat al-kitaba fi Rusiya,” al-Hilal 6 (1 March 1900): 342. Al-Manar was a key Islamic modernist journal run by Rashid Rida that took a more anticolonial stance than al-Hilal.
46 Al-Hilal 9 (15 May 1901): 470.
47 Ibid. 12 (15 May 1904): 503.
48 Ibid., 502.
49 Although the New York Times reported on it in 1901. The Arabic typewriter's reception among Arab communities in New York is a subject of my ongoing research; my thanks to Samah Salim for this and other new directions.
50 See Mullaney, Thomas S., The Chinese Typewriter: A History (Boston, MA: MIT Press, 2018)Google Scholar.
51 Mullaney, Thomas S. “Facing the World: Toward a Global History of Latin Type Design,” Philological Encounters 3 (2018): 399–411CrossRefGoogle Scholar, quotation on 402.
52 Barak, On Time, 243–44.
53 Al-Hilal 12 (15 May 1904): 504, emphasis mine. It is worth noting that gharīb in Arabic does not necessarily have the slight negative connotation “strange” tends to take on in English, but nor does it necessarily have the positive ones of other translations (such as “remarkable”).
54 Rumored and likely, as noted already, to be Ibrahim al-Yaziji, the most famous of the Nahda calligraphers.
55 Al-Hilal 12 (May 15 1904): 504.
56 Kittler, Gramophone, 199.
57 Abdelkébir Khatibi and Mohammed Sijelmassi, The Splendor of Islamic Calligraphy (London: Thames and Hudson, 1996), 22; Nemeth, Arabic Type-Making; Osborn, Letters.
58 The invocation of an earlier, singular, unified Arabic script replicates Nahda imaginings of an earlier, singular, unified written style: it is the discourse of the “Golden Age” again.
59 Al-Diyaʾ 6 (31 October 1904): 45. This is also the verb used by al-Yaziji frequently in his series of articles on the effect of the press on Arabic grammar and style.
60 Mentioned in an earlier article; see al-Hilal 8 (1 Sept 1900): 731.
61 See Auji, Printing Arab Modernity.
62 On calligraphy and lithography, again, see ibid.
63 Al-Hilal 12 (16 May 1904): 505.
64 Ibid.
65 Freud, “Uncanny,” 199–200.
66 Ibid.
67 The Arabic is also etymologically linked to gharb, “West.”
68 Castle, Female Thermometer, 5.
69 Ibid., 7.
70 On debates over the sacredness or otherwise of Arabic, see, for instance, Khatibi and Sijelmassi, Islamic Calligraphy, 22.
71 Bhabha, “World,” 141–53, quotation on 142.
72 Siddiqi, Yumna, “The Cesspool of Empire: Sherlock Holmes and the Return of the Repressed,” Victorian Literature and Culture 34, no. 1 (2006): 233–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
73 Ibid., 243.
74 Salim, Popular Fiction, 191.
75 See Nasib al-Mashaʿlani, “Binaʾ Nurwud,” al-Diyaʾ 1 (28 February 1905): 310. A Study in Scarlet was translated by Nasib Badr. See Badr, Nasib, Riwayat Bulis London (Cairo: Matbaʿat al-Maʿarif, 1900)Google Scholar.
76 Nasib al-Mashaʿlani, “al-Ikhtifaʾ al-Gharib,” al-Diyaʾ 2 (15 April 1906): 405–16.
77 Arthur Conan Doyle, “A Case of Identity,” in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (London: Penguin, [1892] 2007). The stepfather, incidentally, was trying to gain control of his daughter's inherited income.
78 Johnson, Rebecca, Stranger Fictions: A History of the Novel in Arabic Translation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2021), 95–96Google Scholar.
79 For example, al-Mashaʿlani, “al-Ikhtifaʾ al-Gharib,” 411, 412, 413, 416.
80 In “A Case of Identity,” Holmes never even informs the authorities of his conclusions.
81 “Shiḥna” is a historic term used in this journal in place of the more common “būlīs”; al-Yaziji's linguistic reformism advocated “reviving” older Arabic vocabularies. My thanks to Adam Talib for the Mamluk etymology.
82 “The Turk and the Typewriter,” New York Times, 20 May 1901, 6.
83 Since the 1870s the regime had tightened censorship and created an extensive system of spies. See, for example, Yosmaoğlu, “Chasing the Printed Word.”
84 It was even made the subject of an Ottoman dissident novel titled Abdülhamid ve Sherlock Holmes (1913). Press publication of translated crime fiction, formerly prolific, reportedly came to an end in 1903. See Sehnaz Tahir-Gurcular, “Sherlock Holmes in the Interculture: Pseudotranslation and Anonymity in Turkish Literature,” in Beyond Descriptive Translation Studies: Investigations in Homage to Gideon Toury, ed. Anthony Pym, Miriam Shlesinger, and Daniel Simeoni (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Translation, 2008), 135–36.
85 On these texts see Hannah Scott Deuchar, “Terrors of Translation: Ottoman Crime Fiction and the Politics of Fear” (unpublished conference paper, MESA, 2017, Washington, DC).
86 On the myths and limits of Abdulhamid II's personal power see Deringil, Salim, The Well-Protected Domains: Ideology and the Legitimation of Power in the Ottoman Empire, 1876–1909 (London: Bloomsbury, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
87 See Kupferschmidt, “Diffusion.”
88 The letter also was recorded in what Herzl, according to Derek Penslar, termed his “Zionist diaries.” See Penslar, Theodor Herzl, 9–10.
89 Herzl, Theodor, Der Judenstaat: Versuch eine modernen Lösung der Judenfrage (Leipzig, Germany: Verlags-Buchhandlung, 1896)Google Scholar. He had met with figures from the Rothschilds to the German Kaiser and the Russian czar.
90 See Herzl, Complete Diaries 863–64, 888, 1274, 1277–79, 1475–78.
91 Ibid., 834. Mention of the latter is made here in a letter dated 28 April 1899 to Sir Ellis Ashmead MP.
92 See, for example, Jakes, Egypt's Occupation.
93 Herzl, Complete Diaries, 1188. The professor in question was Richard Gottheil, a scholar of Semitic languages and president of the newly established American Federation of Zionists.
94 Ibid., 1279. A typewriter was found among the sultan's possessions, but its provenance is uncertain; interestingly Haddad, too, had planned to present him with one. See Kupferschmidt, “Diffusion,” 238.
95 See for instance Herzl, Complete Diaries, 1473. The minister in question was Joseph Chamberlain.
96 These narratives echo in recent less-than-scholarly accounts of Herzl's typewriter, which argue triumphantly that “though Arab leader [sic] might not like this assumption,” Herzl was responsible for the later transformations of the Arabic script precipitated by typewriter fonts. See for example Ushi, “The Arabic Typewriter Case: How Herzl Tried to Bribe the Sultan,” ANU Museum of the Jewish People, 22 July 2018, https://www.anumuseum.org.il/blog-items/the-1901-case-how-herzl-tried-to-bribe-the-sultan.
97 Herzl, Complete Diaries, 1217.
98 Ibid., 1217–18.
99 Herzl, Theodor, Altneuland (Leipzig, Germany: Hermann Seemann Nachfolger, 1902)Google Scholar.
100 See for instance ibid., Book 3.
101 On Israeli national mythologies see El-Haj, Nadia Abu, Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001)Google Scholar.
102 Figure 3 contains text in German, Cyrillic, and Hebrew, and is itself a fascinating example of multilingual printing in Eastern Europe. My thanks to Amitai Ben-Abba for the Hebrew translations.
103 See Murat Umut Inan, “Imperial Patronage of Literature in the Ottoman World, 1400–1600,” in The Empires of the Near East and India, ed. Hani Khafipour (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), 493–504.
104 Hill, Peter, Utopia and Civilisation in the Arab Nahda (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press 2019), 75–76Google Scholar.
105 On Herzl's literary career, see for example Wistrich, Robert S., Laboratory for Destruction: Germans and Jews in Central Europe (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 205–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
106 See for example Penslar, Theodor Herzl, 5–10. Herzl did not have access to a fraction of the funds he would need.
107 Deringil, Well-Protected Domains.
108 As Said among others has argued; see Said, Orientalism, 103.
109 These members established the Ottoman Public Debt Administration, which was responsible for the overseeing of the debt repayment. For more on this topic, see Birdal, Murat, The Political Economy of Ottoman Public Debt: Insolvency and European Financial Control in the Late Nineteenth Century (London: I. B. Tauris, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
110 See Schreiner, Eva, “Building (on) Trust: The Architecture of Debt in the Late Ottoman Empire,” Architectural Theory Review 26, no. 1 (2022): 1–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
111 Penslar, Theodor Herzl, 8.
112 Scholars argue that as well as reacting against rising anti-Semitic nationalism, Zionist emphasis on a territorial homeland was shaped by nationalist ideals. See, for example, Stanislawski, Michael, Zionism and the Fin de Siècle: Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism from Nordau to Jabotinsky (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
113 Twentieth-century Orientalism, he argued, entailed “the transfer of a popular anti-Semitic animus from a Jewish to an Arab target”; Said, Orientalism, 286.
114 James Pasto “Islam's ‘Strange Secret Sharer’: Orientalism, Judaism, and the Jewish Question,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 40 no. 3 (1998): 467; Andrew Rubin, “Orientalism and Western Anti-Semitism: The Coming End of an American Taboo,” History of the Present 5 (2015): 95–108.
115 For a further discussion of this element of Said's scholarship, see, for example, Bolan, Christopher, “Introducing Edward Said,” in Freud and the Non-European, Edward W. Said (London: Verso and the Freud Museum, 2003), 7–8Google Scholar.
116 Wadie Said was born in Jerusalem but had American citizenship, shared by his children but not his wife. Border troubles recur in the narrative as a result. Said, Out of Place, 5–6, 132.
117 Ibid., xiii.
118 Ibid., 4–5. See also Emile Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek (Miami, FL: University of Miami Press, [1966] 1971), 195–96.
119 Said, Out of Place, 200.
120 Ibid., 80, 90. One is reminded, here, of Freud on “uncanny doubles.”
121 Freud, “Uncanny,” 226.
122 On the topic of Freud and race, see for instance Said, Freud and the Non-European, 17–18.
123 Said, Out of Place, 3, emphasis mine. The physical weight of the term “yoked” is echoed later, for instance in a description of French, Arabic, and English as awkward pieces of luggage the narrator carried on his travels (200).
124 Ibid., 90–91.
125 Ibid.
126 Ibid., 93–94.
127 Also, apparently, the first in Egypt. Ibid., 94.
128 Ibid., 5. Edward's father speaks to him only in English.
129 This might explain why Arabic typewriters had not managed to “transform the Egyptian bureaucracy” before.
130 For instance on the subject of “self-abuse,” of which the young Edward is humiliatingly found guilty. Said, Out of Place, 71.
131 Ibid., 68.
132 Ibid., photographs 4, 5.
133 Ibid., 243.
134 Ibid., 242.
135 Ibid., 94.
136 It is central, for instance, to Nemeth's account of typographical development; Nemeth, Arabic Type-Making, 55.
137 Said, Out of Place, 289.
138 The characterization of the father-son relationship is surely knowingly in dialogue with psychoanalytic discourse, perhaps particularly another Freud essay, “Family Romances” (1909).
139 Said, Out of Place, photographs 6, 9, 18.
140 Ibid., ix. The manuscripts are held at Columbia University, to which Said gifted them.
141 Although for much of his career, Said remained ambivalent on the topic of capitalism. See for example Spencer, Robert, “Contented Homeland Peace: The Motif of Exile in Edward Said,” in Edward Said: A Legacy of Emancipation and Representation, ed. A., I., and H. R. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2010), 406Google Scholar.
142 Said, Out of Place, xii, 22, 109, 133, 248—to pick just a few examples.
143 Bhabha, “World,” 142–43.
144 Ibid., 144–45.
145 Ibid., 147.
146 On the modern novel's struggles to account for the historical and ecological strange, see Ghosh, Amitav, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017)Google Scholar. Ghosh's reading of the novel's encounter with climate change brings the question of the uncanny into new territory again.
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