Al-Muqtataf, the main subject of this treatise, was the only one of several Arabic educational periodicals from the 1870s which survived into the 20th century. Founded as a scientific journal in Beirut in 1876, and later published in Cairo, it developed into a leading secular modernist organ of the Arab Renaissance. Using the extensive source material, primarily in Arabic, including the 70 published volumes of the periodical (1876-1927), the author examines how Al-Muqtataf, under Ya'qub Sarruf (d. 1927), functioned as a discussion forum, and the background against which it did so. Going beyond this, she also examines the hitherto barely researched question of its role, and the role of early (private) educational and cultural periodicals, in the development of the Arabic press and the transformation of the journalistic and literary public sphere. Through an analysis of readers’ letters, the central importance of dialogue and conflicting opinions in the enlightenment discourse of Al-Muqtataf is elaborated, and its overriding principle identified: truth is not to be found in any dogma, but in the outcome of examination and rational argument. The records of the controversies over religion and science (including Darwinism), the modernisation of Arabic, the role of the (Arab) woman in society, Socialism, or the connection between politics and religion in Islam, among others, provide documentation of especially representative examples of this. The analysis of about 3500 readers’ letters, systematically undertaken here for the first time, makes it possible to assess them as mostly neither fictional nor fabricated. The reader’s letter is a vehicle of dialogue par excellence, and when examined it proves to be, within the limitations of the time, a unique and thoroughly effective institution for the formation of public opinion. It anticipates modern Arabic cultural discourse in having recourse both to Western models and to traditional styles of communication. The work is conceived both as a contribution to Arab-Islamic media and communications research and to a discursive history of ideas.
