2Numerous studies have addressed the theme of media related to migration and in relation to the phenomenon of satellite television and reception practices among immigrants settled in Europe (Mattelart, 2014). With the development of new information and communication technologies at the turn of the 1990s, particularly the emergence of the Internet and satellite channels, the existence of an Arab public sphere, its constituents and its transformations, has given rise to a great deal of research (Alterman, 1998; Mermier, 2003; Gonzalez-Quijano and Guaaybess, 2009; Mohsen-Finan, 2009). Similarly, the issue of the economic and political control of these new media configurations, in a context of more or less effective privatisation, have also been scrutinised (Sakr, 2007; Della Ratta, Sakr and Skovgaard-Petersen, 2015).

4Within the Arab space, defined as a space of dissemination and reception that can therefore extend beyond an Arabic-speaking area, the press, defined as "all newspapers and periodicals" (Larousse), has been strongly affected by these developments. The transition to digital especially for those who successfully navigated the transformation, significantly disrupted the media landscape in most countries. The 2011 uprisings, followed by the wars that ravaged several Arab countries, with attendant dispersion and forced migration, also had profound consequences for the reconfiguration of media spaces, albeit consequences differentiated according to context. Repression and extreme violence provoked the search for new broadcasting spaces from the territories of exile. This in turn, led to the recomposition of the Arab press based on new centralities and the resulting transnational circulations arising from forced migratory flows.

5If we look back at the development of this Arab press created outside the predominantly Arabic-speaking countries, we can only observe that it is largely the consequence of migration situations.

A variety of designations

6The academic denomination of this press is varied and recalls the historical contexts that saw its birth or development. The Lebanese scholar Philippe de Tarrazi, author of the first history of the Arab press, does not distinguish between titles that were created in predominantly Arabic-speaking countries and those founded outside, except when it comes to ranking cities and countries in order of importance of newspapers and periodicals published between 1800 and 1929, even going so far as to determine the religion of their owners (de Tarrazi, 2020: 739-758). This wide-ranging study provides a map of Arab migrations, which have their own historical, political and cultural characteristics, depending on their points of departure and destination. One of the first syntheses specifically devoted to the "migrant Arab press" deals with the migration of the press both among Arabic-speaking countries and outside Arabic-speaking countries (Abū Zayd, 1985). For its author, the Egyptian Fārūq Abū Zayd, it was the same press that circumstances forced to settle elsewhere than in the home country of its founders. William A. Rugh isolates a separate category, that of “Offshore Pan-Arab Print Media” (Rugh, 2004: 167-180). However, one of the reasons that motivated the relocation of the press outside the Arab world was the search for greater freedom of expression, even if in the case of the London-based pan-Arab press studied by Rugh, its relationship with the powers that be, particularly in Saudi Arabia, was close.

7De Tarrazi already pointed out that a major reason for the creation of many Arab press titles in Europe and the Americas during the Ottoman era was the avoidance of censorship:

It is plain from the producing tables that some of the far cities in Europe and America, where the inhabitants do not speak Arabic, have surpassed in the number of journals and magazines several capitals and famous cities right in the heart of Arabic speaking countries. This is due to the immigration of a large number of journalists and writers in the day of the Ottoman government to which they were subject. This government oppressed and persecuted the thinking and learned men of her country. She was afraid of their writings… (de Tarrazi, 2020: 745)

Crossing the Atlantic

8Beyond these considerations on the effects of censorship in the relocation of the Arab press, migratory flows from the Levant (Syria, Lebanon, Palestine) to the New World also led to the creation of many Arab newspapers. Brazil surpassed all other countries in the Americas in terms of the number of titles, 82 newspapers and 13 magazines, according to de Tarrazi’s 1929 census, and it was also the country where the first newspaper in Latin America was created in 1894 (Bruckmayr, 2014: 245). Brazil was followed by the United States (52 newspapers and 27 journals), then Argentina (41 newspapers and 17 journals) and Mexico (15 newspapers and 2 journals) (de Tarrazi, 2020: 737). Already in 1910, there were more than 15 Arab newspapers in the United States (Cardinot, 2013), including Kawkab America (Planet America) published in 1888 in New York (Abu Laban, 1981). Several of these titles were closely linked to sectarian groups and represented, for Michael W. Suleiman (1999: 4), “the main socializing agencies conveying the messages of their sectarian leadership. Because the Orthodox had already Kawkab America, Al-Hoda was set up to represent and speak for the Maronites. Later, Al-Bayan proclaimed itself the newspaper of the Druze”. As Philipp Bruckmayr points out, the Arab press in Latin America, though numerically superior, has been the subject of far less study than the Mahjar press in the United States with its famous authors, Khalil Gibran and the writers of the Rābiṭa al-qalamiyya (Bruckmayr, 2014: 245-247). This author draws on data more recent than those used by de Tarrazi and shows the vitality of this press in different urban centres including Rio de Janeiro, which “before 1950 saw the emergence of at least 42 Arabic language newspapers and 5 magazines” (Bruckmayr, 2014: 249).

9Some of these titles had a truly “translocal” dimension linking emigrants to their city or region of origin in a shifting context where the balance between Ottomanism and Arab identity fluctuated greatly depending on individual and political circumstances. The Lebanese journalist Iskandar Riachi, recounting his crossing of the Atlantic on the German liner L’Imperator in June 1913, said that he had been invited by his compatriot Najla Mutran to come from Paris to New York to create a newspaper for the immigrants of Zahlé, to be called The New Country, in Arabic transcription (Riachi, 1966: 32-33; Riachi, 1954: 92). As Jonathan Friedman (2000: 199-200) observed: “Could it not be that the local is a relationship of interlocality and not simply a cultural representation, that is, a cultural and social practice on a larger scale?”

10It is also important to note that this press served as a vehicle for nationalist ideas such as Arab, Pansyrian and Lebanese nationalisms in particular (Bruckmayr, 2014: 250) and played an important role in “transnational political mobilisations” (Logrono Narbona, 2014; Fahrenthold, 2013: 34-63). In this issue, Camila Pastor de Maria Campos traces the evolution of the Arabic press in Mexico from the end of the Ottoman period (1878-1914) to the French Mandate over Syria and Lebanon. Her study focuses on two newspapers created within the Maronite community that reflect the ideological underpinnings of the positions taken in relation to major events occurring in the Levant, such as the Palestinian revolt of 1936, and in relation to the place reserved for these immigrants in the host society. The gradual shift from Arabic to Spanish, or the initial choice of the latter language for each of the two newspapers studied, also shows that this press differentiated itself according to the type of relationship that its instigators had with their country of origin and their chosen immigration destination. Its transformations were also the result of the evolution of the links between these two poles and their ideological, social and cultural anchoring strategies.

Shifting configurations and identifications

11To lump together under a single heading as “Arab migration” phenomena as diverse as the resettlement of populations from Hadramaut (in present-day Yemen) in Southeast Asia, particularly in Indonesia and India, with the migration of hundreds of thousands from the Levant to the Americas, or the migration of North Africans to Europe and Yemenis to the United Kingdom, is to conceal under the cloak of homogenising ethnic categorisations the specific dynamics and particular interactions that exist between the different spaces and populations brought together, often under the aegis of colonial authority. The Arab press wherever it exists reflects such particularities, whether among the outposts of the British Empire, the Dutch East Indies, in Zanzibar, Turkey, Russia, Switzerland, Germany, Italy, France, the United Kingdom, Malta, Cyprus, the United States, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Cuba, Argentina, Chile, the Dominican Republic or Uruguay, From this list, which respects the order of countries established by de Tarrazi, it can be seen that the idea of an allophone press is shifting, since Zanzibar, which had been attached to Oman became an autonomous province of Tanzania in 1964, and the Sanjak of Alexandretta, assigned to the Syrian territory under the French Mandate, was ceded to Turkey in 1939.

From Ottoman Empire to Turkey

13A reference to the case of the Arab press in the Ottoman Empire and in Turkey is particularly interesting because it can give rise to temporal shortcuts on possible continuities but also because it can suggest interesting comparisons on conditions leading to the formation of an Arab press scene within a single metropolis over distinct periods marked by very different political and geopolitical contexts. It is also the very definition of Arab denomination that is at stake, since the political and cultural connotations that refer to it are far from stable and fluctuate according to situations, allegiances, the scale of membership and representations. The parallel drawn between the Ottoman period and the contemporary period to speak, for example, of a (re)creation of a press in Arabic in Istanbul seems specious, to say the least, if it suggests a false historical continuum associating the presence of an Arab media scene with the activation of the same referential horizon that the Arabic name would subsume.

14Thus, Fārūq Abū Zayd points out that the first title of the emigrant Arab press was Mir’āt al-Aḥwāl [The Mirror of Situations] created, in Istanbul, by the Aleppine poet and journalist Rizqallāh Ḥassūn al-Ḥalabī in 1855, which actually seems to be the first Arabic-language press title created in the capital of the Ottoman Empire (de Tarrazi, 1913: 86 and Abū Zayd, 1985: 19). It was followed by the daily newspaper Al-Ǧawā’ib founded in 1861 by the famous Aḥmad Fāris Al-Shidyāq, which ceased publication in 1884 (Roper, 1995: 213: Debbech, 2020: 97-101). Elias Hanna Elias, referring to the circumstances surrounding the founding of these two newspapers, does not hesitate to describe Istanbul as the “capital of the Arab press” (Elias, 1993: 24), while pointing out:

It may seem paradoxical that some Arabic-language newspapers were able to take up residence in Istanbul, the capital of the Ottoman Empire, which was not particularly favourable to the Arabic language, but which nevertheless constituted a pole of attraction for ambitions that had a chance of being fulfilled there.

15This press was created outside the Arab provinces of the Empire, in a context where the latter were not national entities, yet it was intended for them. Depending on the perspective, this phenomenon is likely to be overlooked as it was in this book on the “Turkish Press and the Press of Turkey” (Clayer et al., 1992), which makes no mention of the Arabic-language press even though several of the contributions concern the Ottoman period. It is interesting here to compare the testimony of the Lebanese writer Ǧurǧī Zaydān (2017: 86), during his visit to Istanbul in 1909, which mentions the names of eight Arabic-language weeklies published in Istanbul after the Young Turk revolution in 1908, six of which had ceased publication, with the data reported in Baykal’s (2019: 56-58) work on periodicals published between 1908 and 1923. Baykal lists 11 Arabic publications in Istanbul and the vilayets of Aydin (Smyrna region) and Salonika, i.e., 2% of the 140 Arabic publications authorised in the Ottoman Empire at the time.

16The creation of an Arabic media scene in Turkey after 2011 is by no means an extension of the one formed by Arabic newspapers during the Ottoman period. It is the result of a particular geopolitical conjuncture brought about by the uprisings of the Arab Spring, their repression and/or their slide towards internal dissension which notably provoked the resettlement of 3.6 million Syrians in Turkey as well as the displacement of tens of thousands of Iraqis, Libyans, Egyptians and Yemenis. It is also the result of the policy of influence pursued by regimes in Ankara and Doha, which joined forces to sponsor and finance a large part of the Arab media in Turkey (Mermier, 2021). More than differences related to the technological transformations of the press, which it is useless to go back over, it was in fact the political nature of territorialities and affiliations that changed before and after the formation of Turkish and Arabic nationalities, and therefore of the nature of relations between these entities.

17In this issue, the case of the online journal Al-Jumhuriya [The Republic], founded in 2012 by opponents of the Bashar Al-Assad regime, analysed by Adélie Chevée and Franck Mermier, shows how the circumstances of the uprising, war and repression in Syria led to the establishment of a transnational network of journalists and intellectuals linking Syria from the inside to Syrian capitals in exile, including Istanbul. The journal’s left-leaning ideological and cultural orientations, however, contributed to a drastic reduction in the presence of those of its contributors residing in Turkey after the hardening of the political climate following the attempted coup in 2016.

The handover from Paris to London

18These historical discontinuities can be seen in the examples of the Arab press in Paris and London. Fluctuating power relations and political rivalries, particularly between France and the United Kingdom, as well as the nature of the relations maintained by these European powers vis-à-vis the Arab parts of their colonial empires, had direct consequences for the environments in which Arab-speaking journalists were obliged to work. Fatna Ziani, responsible for Arabic language collections at the BULAC (the University Library of Languages and Civilizations, Paris), mentions in an interview published in this issue and conducted by Diana Cooper-Richet, that the library possesses issues of the bi-monthly Al-Tafāhum published in 1942 in Vichy by the Service des affaires musulmanes. It is interesting to note that, in his autobiography, the “Arabist” Charles Pellat, who was in charge of creating it, makes only an elliptical mention of it without mentioning its name, no doubt to conceal this inglorious episode in his professional itinerary (Pellat, 2007: 55).

19While France and the United Kingdom may have been breeding grounds for an Arabic-speaking press in search of freedom and a favourable publishing climate (Elias, 1993: 44), it is obviously necessary to take into account the different historical contexts in which this press developed, to identify the political motivations that presided over its creation. In the “media capital” (Charles, 2021: 464-465) that Paris would become, and which assumed new proportions following adoption of the 29 July 1881 law on the freedom of the press, Arabic-language titles were published for propaganda purposes by the French authorities. In this issue, Ons Debbech tells the story of Birğīs Barīs [The Paris Eagle], the first newspaper published in Arabic in Paris in 1859, under the aegis of Abbé Bourgade which aimed, explicitly, to promote “Christian civilisation” and French politics among Muslims. The creation of the newspaper Al-Ǧawā’ib in Istanbul, with subsidies from the Ottoman sultan, was also intended to counter the influence of Birğīs Barīs, whose circulation was not limited to Muslim countries following the example of the daily Al-Shidyāq, a newspaper created by Aḥmad Fāris Al-Shidyāq (Debbech, 2020: 99).

20Numerous titles were then published, such as Al-'Urwa Al-Wuthqā [The Indissoluble Bond], which was born in 1884 from a collaboration between the two Muslim reformists Jamal Eddine Al-Afghani and Mohamed Abduh. One of the contributions in this dossier that we owe to Eliane Ettmüller is devoted to the satirical newspaper Abū Naẓẓārāt Zarqā that Ya’qūb Ṣannū’ continued to publish in Paris after his exile from Egypt in 1878 and in which he advocated Egyptian nationalism to Europeans (Fahmy, 2008). During the First World War, the founding of the newspaper Al-Mustaqbal [L’Avenir] in Paris in 1916 was part of the context of the war between France and the Ottoman Empire and the plan to dismember its Arab provinces after the conflict. Across the Channel, and as early as the second half of the nineteenth century, several titles hostile to the Ottoman Empire emerged such as Al-Naḥla [The Bee]. Initially published in Beirut, this periodical started to appear in London, from 1876, after the exile of its founder Louis Sabounji (Zolondek, 1978; Visser, 2014). Similarly, propaganda titles such as Al-Ghayra (Elias, 1993: 45) were edited and published by the Ottoman administration in London, to counterbalance ideas that were hostile to it.

21In the mid-1970s, with the war in Lebanon, many journalists and press titles emigrated to Paris and London or were created there in the context of rivalries between Arab regimes. Nicolas Beau (1995: 150-157) referred to the large number of pro-Iraqi periodicals that were created in Paris during the 1980s and which later served the Saudi regime, especially during the first Gulf War (1990-1991). One of the flagship publications of the Arab cultural and political press based in Europe was the weekly Al-Yawm al-Sābi’ published in the French capital under the aegis of the Palestine Liberation Organisation from 1983. Bringing together journalists from different Arab countries and distributed as much in North Africa as in the Middle East, this journalistic experiment can be considered as one of the last lights of a certain political pan-Arabism centred around the Palestinian question. An article written by Aya Khalil, in this issue, gives an account of the characteristics of this weekly, notably through the testimonies of several of its contributors. Another of its eminent protagonists, Basheer Al-Bakr, relates the circumstances of his participation in this periodical in an interview published also in this issue and conducted by Franck Mermier. The replacement of Paris by London as the centre of gravity of the Arab press in Europe is discussed in relation to his own journalistic journey.

22Several pan-Arab newspapers were thus created in the British capital with Saudi financial backing (El Oifi, 2005), in particular, the daily Al-Hayat, bought by the Saudi prince Khalid Bin Sultan, relaunched in London in 1988, then relocated again to Lebanon in 2000 before disappearing twenty years later. For this dossier, Amal Nader and Mohamed Bendahan focused on three pan-Arab dailies (print and online) published in London and financed by the Saudis (Al-Sharq Al-Awsat - The Middle East), the Qataris (Al-Quds Al-Arabi - Arab Jerusalem) and the Emiratis (Al-Arab - The Arabs). The nature of the dailies’ relationships to their benefactors is analysed through their reporting on events that took place in 2017, 2019 and 2021.

23In 2014, the daily Al-Araby Al-Jadeed was published in London and Doha, extending Qatar’s policy of media influence to print media, with Al Araby channel also established as an alternative to Al-Jazeera. If London replaced Paris as an Arab media platform, it was because of the administrative facilities granted for the establishment of media companies, the absence of censorship and the greater accessibility of English, as mentioned by Basheer Al-Bakr in an interview published in this issue. The fact remains however, that the British capital has lost its attractiveness and that its role as a European hub for the Arab press is reportedly declining (Jarrah, 2008).

Press, Migrations and Transnationalism

25One of the concepts that has become exponentially more popular since the 1990s and has accompanied the process of “globalisation” is that of transnationalism (Green, 2011: 197-208). It has also been used to describe media carriers and productions that are included in the category of “transnational media” and to claim the existence of a “transnational public sphere” (Gupta and Fergurson, 1997: 48).

26In anthropology, one of the first definitions of transnationalism, linking it to migrants, is offered by anthropologists Nina Glick Schiller, Linda Basch and Cristina Blanc-Szanton (Green, 2011: 202-206). They call transnationalism the immigrant experience “to emphasize the emergence of a social process in which migrants establish social fields that cross geographical, cultural, and political borders”. Immigrants are understood to be transmigrants when they develop and maintain multiple relations—familial, economic, social, organizational, religious, and political that span borders” (Glick Schiller et al., 1992: ix). Anthropologist Steven Vertovec points out “that the long-distance connections maintained by migrants 100 years ago were not truly ‘transnational’—in terms of one contemporary sense of regular and sustained social contact; rather, such earlier links were just border-crossing migrant networks that were maintained in sporadic fashion as best as migrants at that time could manage” (Vertovec, 2009: 16).

27Tristan Mattelart (2007: 13-54) offered a valuable critical reflection on “transnational cultures” in relation to the media to highlight the relevance of Benedict Anderson’s thesis on “long-distance nationalism” created by the conjunction between migration and the internationalisation of the media (Anderson, 1998 cited in Mattelart, 2007: 55). This is echoed in Nancy Green’s warning about an irenic vision of transnationalism (Green, 2011: 208). Acknowledging the heuristic value of this notion for revisiting historical sources, she argues “against an over-interpretation of the fluidity of the present that would neglect the constraints that persist. The praise of mobility, of which the transnational is a part, is limited by the power relations inherent in the forms and facets of mobility.” Moreover, the relations of centre to periphery that marked the colonial period did not suddenly vanish with contemporary globalisation. As the anthropologist Jackie Assayag writes (Assayag, 2005: 279) “...these networks that direct and channel these ‘flows’ depend on poles of power and geopolitical power relations linked to the ‘global megalopolitan archipelago’ formed by a set of cities that contribute to the direction of the world”.

28The parallels that could be drawn between the Arab émigré press prior to the diffusion of new information and communication technologies and the news websites of the Internet age suggest, however, that beyond the obvious differences relating to the speed and density of connections and flows, constants can be observed, particularly at the level of context effects. The evolution of the place and status of Arab immigrant populations, of their (differentiated) expectations in relation to the host societies, not to mention the greater or lesser strength of identity assignments, permanently reconfigures the content, orientations and spaces of distribution of this press. Thus, while part of the Syrian press in Turkey experiences great precarity, it remains oriented towards the Syrian populations both inside and in exile (Badran, 2020: 69-85), certain press sites in Germany, the outcome of German-Syrian initiatives, provide a catalyst for Arabic cultural circles, such as Fann [Art], an online magazine in Arabic and German devoted to arts and culture (Mermier, forthcoming).

29By revisiting the theme of the Arabic allophone press from a diachronic perspective and in the light of contemporary technological and political transformations, this issue aims to focus on the consequences of the interactions that this allophone press has with the social, political and cultural configurations in which it is deployed. Its study lies at the crossroads of several disciplines: cultural history, information and communication sciences, political science, socio-anthropology and migration studies. The purpose of this issue is also to decompartmentalise disciplinary approaches. Finally, it aims to contribute to a reflection on areal studies by confronting the diversity of the contexts studied with the underlying question of how to define the changing configurations of theArab space.