Free The Shaping of the Modern Middle East by Bernard Lewis

time of correspondents working for daily papers set an example and in time provided an opportunity for the new Turkish newspapers. The foreign presence also gave a new impetus to the improvement of street lighting, transport, and other amenities.
    Some of the changes were more equivocal. As an ally of Britain and France, the sultan was enabled to raise war loans in Western financial markets and thus enter the slippery slope to extravagance and bankruptcy.
    The dissemination of Western knowledge and ideas was enormously helped by the spread, in various forms, of the European book. As a knowledge of European languages became more common, European books found readers and, more important, translators. During the sixteenth century, two books of Western origin are known to have appeared in Turkish; one-never printed-was a history of France, translated in 1572 by order of the Reis Efendi, the chief secretary in charge of foreign affairs; and the other was an account of the discovery and wonders of the New World, compiled from European sources in about 1580. The seventeenth century brought a couple of books on history and geography and a treatise on the diagnosis and treatment of syphilis, which the Turks, and after them, other Middle Eastern peoples, call firengi; the eighteenth added a few more, including some translations of French books on the military sciences that were printed in Istanbul. Until the end of the eighteenth century, there were still only a handful of Western works available in Turkish, most of them dry and factual compilations prepared for official use; there were none at all in Arabic or Persian.

    The first impulse to the new translation movement seems to have come from the French, for frankly propagandist purposes. Thus, for example, the address of the National Convention to the French people, of 9 October 1794, was translated into Arabic and published in a quarto booklet with the French and Arabic texts on facing pages, a useful aid to students of language and of other things. Other French political writings were translated into Arabic and Turkish and distributed in the Middle East. The French expedition to Egypt made detailed arrangements for the publication of French news and opinion in Arabic.
    The immediate impact of all this was, as far as we know, limited. Far more influential was the translation movement that developed during the nineteenth century in the three main centers, in Turkey, Egypt, and Persia. At first it was all officially sponsored and reveals a rather official trend of thought. The first translations made and published under the auspices of Middle Eastern rulers include works on Napoleon and Catherine of Russia, Voltaire's Peter the Great and Charles XII, Robertson's Charles V, and the instructions of Frederick the Great to his commanders. Later the work was taken up and immensely developed by the enterprise of editors, publishers, printers, and translators.
    The West had offered new media of communication-printing in the eighteenth, journalism and the telegraph in the nineteenth, and radio and television in the twentieth century-all of which played a great role in the dissemination of Western and other ideas. The first newspapers were mainly official; for example, the leading article in the first issue of the Ottoman official gazette, published on 14 May 1832, defines the function of the press as being to make known the true nature of events and the real purpose of the acts and commands of the government, in order to prevent misunderstanding and forestall uninformed criticism; another purpose was to provide useful knowledge on commerce, science, and the arts. The first nonofficial newspaper in Turkish was a weekly founded in 1840 by an Englishman called William Churchill. It was followed by many others, in Turkish, Arabic, and Persian, as well as other languages.
    With the press came the journalist, a new and portentous figure in Middle Eastern life. Another newcomer, no less important,