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The Iranian Community of the Late Ottoman Empire and the Egyptian “Crisis” through the Persian Looking Glass: The Documentation of the ʿUrabi Revolt in Istanbul’s Akhtar

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Tanya Elal Lawrence*
Affiliation:
History at Yale University and Skilliter Centre for Ottoman Studies at Newnham College, Cambridge

Abstract

This article focuses on the coverage of the ʿUrabi rebellion of 1881–82 in the Istanbul-based Persian-language newspaper Akhtar. Akhtar was the first periodical to be published in Persian outside the auspices of the Qajar state, and first appeared on 13 January 1876, from the press owned by Mohammad Tāher Tabrizi in the Valide Han in the Ottoman capital. The objective of the present article is twofold. First, it aims to interweave the history of the Persian-language publication Akhtar with broader questions of how the Hamidian state strove to situate itself within a changing international order in a bid to affirm its legitimacy and sovereignty. It then proceeds to examine the ideological leanings of Akhtar set against the complex background of censorship laws implemented by the Hamidian state (1876–1908). To this end, by scrutinizing the reportage of this one specific event—the Egyptian crisis of 1881–82—it attempts to shed light on how the editors of Akhtar successfully maintained the delicate equilibrium of appeasing both its patrons: namely, the Hamidian state and its readership across the region where Persian was spoken. Thus, the article seeks also to highlight the ways in which inter-imperial dynamics lie at the heart of the history of this “Persian” publication.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © 2017 Association For Iranian Studies Inc.

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Footnotes

The author thanks the Iranian Studies editors and the three anonymous reviewers for their insightful feedback on the article, and is grateful to John Gurney for his comments on an earlier draft. A particular note of thanks is due to Chris Wilson.

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