ABSTRACT

Al-Muqtataf was a commercial and intellectual success. It had to be to survive. No government ministry subsidized it. Within the Arab world it immediately became what could be likened to an international journal, its issues finding their way from Beirut to Damascus, Aleppo, Cairo, Alexandria, Baghdad, Basra, Najaf and Mosul. Muqtataf's emblem was a drawing of a feather pen and an awl the name of the journal, the former standing for the work of mind, the latter for the technical application of the products of mind: science and technology. Officials in the Egyptian Ministry of Schools and editors of Rawdat al-Madaris had been reading Muqtataf and its articles on modern astronomy. The deputy minister assigned to respond to the brouhaha in Beirut was Abdallah Fikri Pasha, a 43-year-old government official of secular education, little of it in science, who had absolutely no religious authority or standing.