Somehow I think that with even a little motivation they could have found a substitute for boar bristles. They could even have used them. After all, they aren't eating or even wearing them.
Though there were earlier presses in Turkey and India, the first press in the Arab world was in Egypt where it was set up by Muhammad Ali during his modernization program. This would have been after Napoleon's Egyptian expidition so it would be the first decades of the 1800s. The Vatican had one for some time before for its uniate communities and for missionary work. If memory serves Napoleon brought an Arabic press to Egypt and it came from the Vatican. Literacy was reasonably common in pre-Napoleanic Muslim countries. They are sometimes described as "virtually literate." That is more than one person in twenty knew how to read and write. Once there were newspapers everyone interested could have had the daily news read to them. However, in many instances you can still see the effect of pre-press traditions that would be based on a limited cannon and high cost scribal reproduction of manuscripts. Preliterate societies emphasize storytelling. Scribal societies emphasize detailed mastery and recall of cannonical texts. The classic example is the Quranic school where very young children are taught the rudiments of othography and memorization of the entire Quran by heart. None of this explains why it took over 300 years for movable type to get to areas using the Arabic family of scripts (Arabic, Persian, Pre-Kamalist Turkish, and Urdu are the most influential). There are probably two reasons. First, it was not evident that Islamdom had an arms gap with the West until Napoleon's action in Egypt. This really shook-up the Ottomans and their Arab allies who would desperately try to remedy the situation until they fell in the sequelle of WWI. The Indian Muslims got moving somewhat earlier since they were more directly colonized by the British and thus culturally challenged at an earlier date, to a deeper degree, and more directly affected by direct cultural diffusion. Locked between the two, the Persians were initially less challenged. When they were exposed, their problems were as much with Russia and Ottoman Turkey as with more technically advanced West European powers. This amounts to an argument that the Muslims didn't know and didn't care about movable type. A more minor argument is that setting Arabic style orthography in mechanical movable type is significantly more difficult than setting Latin, Cyrillic, or even Hebrew. Arabic othographic systems do not have a block form. Letters come in a many as three varieties (initial, medial, and final position). You must immediately be able to include floating diacritics. Letters that have a final form must connect to any preceeding letter. Letters with a medial form must also connect to the following letter. However, this technical challenge is a relatively low hurdle and would not have delayed (and in the end did not delay) adoption of of Arabic form presses. My hypothesis is that the delay just seems to be an example of "Not Invented Here" syndrome. ==================== PS: I know this because I am working on a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology specializing in Arab, Mediteranean and Islamic anthropology. I am minoring in Near Eastern Studies. I spent 15 months in 1992 and 1993 as a religious volunteer with Mennonite Central Committee teaching English as a foreign language to Egyptian Coptic Christians in Cairo Egypt. (I used to be a believing Mennonite and pacifist.) I spent 10 months during 1997 in Amman, Jordan conducting field work for my dissertation. The working title for my dissertation is _Jordanian urban youth at the end of the Twentieth Century_. It is in its second, and hopefully penultimate, revision. I studied Arabic for years but still can't read it or participate in a meaninful conversation. I studied French for one summer and Spanish for two years. Those languages I can read. I studied Persian for one semester. I can identify Persian text and guess whether or not two people are speaking Persian. On Saturday 29 September 2001 16:59, you wrote: > Nick Arnett wrote: > >The main thing I've known about Islam is that it has had such a strong > > oral tradition that the printing press did not have nearly the impact in > > Islamic lands as it did in Christian areas. And since I've focused my > > readings on printing technology in history, that meant I saw very little > > about Islam. > > > >How do you happen to know all this? > > I know something. The printing press used pig's hair to clean the > printing pieces - and the pig is an impure animal. So, printing has > been severely delayed in Islam... > > Alberto Monteiro
