238 Mediated Publics
critical period after the 1908 Ottoman revolution.^1 At the same time that
it saw itself as the voice of the people, reflecting their “authentic” wishes
and desires, it took it upon itself to be a voice to the people, educating
and enlightening them to the requirements of a changing world. The press
would serve as the handmaiden of the revolution, carrying out its aims of
reforming and reviving the Ottoman Empire by showing its readers—the
Ottoman public—what it meant to “be Ottoman,” in a period when this
was an unfamiliar identifier and a time of rapidly changing political and
social realities.
As a result, the multilingual press in the Ottoman Empire became a
central site for an emergent revolutionary public sphere whose central task
was the deeply public process of endowing Ottomanness with meaning.
First and foremost, the press consciously took upon itself the task of pro-
moting Ottoman unity and citizenship practices across ethnic, religious,
and linguistic boundaries. As al-Ittihad al-‘Uthmani characterized it, “the
Ottoman state is comprised of many groups [‘anās.ir]^2 and it is upon us
to strive to publish newspapers composed of the elite of the ‘anās.ir pres-
ent in the Ottoman lands until true synthesis [al-ta’līf al-h.aqīqī] and true
devotion are attained and until the editors will possess the trust of the
people and its consent.”^3
t the same time, however, the multilingual press would also cater A
to and presume to speak for particularistic (linguistic, religious, ethnic,
local) interests and groups. These communal-sectarian publics were thus
produced alongside—and sometimes in opposition to—the imperial pub-
lic, so that the “true synthesis” that al-Ittihad al-‘Uthmani proposed was
both a highly desired yet deeply contested aim.
s article explores the role of the multilingual press as an impor-Thi
tant actor in the creation and contestation of imperial, local, and confes-
sional publics in late Ottoman Palestine. Rather than simply transmitting
information and knowledge, newspapers played a much more productive
role in constituting and articulating the public self. The dialectical ten-
sions between the aspiration to constitute a trans-communal Ottoman
imperial public on the one hand, and the politicization of ethno-religious
publics on the other, manifest as debates among readers, between newspa-
pers, and across languages, were central to the creative process of “becom-
ing” Ottoman.