Shami 23create new publics that challenge existing social as well as political bound-
aries?^8 The chapters in this section provide compelling accounts of the
ways in which communication through technology has vitally expanded
the notion of the public in the Middle East and North Africa region.
Imagination is a central factor here—how nation but also community and
self are imagined and refracted through the lens of various media from
traditional print to new information and communication technologies.
A historical perspective is important in this endeavor, so as to assess con-
tinuities as well as differences between different kinds of media and the
ways in which they create their publics.
hile Kırlı in his chapter discussed the important role of the first W
Ottoman newspaper, launched in 1831, in creating a “public” in the
modern sense of the term, in her chapter, Michelle Campos examines
the press in the last years of Ottoman rule in Palestine as “an emergent
revolutionary public sphere” that took upon itself the role of defining
the “Ottoman public.” The newspapers in this multilingual press aimed
at different ethnic, religious and linguistic readerships (Turkish, Arabic,
Greek, Armenian, Ladino, Bulgarian and Hebrew) while aspiring at the
same time to create a transcommunal Ottoman imperial public. The
papers were to be “the voice of the people” while at the same time shap-
ing what “the people” were to be. The outcome was a constant tension
between “the Ottomanizing impulse of the press and its particularistic
thrust.” Thus, Campos shows that the hegemonic public and the counter-
publics were being created through the self-same medium of the news-
paper. Campos shows how these papers, in their different languages and
targeting different communities, worked to constitute a national / impe-
rial public through their didacticism, through their news from all parts of
their empire, through comparing governance practices in different cities,
through discussions about universal conscription and through debates,
editorials and letters from readers that operated as a public forum for
discussion. At the same time, by targeting specific linguistic and ethnic
groups as their reading public, they highlighted, often implicitly and
sometimes explicitly, the particularities and competing interests of these
groups within the larger imperial entity.
ampos also looks at the practices of reading newspapers and shows C
that the public sphere created by the newspapers was not composed simply