258 Mediated Publics
Morgenlandischen Gesellschaft, 2002).
7.o date, much of the historical literature of the Arab press in the Middle T
East focuses on the press as a documentary source of nascent Arab or
local nationalisms. See Samir Seikaly, “Damascene Intellectual Life in the
Opening Years of the 20th Century: Muhammad Kurd ‘Ali and al-Muq-
tabas,” in Intellectual Life in the Arab East, 1890–1939, edited by Marwan R.
Buheiry (Beirut: American University of Beirut Press, 1981); Samir Seikaly,
“Christian Contributions to the Nahda in Palestine Prior to World War
I,” Bulletin of the Royal Institute for Inter-Faith Studies 2, no. 2 (Autumn
2000); Rashid Khalidi, “The Press As a Source for Modern Arab Political
History: ‘Abd al-Ghani al-‘Uraisi and al-Mufid,” Arab Studies Quarterly 3,
no. 1 (Winter 1981); Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian Identity: The Construction
of Modern National Consciousness (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1997); Eliezer Tauber, “The Press and the Journalist As a Vehicle in
Spreading National Ideas in Syria in the Late Ottoman Period,” Die Welt
des Islams 30 (1990); and James L. Gelvin, Divided Loyalties: Nationalism
and Mass Politics in Syria at the Close of Empire (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1998). While this (proto-)nationalist element is undoubt-
edly present, the late imperial context cannot be solely reduced to the
nationalisms that would become dominant in the post-WWI period.
Interesting works on the Ottoman public include Elizabeth Brown Frierson,
“Unimagined Communities: State, Press, and Gender in the Hamidian Era,”
PhD dissertation, Princeton University, 1996; Palmira Brummett, Image
and Imperialism in the Ottoman Revolutionary Press, 1908–1911 (Albany:
State University of New York, 2000); Sarah Abrevaya Stein, Making Jews
Modern: The Yiddish and Ladino Press in the Russian and Ottoman Empires
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003); Keith Watenpaugh, Being
Modern in the Middle East: Revolution, Nationalism, Colonialism, and
the Arab Middle Class (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006);
and Reşat Kasaba, “Economic Foundations of a Civil Society: Greeks in
the Trade of Western Anatolia, 1840–1876,” in Ottoman Greeks in the Age
of Nationalism: Politics, Economy, and Society in the Nineteenth Century,
edited by Dimitri Gondicas and Charles Issawi (Princeton, NJ: Darwin
Press, 1999).
8.eoff Eley, “Nations, Publics, and Political Cultures: Placing Habermas G
in the Nineteenth Century,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, edited by