Abū Nazzāra’s Journey from Victorious Egypt to Splendorous Paris: The Making of an Arabic Punch

Abstract

Among the Egyptian periodicals published at the end of the nineteenth century, there was no such thing as an Arabic Punch. It was only in 1907, decades after the period at stake in this chapter, that a ‘Punch proper’, the al-Siyâsa al-Musawwara or The Cairo Punch, made its appearance and was eventually followed, in the 1920s, by a massive flow of satirical magazines. The absence of an Egyptian Punch version before the onset of the twentieth century, however, does not mean that there was no satirical press in Egypt, nor does it preclude an awareness of Punch and other European satirical periodicals in this country. The present chapter focuses on the late nineteenth century and reconstructs the somewhat complex and multi-layered story of how the Egyptian satirical press came into being. It deals, more specifically, with the first satirical journal in Egypt, Yaʿqūb Sannūʿ alias James Sanua’s Abū Nazzāra Zarqā (1878–1911). Sanua was essentially a dramatist, and tracing this history requires indeed close attention to the nineteenth century Egyptian theatre in order to capture, as this chapter will, the accommodation of drama in satirical journalism. The question of the British Punch’s (in this case mostly tacit) presence shall also be heeded and will be taken up summarily in the conclusion.