About Al-Lissan

Al-Lissan

Al-Lissan, whose name meant "The Tongue," was an Iraqi Arabic illustrated magazine that was published in Baghdad from July 1919. It was a historical, social, scientific and literary monthly of thirty-three large-format pages, produced by a circle of nationalist journalists around the editor Ahmed Izzat al-Adhami, with the Baghdadi Christian officer and teacher Antoine Luqqa as its responsible manager and Ali Riza al-Ghazali holding its licence. Scholarly histories of the Iraqi press described Al-Lissan as the first Iraqi publication to call for revolution against the British forces, ahead of the 1920 Iraqi revolt, and it nourished that coming revolution with articles and poems that inflamed national feeling and stressed the importance of freedom and independence. It appeared regularly for a full year and ceased after the first two issues of its second year, in 1920, despite the wide spread it had achieved in its lifetime. Because the magazine belonged wholly to the brief interval between the end of Ottoman rule and the explosion of the 1920 revolt, its history was told in the past tense by the historians who preserved its memory.

Baghdad between Two Empires

Al-Lissan appeared in a city that had changed rulers within living memory of its first readers. Baghdad had been an Ottoman provincial capital until British forces occupied it in 1917, when the official Ottoman-era newspaper Al-Zawra was stopped and the British issued their own Arabic newspaper, Al-Arab, on 4 July 1917, having prepared its printing needs in advance, alongside other papers that reflected the occupiers' policy. Iraq's educated class was left without a press of its own at precisely the moment when the country's constitutional future was undecided. The British attempted, on their side, to fill the intellectual vacuum with papers serving their presence, while Iraqi journalists of nationalist inclination sought the means of effective work among the masses. When Britain announced its mandate over Iraq on 25 April 1920, a political resistance movement developed that grew into the great revolt which broke out on 30 June 1920. Al-Lissan belonged to the year before that explosion: it was the product of nationalist journalists who, in 1919, obtained a licence for a magazine that would spread national awareness while open revolution was still only an idea in print.

A Licence for National Awareness

A study of the Iraqi press and the 1920 revolution, preserved in Iraq's political encyclopedia literature, recorded how the magazine came into being. A group of Iraqi journalists of nationalist tendency, headed by the journalist Ahmed Izzat al-Adhami, succeeded in obtaining the licence of a magazine to help them spread national awareness, and they named it Al-Lissan. It was a historical, scientific, literary and illustrated magazine, published in Baghdad in July 1919. The choice of a monthly magazine form, rather than a daily newspaper, was itself significant in the Baghdad of 1919: a monthly could carry long essays, historical and scientific chapters and poetry, the genres through which an educated readership was argued into national consciousness, and it could do so under a licence granted in a city whose daily press was dominated by the occupation. The magazine's makers intended it, from the first, as an instrument of awakening: it devoted special care to the Arab cause and published valuable chapters on it, and it stood in the forefront of the publications that affirmed the importance of freedom and sovereignty.

The Men behind Al-Lissan

The formal structure of the magazine was recorded in the catalogues of the Iraqi press. The holder of the licence, the sahib al-imtiyaz, was Ali Riza al-Ghazali, and the responsible manager was Antoine Sadiq Luqqa. Its editor-in-chief was Ahmed Izzat al-Adhami, although, as the historian Abd al-Razzaq al-Hasani recorded, his name was not mentioned openly on its cover. The magazine's administration was in Baghdad, at Suq al-Jukhajiya, the cloth-sellers' market, and it was printed at the Arab Press, Matba'at al-Arab, in Baghdad. The arrangement reflected the legal realities of publishing under occupation: a licence-holder whose name stood on the concession, a responsible manager answerable for the publication, and an editor whose political reputation made discretion advisable. Between them, the three men represented the coalition that produced much of Iraq's early nationalist press, officials and officers, merchants of print and professional journalists, working within the narrow space the occupation authorities left open.

Luqqa: The Manager

Antoine Luqqa was a Baghdadi Christian whose biography, preserved in histories of the press and media in Iraq, illustrated the world of the late Ottoman officer class from which the magazine drew its management. He had entered the military school in Baghdad after the proclamation of the Ottoman constitution in 1908, and was then transferred to Istanbul as an officer. He fought for the Turks in the Balkan War, was wounded and lost a leg, and returned to Baghdad during the First World War, where he worked as a teacher in the military school. The same account noted, with a candour unusual in press history, that Luqqa personally could not write and was merely a manager, and that he was a supporter of the Arabs more than of the Turks. His role at Al-Lissan was therefore administrative and legal rather than literary: he carried responsibility for a publication whose writing was done by others, and his sympathies lay with the Arab national direction the magazine took. In the division of labour of a small nationalist magazine, such a figure was indispensable, the man whose name and standing made publication possible.

Al-Adhami: The Editor

The magazine's real intellectual force was its editor, Ahmed Izzat al-Adhami, a Baghdad journalist and lawyer who had graduated in law from Istanbul. Before the First World War he had been active in the Arab awakening against Turkish domination, in the circles of the Literary Club, al-Muntada al-Adabi, and of Lisan al-Arab, and after the war he issued the magazine Al-Lissan in 1919 to spread the national idea. His commitment carried personal costs that his biographers recorded plainly: for his writings calling for the liberation of the Arab lands he was prosecuted, imprisoned and pursued. He was later elected as a representative of Baghdad in the Chamber of Deputies, and among his works was the book Al-Qadiyya al-Arabiyya, The Arab Cause, a title that matched the cause to which his magazine had devoted its special attention. He died in 1936. Around him gathered the magazine's writers: among its most important contributors were the historian and educator Taha al-Rawi and the poet Jamil Sidqi al-Zahawi, one of the best-known literary figures of modern Iraq, whose presence in its pages connected Al-Lissan to the highest level of Baghdad's literary life.

Format and Production

As a physical object, Al-Lissan was an ambitious production for occupied Baghdad. It was an Iraqi historical, social, scientific and literary illustrated magazine of thirty-three pages in large format, issued in Baghdad once a month. The price of an issue was five annas. It was printed at the Arab Press in Baghdad, and its administration sat in Suq al-Jukhajiya, in the commercial heart of the old city. Illustration, large format and a thirty-three-page monthly gathering of history, society, science and literature placed heavy demands on paper, printing and money in a city still living with wartime scarcity, and the regularity the magazine achieved was itself an accomplishment: it continued to appear regularly for a full year. That regularity, combined with the standing of its contributors, gave Al-Lissan a presence out of proportion to its frequency. A monthly that arrived on time, every month, through the year in which Iraq's political future was being contested in print, in mosques and in tribal country alike, became a fixed point in the reading life of the nationalist public.

The Arab Cause in Its Pages

The content of Al-Lissan matched the purpose for which its licence had been sought. It gave special care to the Arab cause, the qadiyya arabiyya, and published valuable chapters on it, treating the history and claims of the Arab nation as the central subject around which its historical, scientific and literary material was arranged. Through what it published of articles and poems that inflamed national feeling, it affirmed the importance of freedom and independence and of sovereignty. The enthusiastic reception of its appearance by Iraqi youth was recorded by the press historians: young Iraqis hungry for freedom and independence welcomed the magazine warmly, and it held a great place in their hearts. In a country where the daily newspapers were the occupation's own, a monthly written by Iraqis, for Iraqis, about the Arab nation's past and future, performed the work that a national press performs before a nation has a state: it taught its readers to imagine the political community whose independence it demanded, and it did so in the elevated genres, history, science, literature and verse, that carried prestige with the educated class.

The First to Call for Revolution

Al-Lissan's distinction in Iraqi press history rested on a specific claim made for it by the scholars who studied the period. The study of the Iraqi press and the 1920 revolution described the magazine as the first publication to call for revolution, which worked to nourish the revolution and spread its concepts, standing in the forefront of the papers that affirmed the importance of freedom and independence, through the articles and poems it published inflaming national sentiment. Scholarly histories of media practice in Iraq, citing Raphael Butti's 1968 work and the records of the Iraqi National Library and Archives, likewise described Al-Lissan as the first Iraqi publication to call for revolution against the British forces, ahead of the revolt of 1920. The sequence mattered: the magazine began in July 1919, almost a year before the armed revolt broke out on 30 June 1920, and its second year opened in the summer of 1920, as the country moved from argument to insurrection. What the revolt's own newspapers, Al-Furat and Al-Istiqlal, would later do under fire, Al-Lissan had done beforehand in the study and the salon: it had made revolution a subject that could be printed, discussed and desired.

A Year of Publication and a Quiet End

The magazine's end was as undocumented in drama as its beginning had been deliberate. It continued to appear regularly for a complete year, and after the first and second issues of its second year, in 1920, it stopped publishing, despite the wide spread it had enjoyed during its life. No closure order or suppression decree was attached to its name in the standard accounts; its historians recorded the simple fact of cessation after some fourteen issues. The timing invited the obvious reading: by the second half of 1920 Iraq was in open revolt, the nationalist public's attention had moved from monthly essays to war news and leaflets, and the conditions of printing in Baghdad had been transformed by insurrection and its suppression. Al-Lissan had been a magazine of the interval of preparation, and when the preparation ended in revolution, the magazine ended with it. Its editor's later career, parliament, prosecution and imprisonment behind him and ahead of him in the telling, belonged to the Iraq that the revolt had helped to bring into being.

Legacy

Al-Lissan survived in the record because Iraq's press historians kept returning to it. It was catalogued in the standard histories of Iraqi journalism and of the press and media in Iraq, in the Iraqi Knowledge Gate maintained for the country's heritage, in the Arabic reference literature on Iraqi periodicals, and in academic studies of the press of the 1920 revolution, which treated it as the opening document of the revolutionary press tradition. Its legacy was the priority its historians claimed for it: before the revolt had newspapers of its own, before Al-Furat and Al-Istiqlal were pasted on mosque doors in Najaf, a Baghdad monthly of thirty-three illustrated pages had called, in print, for the revolution that followed. In the longer history of the Iraqi press, which ran from the Ottoman official gazette of 1869 through occupation papers and party organs to the crowded journalism of the monarchy, Al-Lissan held the particular honour of the forerunner: the tongue that spoke first.