As-Sufūr

When the Ottoman Empire entered World War I, Britain, under British Army Officer John Maxwell, enacted legislation on November 2, 1914 that subjected the Egyptian press to censorship.^[6] This created a paucity in the Arabic press and caused many papers to cease publication.^[6] Among the periodicals affected was Ahmed Lutfi es-Sayed's newspaper Al Jarida.^[6] When the conditions drove Ahmed Lutfi es-Sayed away from the paper, some of his writers—Abd al-Hamid Hamdi, Mustafa 'Abd ar-Raziq, Mohammed Hussein Heikal, Mansur Fahmi [ar], and Taha Hussein—sought to resist.^[4] They attempted to buy the rights to Abd ar-Rahman al-Barquqi's [ar] magazine al-Bayan, but negotiations were unfruitful.^[6] Instead, the writers established a company and to publish as-Sufūr under Abd al-Hamid Hamdi, who assumed fiscal responsibility for the paper.^[6]

The first edition was published May 21, 1915 with eight pages.^[6] Its 307th edition was published October 22, 1922, after which it published irregularly in 1923.^[6] It was officially forced into decommission as its license was revoked for about a year and a half after publishing content deemed to have transgressed its social-literary bounds into something political.^[6] It published a few editions in 1925 before disappearing for good.^[6]

Muhammad Taimur [ar] published short stories in as-Sufūr from 1917.^[7] It was later acquired by members of al-Madrasa al-Haditha for 50 Egyptian pounds and edited by Ahmed Khairi Sa'id, serving as a precursor to the movement's magazine Al-Fajr (1925-1927).^[8]

Editions of as-Sufur were typically organized into the following sections:

• Introduction

• Society

• Critique

• Literature

• Comedy

• Stories