5 - The Diplomat and the Printer

Summary

This chapter examines the last phase of the Buffalo Agency’s existence from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries. It refracts this institution’s history through an existing body of historical literature that explores the intersections among print technology, Islamic reform and ecumenicalism, and political life in the history of Ibadi and other Muslims communities in Egypt in the context of colonialism. The chapter examines these themes by telling the stories of two people whose lives are largely unknown. The first figure, Saʿīd al-Shammākhī, served as the director of the Buffalo Agency in the mid-nineteenth century. In 1871, however, he was appointed agent (wakīl) for the Husaynid bey of Tunisia in Egypt and served as a line of communication between the governments of the two Ottoman provinces. The second figure is Muḥammad al-Bārūnī, owner of the first Ibadi printing house in Cairo. In terms of its operation, its financing, and its choice of titles, this Ibadi press functioned in much the same way as other late Ottoman presses in Egypt. Through the stories of these two men, the chapter situates Ibadis in the changing technologies and politics of late nineteenth century Ottoman Egypt.