The “Digital Cairo” sub-project of La fabrique du Caire moderne program is happy to announce that it requested the digitization of microfilms of the early issues of the Egyptian official gazette (al-Waqāʾiʿ al-Miṣriyya), held in the Center for Research Libraries (CRL). With the help of Sean Swanick, Librarian for Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at Duke University Libraries, we were able to contact CRL and their administrators generously accepted our request. In this way, CRL added scans of microfilms to its already existing online collection of al-Waqāʾiʿ al-Miṣriyya, scanned earlier also because of our request (these are the years of 1865-1869, 1875-1877, 1895). The newly scanned issues are in the following years: 1830-31, the spring of 1882, and one issue from 1883.
Issue dated 9 Jumada al-Ūlā 1246/26 October 1830
You can access the issues in the calendar view which is available here: http://ddsnext.crl.edu/titles/260/calendar
The newly scanned microfilmed issues are between 3 Muḥarram 1246/24 June 1830 – 24 Shawwāl 1246 / 7 April 1831. These issues nicely complement the online available issues in the BnF (which has only January-June for the Gregorian year of 1830: 7 Rajab – 29 Dhu al-Hijja 1245). One can easily see that the BnF collection covers the hijrī year of 1245 and the CRL microfilms most of the hijrī year of 1246.
Importantly, however, CRL staff wrongly converted the hijrī dates to Gregorian ones in the 1830-1831 series. Usually there is ten-twenty days of difference between the indicated dates and the actual ones.
As to the spring 1882 issues, these are one of the most important historical sources for the background and public sphere of the ‘Urabi uprising. Here the conversion between calendars is fine in the CRL collection (possibly because at this time the colophons contain also the Gregorian date).
For more information on availability and holding institutions, check the Jara’id tool.
(A.M.)
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