On 20 June 1928 the first issue of Majallat Al-Kuwait appeared: the first monthly to carry that name, and the first magazine published in Kuwait or anywhere in the Gulf. Abdulaziz Al-Rashid founded it and ran its editorial desk.
A country with no type
The obstacle was never the writing. It was the machine. Kuwait had no printing press, so the country’s first journalism was produced from outside it: material gathered here, sent away to be set and printed, and carried back as finished copies to be distributed.
Every issue therefore made the journey twice before a reader ever touched it — which tells you how much a monthly schedule was actually costing the man who kept it.
The editor arrived before the magazine did
Abdulaziz Al-Rashid lived from 1887 to 1938. Two years before the first issue, in 1926, he had already published his history of Kuwait. He also worked as a correspondent and agent for the major Arab periodicals of the day — Al-Manar, Al-Hilal and Al-Shura.
That last detail explains a good deal. He did not start from nothing. He was already inside the network of the Arab reform press: he knew how a periodical was run, who read one, and where it could be printed. When his turn came, he was not experimenting.
Two years
The magazine ran from 1928 to 1930. Its name still opens any account of the Kuwaiti press, for the plain reason that nothing preceded it.
Photograph: lead sorts in a compositor’s type case — the thing Kuwait did not have. Photo by Thomas Quine, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
Source: the study “Abdulaziz Al-Rashid (1887-1938), pioneer of the Kuwaiti press, and Majallat Al-Kuwait (1928-1930)” in the Annals of Arts and Social Sciences, Kuwait University; and the Jamal bin Huwaireb Centre for Studies.
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