This article explores early attempts to romanize the Arabic language in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Egypt and situates them within a global history of script reforms in the modern period. I focus on the models to write Arabic in the Latin script developed by the Cairo-based magazine al-Muqtataf between 1889 and 1897 (which, to the extent of my knowledge, have never been examined before), relating them to the responses they elicited from the magazine's readers and some of the romanization practices found in advertising, commercial displays in the streets, and governance at the time. I demonstrate that, in this period, romanized Arabic was envisioned as an original way to pursue financial profit and technological efficiency, confront European knowledge production, and redefine the standing of Arabic within transregional publishing networks that encompassed different languages and alphabets. This analysis thus offers an alternative geography of script reform that supersedes the national framework.

本文探讨了 19 世纪末和 20 世纪初埃及对阿拉伯语进行罗马化的早期尝试，并将其置于现代文字改革的全球历史中。我重点关注开罗杂志 al-Muqtataf 在 1889 年至 1897 年间开发的用拉丁文字书写阿拉伯语的模型（据我所知，以前从未对其进行过研究），并将它们与它们引起的反应联系起来来自该杂志的读者以及当时在广告、街头商业展示和治理中发现的一些罗马化做法。我证明，在这一时期，罗马化阿拉伯语被设想为追求经济利润和技术效率、对抗欧洲知识生产并重新定义阿拉伯语在包含不同语言和字母的跨区域出版网络中的地位的原始方式。因此，这一分析提供了替代国家框架的文字改革的替代地理。