Downloaded By: [Princeton University] At: 16:32 25 April 2008 Richelieu in Arabic: The Catholic Printed Message to the Orient in the Seventeenth Century 1 YARON AYALON Princeton University, USA ABSTRACT Throughout most of the seventeenth century, the printer and publisher Antoine Vitre ´ dominated the printing of Arabic in Paris. He produced mainly religious texts, intended for use by missionaries in the Orient. One of these books was the Arabic translation of Cardinal Richelieu’s famous catechism Instruction du Chre ´tien. This article looks at the story behind the preparation of the Arabic edition, its printing, and its use by missionaries. It explores the role written texts played in conveying a religious message to an essentially illiterate society. In addition, it uses the story of Richelieu’s text in Arabic to attempt to explain why Middle Eastern societies declined to adopt mass printing before the nineteenth century, even though there were apparently no interdictions against its implementation. ‘Intellectually, the land was in utter stagnation,’ wrote the American Protestant missionary Henry Jessup in his description of Lebanon as he experienced it in 1856. Among Muslims, he commented, no books aside from the Qur’an and its literature were to be found. Chris- tians were also not exposed to any form of literature bar their scriptures. Thus, he con- cluded, ‘it was in general true that there were in the land neither books, readers nor schools, as such’. 2 Jessup’s statement conforms to what is generally known about the lit- erary state of the Middle East before the second half of the nineteenth century. But it makes one wonder why this situation persisted despite the printing in Arabic of a great number of books in Europe that were intended for readers in the East. One possible expla- nation is that books arrived in the Middle East in minute numbers, so a ‘literate society’, in which people are exposed to written texts through either direct or indirect contact, was not created. And if this was so, one has to wonder what the motivation for printing in Arabic in Europe was. The decision of the Council of Vienna, which convened during the pontificate of Clement V in 1311–12, to establish programmes for the study of oriental languages in major cities, and the subsequent expansion of oriental and biblical studies in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, resulted in a growing demand for such printed texts. Islam and Christian–Muslim Relations, Vol. 19, No. 2, 151–165, April 2008 Correspondence Address: Yaron Ayalon, Department of Near Eastern Studies, 110 Jones Hall, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, 08544, USA 0959-6410 Print/1469-9311 Online/08/020151–15 # 2008 University of Birmingham DOI: 10.1080/09596410801923535