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This chapter focuses on the kind of news a community needs, what ways it is obtained, and who reads it. Traditional channels of transmitting information had served the needs of Middle Eastern society effectively. The nature of the reading public in a region so diverse as the Middle East during a period of accelerated change varied in time and place. The reservoir of potential readers throughout the region during the period consisted mostly of men although women grew in proportions. The question of press circulation is the most elusive in Arab-speaking countries. The reading habits of a society are seldom documented. Testimonies on reading habits are mostly by foreign visitors. Cafes were popular and convenient locations for reading newspapers. The Arab press reflected public sentiments and the performance of journals and journalists during the first century of the Arabic press generated an ambivalent response by the readers.

This chapter discusses what a journalist craft is. Journalists are not required to undergo a prescribed course of study, acquire particular skills, past tests, or become certified in order to practice their craft. The evolution of journalism in the Arab countries is a broad subject. Arab journalists faced the challenge of defining their vocation and establishing respectability in a milieu that tended to regard them with suspicion. Journalism as a profession was assimilated by Middle Eastern society slowly. It is a valuable device for dealing with the formidable challenges of modernity. The careers of the overwhelming majority of nameless Arab journalists remain obscure. What emerges clearly from Istanbuli's biography is the harsh reality they all faced in the markedly inhospitable Middle Eastern environment.

This concluding chapter summarizes key themes and presents some final thoughts. The book has shown that the multiplicity of lived ʻAlawi experiences cannot be reduced to the sole question of religion or framed within a monolithic narrative of persecution; that the very attempt to outline a single coherent history of “the ʻAlawis” may indeed be misguided. The sources on which this study has drawn are considerably more accessible, and the social and administrative realities they reflect consistently more mundane and disjointed, than the discourse of the ʻAlawis' supposed exceptionalism would lead one to believe. Therefore, the challenge for historians of ʻAlawi society in Syria and elsewhere is not to use the specific events and structures these sources detail to merely add to the already existing metanarratives of religious oppression, Ottoman misrule, and national resistance but rather to come to a newer and more intricate understanding of that community, and its place in wider Middle Eastern society, by investigating the lives of individual ʻAlawi (and other) actors within the rich diversity of local contexts these sources reveal.