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In addition to promoting maximum utility and minimum waste, the story presents knowledge as the key to progress: “Our ignorance can render [human wealth and resources] such as fertile land . . ”71 It is this recurring and framing theme of progress that reveals the “solid connection” between literature and economics. ”72 Thus economics emerges as a rational science in the service of man. The producer of intellectual products risks irrelevance should he choose to ignore economics. ”75 What were these exalted principles?

107 Was luxury to be celebrated as the arrival of progress or shunned as a corrupting force? What was the delicate balance between need and luxury in the face of economic change and growth? As with much of the work of Iqtisadiyyat’s contributors, the description of needs followed a nahda narrative structure. It began with a point of origin, described a latent state, and then followed a teleological path to awakening. For example, a need was “first born” in the “psyche” [nafs] as desire. It then transformed into the pursuit of its attainment.

43 It was in the late 1890s that privately owned Arab presses enabled the production of Palestinian periodicals such as Al-Quds (Jerusalem, 1898), Al-Karmil (Haifa, 1908), Al-Akhbar (Jaffa, 1909), and Filastin (Haifa, 1911). 44 The interwar period was also an intensive time of translation in Palestine. 47 By the 1920s, periodical production expanded out of the urban centers of Jerusalem, Jaffa, and Haifa to include Acre, Bethlehem, Gaza, and Tulkarm. 48 After the political upheavals of the late 1920s, there was a higher demand for daily news.