The first genuinely free press in the Middle East existed under British occupation

Evidence

In that sense, free institutions have, alas, become something of a rarity. The first really free press that we find in the Middle East, where issues could be argued freely and openly and the government could be criticized, was in Britishoccupied Egypt from the 1880s onwards. That country, under Imperialist dom­ ination, nevertheless became a haven of refuge for people from all over the region who had something to say and wanted to be free to say it. That again, it seems to me, is a very important part of the heritage of the British Mandate. This tradition of freedom of expression, freedom of exchange of views, freedom of organization which were well established during the mandatory period and have survived pretty well since then. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 825

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth verifying: does ‘first really free press in the Middle East’ survive scrutiny, given Ottoman-era and other claimants?
• XREF: Echoes the broader pattern in ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ and other revisionist colonial histories that imperial rule sometimes enabled freedoms the successor states curtailed.
• ADDENDUM: Directly supports the line of argument in my thinking about what colonial rule actually produced versus what independence delivered.