—Abd al-Hamid Hamdi in the first edition of as-SufūrWhen the Ottoman Empire entered World War I, Britain, under British Army Officer John Maxwell, enacted legislation on November 2, 1914 that subjected the Egyptian press to censorship.
[6] When the conditions drove Ahmed Lutfi es-Sayed away from the paper, some of his writers—Abd al-Hamid Hamdi, Mustafa 'Abd ar-Raziq, Mohammed Hussein Heikal, Mansur Fahmi [ar], and Taha Hussein—sought to resist.
[6] Instead, the writers established a company and to publish as-Sufūr under Abd al-Hamid Hamdi, who assumed fiscal responsibility for the paper.
[6] It was officially forced into decommission as its license was revoked for about a year and a half after publishing content deemed to have transgressed its social-literary bounds into something political.
[7] It was later acquired by members of al-Madrasa al-Haditha for 50 Egyptian pounds and edited by Ahmed Khairi Sa'id, serving as a precursor to the movement's magazine Al-Fajr (1925-1927).