The Arab cultural awakening (Nahḍa) was one of the most pervasive and consequential intellectual movements in modern history. A key figure within this movement was the Egyptian civil servant, educator, translator and Islamic scholar Rifā‛a Rāfi‛ al-Ṭahṭāwī (1801–1873). Having visited Paris, he developed an interest in the moral, social and political ideas that were prevalent in nineteenth-century France. However, most current scholarship agrees that because of their secular nature, these ideas were of limited use for a devout Muslim such as Ṭahṭāwī in his own cultural and political context. In 1850 Ṭahṭāwī translated François Fénelon’s Les Aventures de Télémaque (1699), and while it has been suggested that this novel may have influenced Ṭahṭāwī’s later works, his translation of it has been mostly ignored by modern researchers. In this paper we demonstrate that Ṭahṭāwī found Télémaque to contain many potentially suitable moral and political lessons to translate into the modernizing Arabic-Islamic culture of the late nineteenth century. First, we present a history of the reception and cultural position of Fénelon’s Télémaque in France. This will help scholars understand it as a popular text across ideologies and philosophical movements. Then we discuss Ṭahṭāwī’s ideological makeup, specifically in relation to modernity. Lastly, we offer a discussion of passages from Ṭahṭāwī’s translation of Télémaque. This allows us to expose some of Ṭahṭāwī’s discursive strategies in Islamizing and Arabizing the concepts and ideas present in the novel, thus laying the conceptual groundwork for his later philosophical writings. On a broader level, this paper examines if and how Ṭahṭāwī’s own ideas and his appropriation of those of Fénelon as present in Télémaque can be plausibly included in the category of a ‘global Counter-Enlightenment’.
Télémaque, Ṭahṭāwī and the (Counter-) Enlightenment in the Arab World