Tarjama as Debt: The Making of a Secular History of Arabic Literature

Chapter four investigates tarjama’s dual meaning in Arabic as biography and translation in the works of Ṭāhā Ḥusayn and Muḥammad Ḥusayn Haykal. Following up on the secular prophecy of chapter three, it studies the complex relationship between Islam and literature in the two modernists’ mappings of Arabic literary history and in relation to their approach to translation. It examines specifically Haykal’s two-volume biography of Jean Jacques Rousseau in 1921 and 1923, his biography of the Prophet and literary essays, exploring political and spiritual temporalities in his unfolding critique of colonialism. It then considers Ṭāhā Ḥusayn’s controversial claims about the historicity of Jahili poetry as post-Islamic in On Jahili Poetry (1926) and argues that it prefigures his translations of André Gide ((1946) and Voltaire (1947), resituating his “heretic” claims within his translation theory. It concludes on the failed narrative subjectivities that emerge from the translations’ critique of European Enlightenment thought, contextualizing the importance of these adaptations to the study of the Arabic novel.

The Hero at Home: Muḥammad al-Sibāᶜī and Thomas Carlyle

Chapter three focuses on the more faithful translation aesthetic of Muḥammad al-Sibā‘ī, reading specifically his 1911 rendition of Thomas Carlyle’s lectures On Heroes, Hero-worship, and the Heroic in History (1841). Challenging Carlyle’s condescending approach to the Muslim prophet, al-Sibā‘ī’s translation rewrites the differences between the Prophet’s Muḥammad’s prophecy and Shakespeare’s genius that informs Carlyle’s account. The chapter argues that al-Sibā‘ī’s translation – apart from its translator’s original intention – offers a critique of colonial liberalism by noting the contradictions in Carlyle’s “secular” readings of Islam. As such, the chapter explores this “secularity” as a critique of the self-orientalizing mode of the translators under study. It extends this critique to al-Sibā‘ī’s adaptation of Charles Dickens in 1912 and its rewriting of the complicity between realism and liberalism in the British tradition.

The Prophet Today: The Novel in Distress

The conclusion historicizes these translations in the story of the Arabic novel before the 1950s, after which the novel becomes canonised. Colonial translation promised facts and truths based on the European master-text, and some Arab reformists confirmed the superiority of philosophy to religion, and hence science to Islam, but the translations complicate such neat cultural translation. The novel is born somewhere in between the original and translation, obfuscating intentionally the original source of which becomes secondary to the process of its adaptation and transmission. The reformist aspirations of the authors remain unrealised much like a perfect emulation of the prophet. Finally, it interrogates the dominant critical approach to these modernist intellectuals as secularising liberals who intentionally separated religion from literature by adopting the reductive Western humanisation of the prophet. The translations reveal how they trespass the separation between literary and religious interpretation bringing the stakes of narrative representation to bear on European ideals of subjectivity and universal reason. In this transgressive space, precisely the incubator of “modern” Egyptian literature, translation becomes neither domesticating nor foreignising but a space where various representational claims are simultaneously adapted and contested.

Plagiarised Prophecy in the Romantic Works of al-Manfalūṭī, al-ᶜAqqād and al-Māzinī

The chapter focuses on the free, and occasionally plagiarized adaptations of three major figures of early Egyptian romanticism - Muṣṭafā Luṭfī al-Manfalūṭī, Abbās Maḥmūd al-‘Aqqād, Ibrāhīm al-Mazinī. It reads the free appropriation of French romantic and sentimental fiction as well as British romantic thought paradigmatically as making possible prophetic narration with a displaced origin. The origin is forgotten in a translation that refuses to name itself as such. It explores the birth of a romantic notion of literary prophecy in relation to a history of plagiarism in Arabic literature, challenging readings of the absolute modernity of the translators studied. It also situates translation as appropriation in relation to the changing function of literature in the early 20th-century, pointing to its new agency in producing moral didacticism. Reading their translations and their essays/articles together, the chapter locates a different form of romantic prophecy that is not secular but rather disruptive of the hegemonies of colonial time.

Translation in Motion: A Survey of Literary Translation in Lebanon and Egypt during the Nahḍa

Chapter one surveys the movement and scope of literary translation in Egypt and Lebanon from 1798 until the 1930’s. It explores the different incentives behind the choice, frequency, and method of translation in both places, noting their interrelatedness through the Syrian émigrés who immigrated to Cairo and started literary journals that changed the face of literary translation in Egypt in the 19th century. It identifies the various translation motives from the desire for fast modernization and better urban planning, to education, and finally to entertainment, which becomes the major purpose of translation in the early 20th century). Finally, it registers the difference between the translation of poetry and that of fiction in both places and traces the influence of such translation on the development of distinctly national versus Western styles in the works of Egyptian and Lebanese authors and translators.

Prophetic Tendencies: Egyptian Translators of the Twentieth Century

The introduction explores the complex history of literary translation into Arabic from Napoleon’s arrival in Alexandria in 1789 until the 1950s. It considers the formative correlation between the stylistics of translation, the promise of fiction, and the political context as they relate to the ‘modernity’ of the novel form. Focusing on the works of four major translators - Muṣṭafa Luṭfī al-Manfalūṭī, Muḥammad al-Sibā‘ī, and Muḥammad Ḥusayn Haykal and Ṭāhā Ḥusayn – it highlights the different translation aesthetics from free adaptation to literal copying and biographical rewriting. It situates these trends in conversation with translation theory to offer a novel way of approaching literary adaptation in colonial situations. The introduction tackles the debate on ‘arabization’ (ta‘rīb) as opposed to pure translation (tarjama) in Egypt and considers how it has informed genealogies of the Arabic novel more broadly. Precisely because translation appears as failed emulation, the chapter addresses how through the playful adaptation of European influence of romanticism and realism, translation stages the emergence of a secular, prophetic narrative voice in the works of the four translators that challenges dominant narratives of Arab literary modernity.