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Considers the changing role of literary translation in Egypt from the 1910s to the 1940sIn this novel and pioneering study Maya I. Kesrouany explores the move from Qur'anic to secular approaches to literature in early 20th-century Egyptian literary translations, asking what we can learn from that period and the promise that translation held for the Egyptian writers of fiction at that time. Through their early adaptations, these writers crafted a prophetic, secular vocation for the narrator that gave access to a world of linguistic creation and interpretation unavailable to the common reader or the religious cleric. This book looks at the writers' claim to secular prophecy as it manifests itself in the adapted narrative voice of their translations to suggest an original sense of literary resistance to colonial oppression and occupation in the early Arabic novel.

We blame translators, and particularly those who translate romances, for suppressing the names of authors. What is the wisdom of doing so? If these translators claim these works to be their own, we could then say that they want to ascribe these works to themselves. But when they admit that they have only translated these works, would it not be better if they affixed the name of the author, who has consumed his brain and spent nights in research and exposed himself to bitter criticism and reproach to write a romance? … Should not his right in writing his work be preserved as we preserve our right of publishing these works?Editor of al-Hilāl.In his momentous dictionary Muḥaīṭ al-muaīṭ: qāmūs muṭawwal li-l-lugha al-ʿarabiyya (1870) [The All-encompassing Comprehensive: An Extended Dictionary of the Arabic Language], under the entry rawā (to narrate or tell a story), Buṭrus al-Bustānī surprisingly includes no reference to the neologism riwāya (novel) and its novel generic connotations, but adheres to the word's older references (basing his dictionary on Majd al-Dīn al-Fayrūzʾābādī's al-Qāmūs al-Muḥaīṭ). This seems surprising given al-Bustānī and his son Salīm's direct role in introducing and propagating the novel and story forms in Lebanon. Al-Bustānī translated The Pilgrim's Progress (1678; Arabic 1844) and Robinson Crusoe (1719; Arabic 1861), while Salīm took over the cultural journal al-Jinān (Gardens/Paradise) in Beirut, which published translations and original fiction, such as his al-Hiyām fī futūḥ al-shām (1870) (Love during the Conquest of Syria), considered a pioneering Arabic novel. Yet, under the entry rawā in al-Bustānī senior's Muḥaīṭ, we find: ‘rawā al- ḥadīth yarwīhi riwāyatan … ḥamaluhu wa naqaluhu … al-rāwī … ʿind al-muḥaddithīn nāqil al-ḥadīth bi-l-isnād … wa alladhī yarwī al-ḥadīth aw al-shiʿr yuqāl huwa riwāyat fulān’ (to narrate a story by telling it … carry it and copy/ transmit it … for the tradition transmitters the narrator is the one who copies/transmits the story through reference … and the narrative produced is the account of the one who told the story or poetry). In line with the tradition of ‘transferring’ stories in Arabic literature, al-Bustānī retains the original act of naql – to copy and transmit – significantly another name for translation.

You see that taking up this method is not necessary only for those who study science and write about it, but it is also necessary for those who read.Ṭāhā Ḥusayn, Fī al-shiʿr al-jāhilī (1926)Egypt teeters back and forth even today, as in the past, between the Arab and Western mentalities, one of them winning at one point, the other later on. When the Western mentality triumphs, the liberal idea is reasserted, scientific ideas are published and spread about, and culture is influenced by these ideas in various institutes of learning, even the religious institutes. When the Arab mentality triumphs, sentiment takes over and dominates arbitrarily, the power of the past is revived, and culture is influenced by these ideas in various institutes, even in the secular university.Muḥammad Ḥusayn Haykal, Mudhakkirāt fī al-siyāsa al-Miṣriyya (Memoirs of Egyptian Politics) (1951–3)In 1908, Ṭāhā Ḥusayn was one of the first students to enrol in the Egyptian University. After completing his doctoral thesis on Abū al-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī, Ḥusayn left for Paris to study history at the Sorbonne and write his dissertation on Ibn Khaldūn under the supervision of Emile Durkheim, founder of the modern discipline of sociology. He returned to Egypt in time for the 1919 Revolution and soon became its most polemical literary figure. On 10 November 1921, Ḥusayn published an article in al-Istiqlāl (Independence) newspaper– ‘Waylun lī-l-ḥurrīya min Saʿd [Zaghlūl]’ (No Freedom under Saʿd), attacking Saʿd Zaghlūl, prime minister and head of the Wafd majority party, for restricting intellectual freedom. Both Ḥusayn and Muḥammad Ḥusayn Haykal attacked the Wafdist government openly in al-Siyāsa. The newspaper issues were banned, Haykal, then editor-in-chief, was indicted, and Ḥusayn put on trial even though his most aggressive articles remained unsigned. On 17 June 1924, Ḥusayn was summoned to court: when he denied penmanship of the articles, he was dismissed but ordered to refrain from writing political criticism. In 1925, ʿAlī ʿAbd al-Rāziq published his controversial book al-Islām wa-uṣūl al-ḥukm (Islam and the Foundations of Governance), advocating for the separation of religion and politics in Islam. The Azhar ʿulamāʾ revoked his title of ʿalīm.

And thus every translator is to be regarded as a middle-man [Vermittler] in this universal spiritual commerce [allgemein geistigen Handels], and as making it his business to promote/further this exchange [Wechseltausch]: for say what we may of the insufficiency of translation, yet the work is and will always be one of the weightiest and worthiest matters in the general concerns of the world. The Koran says: ‘God has given to each people a prophet in its own tongue!’ Thus each translator is a prophet to his people.Johann Wolfgang Goethe to Thomas Carlyle, 20 July 1827On 5 July 1945, in response to the forthcoming Arabic translation of La Porte étroite, André Gide (1861–1951) writes a letter to his Arab publisher expressing disappointment with his Arab audience. He has enjoyed the company of Arabs and Muslims, and ‘ne serais sans doute pas le meme, si je ne m’étais jamais … avoir gouté jusqu'a l'extase l’âpre brulure du désert’ (would definitely have not been the same had I not tasted, to the point of ecstasy, the bitter heat of the desert). ‘J'ai su dépouiller alors les revetements de notre culture occidentale et retrouver une authenticité humaine perdue’ (I then stripped the coatings of our Western culture and rediscovered a lost human authenticity), but the Arab world has not reciprocated. On 5 January 1946, Ṭāhā Ḥusayn replies, explaining that Gide has encountered not Islam but ignorant Muslims, committed to the ‘lettre que de l'esprit des textes’ (the ext's letter and not spirit). He comforts Gide: this Arab audience welcomes his message as it has already embraced the ‘maîtres de l'antiquité’ (masters of antiquity) – of course through Ḥusayn's translations.The seemingly clean conversation between two writers captures the confrontation between an uncritical orientalism and even more uncritical self-orientalism. The epistolary exchange suggests a distorted equivalence, between both the French writer and his admirer, and two literary sign-systems: the Arab Orient is ready to receive French knowledge, while the French world has peeled itself to find grounds for resemblance in an orientalist ecstasy under desert suns.

The nineteenth century was known to them [the Egyptian writers] as the school of al-nubūʾa [prophecy] and al-majāz [metaphor or allegory] … [that] school counted among its leading lights such names as Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, Shelley, Byron, and Wordsworth. It was succeeded by a similar school which brought ‘reality’ and ‘allegory’ together – the school of Browning, Tennyson, Emerson, Longfellow, Poe, Whitman, Hardy, and others … A great deal from the spirit of these men pervaded the writings of the Egyptian poets who sprang up after Shawqī and his colleagues; but it pervaded them not because these poets were imitators or had no literary identity [of their own] but because it was a spirit common to the inclination of the whole era.Al-ʿAqqād, Shuʿarāʾ MiṣrUnlike Muṣṭafā al-Manfalūṭī, Muḥammad al-Sibāʿī took translation very seriously. Born in Cairo in 1881, he was one of the most dedicated students of Madrasat al-muʿallimīn (Teachers’ College), established in 1889, a landmark of the British colonial education system in Egypt, where students studied more English than Arabic literature. Graduating in 1904, al-Sibāʿī became a prolific translator of English literature and thought, his translations including Shakespeare's Julius Caesar (Riwāyat Yūlyūs Qayṣar) (n.d.), Thomas Carlyle's On Heroes (al-Abṭāl, 1911), Macaulay's Essay on Addison (1852) (Maqālat Macaulay ʿan Addison) (1910–11), Herbert Spencer's Education (al-Tarbiya) (1908), Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White (Riwāyat dhāt al-thawb al-abyaḍ) (n.d.), and Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities (Qiṣṣat al-madīnatayn) (1912). The translation of Carlyle became a canonical text of the colonial school's curriculum while the translation of Dickens was made a required text in secondary school education in 1912.Al-Sibāʿī practised faithful translation, and by supposedly adhering closely to original texts, intended translation to initiate a cultural renaissance in Egypt. In his translations and original works, al-Sibāʿī sought the most apt Arabic expression for the English one and used classical Arabic, taḍmīn (inserting Arabic poetry) and sajʿ (rhyming prose) to give his literature cultural legitimacy.