This paper explores the relationship between the empiricist tenor of nineteenth-century comparative literature and the drive toward "vernacular" realism in the modern Arabic novel. I focus on the Egyptian intellectual Rifa'a Rafi' al-Tahtawi's _Mawaqi' al-Aflak fi Waqa'i' Tilimak_ (Orbits of the Stars in Telemachus's Adventures [of Afar]), an 1850s Arabic translation (published 1867) of François de Salignac de La Mothe-Fénelon's _Les Aventures de Télémaque, fils d'Ulysse_ (The Adventures of Telemachus, Son of Ulysses). Reading al-Tahtawi’s translation against the realist impulses of nineteenth-century British and French literary comparatism--from Joseph Reinaud and Thomas Macaulay in the 1830s to Hutcheson Posnett in the 1880s--I posit that translation as a transformational moment in the reception of the "European" literary tradition in the Arab-Islamic world. By arguing that the ancient Greek gods who populate Fénelon's 1699 sequel to Homer's _Odyssey_ are analogous to Muslim jinn--spirits of smokeless fire understood to be real--al-Tahtawi rewrites what Muslims long had dismissed as pagan "fiction" as Islamized "truth," thereby adroitly negotiating a crisis of comparison and mediating a literary-epistemic sea change in modern Arabic fiction. Indeed, the "untrue" gods of the Greeks (and of French literature) turn not just real but historically referential: al-Tahtawi translates Fénelon's original into a text that speaks to the real-historical world of 1850s Egypt, exhorting an unjust Ottoman-Egyptian sovereign to heed lessons that Fénelon’s original once had addressed to French royalty. Recent critics, notably Catherine Gallagher, have defined the fictionality specific to the modern European novel as neither pure deceit nor pure truth. Gallagher also has suggested that the modern European novel distances fiction from direct reference to external worlds. I argue that al-Tahtawi's rehabilitation of the mythological as the supernatural/historical real, of the "blasphemous" as possessed of a capacity to speak sacred or secular truths, reflects a parallel process of modern fiction-making in the Arabic-speaking world. Yet a divergent process too, for--contra Gallagher's hypothesis--al-Tahtawi's translation actively solicits *belief* in the unbelievable by making Fénelon's gods and heroes refer to "realities" (Islamic jinn, live Ottoman-Egyptian rulers) beyond the inner world of the text. Al-Tahtawi's engagement with Fénelon, I suggest, invites us to develop a translational theory of the modern Arabic novel--hence also a theory that moves beyond simplistic models of influence or imitation—and to rethink both the rise of the novel and modern literary comparatism more generally beyond Europe: to reposition both as transpositions.