In this paper, I unpack (A?mad) F?ris al-Shidy?q’s (1805-87) theory of translation as manifest in two of his major texts: his fictional al-S?q ?al? al-S?q (Leg over Leg) and his travelogue, titled Kashf al-Mukhabba? ?an Fun?n Ur?bba (Revealing the Hidden in the Arts of Europe). Examining al-Shidy?q’s linguistic world, which is for the most part predicated on semantic overlap within endless lists of synonymy, I argue that al-Shidy?q saw the infinitude of “contiguity” rather than strict “equivalence” as driving force of meaning. This suggests the notion that translation and, by implication cultural assimilation, is an impossible undertaking. In this sense, looking at al-Shidy?q’s take on the impossibility of translation helps nuance our common view of translation during the Nah?ah, especially in Egypt, which generally projected assimilation and equivalence as preconditions to a cultural participation in modernity—an argument that Shaden Tageldine profoundly advanced in her Disarming Words. Towards that end, I trace the moments in which al-Shidy?q’s text itself is subversive of the over-determined category of “equivalence.” This subversive energy, I suggest, can be explained historically since al-Shidy?q came to an awareness that there cannot be symmetrical relationships between different cultural, literary, and linguistic systems. Navigating different literary, linguistic, and religious worlds, al-Shidy?q found his poetic (native) and translational (trans-regional/trans-national) selves at jarring conflict. On the one hand, his Qur??n-inspired translations of the Bible into Arabic were criticized and rejected by some Maronite Christians, precisely for their lack of rak?kah (linguistic feebleness) which was arguably, but paradoxically, deemed necessary to draw the reader nearer to a “Christian God.” On the other hand, his classical panegyric qa??dah or ode to a European notable was dismissed for its inclusion of the inaugurational part of nas?b (praise of women). Responsive to European taste, al-Shidy?q re-wrote his panegyric by removing the classical part, thus resulting in what Abdelfatt?? Kili?? refers to as “poetic castration” (ikh?a? al-shi?r). In my analysis, I draw heavily on Kili??’s deconstructive method, questioning notions of correspondence and equivalence among different linguistic and cultural systems.

Recent scholars have challenged the previously dominant paradigm that emphasizes Western literary influences on Arabic literature by situating the Nahda in a regional comparative framework. Despite expanding the geographic scope, they continue to overlook that the Nadahwis produced a significant amount of writing on “the East”. This paper aims to re-examine Arab literary history by revealing a historical moment where Arab intellectuals actively wrote about a world outside Europe, and translated the anti-colonial resistance of other Eastern countries into a Nahdawi context. In this paper, I examine a one-act Arabic play entitled Za’ir al-Sin (The Roar of China) co-authored by Ma Tianying, a male Chinese Muslim diplomat, and Munira Sayyim Shah, a female Egyptian Muslim playwright. Published in the Egyptian literary journal al-Riwaya in 1939, Za’ir al-Sin was written during Ma’s visit to Egypt as a member of the Chinese Islamic Near East Delegation. According to Ma’s introduction, this play portrays a group of Chinese Hui Muslims and their resistance to the Japanese invasion of a mosque in Jining, and is an adaption of true events. Building on Lawrence Venuti’s notions of domesticating and foreignizing translation, I will show how the playwrights present the Chinese anti-colonial struggle as relatable to Egyptians by appropriating Egyptian revolutionary discourse. Focusing on the Arab orientation of this play, I investigate how the two playwrights strategically domesticated the Chinese anti-colonial struggle for their Arabic-speaking audience by situating China as being within the Muslim Umma and by inserting Arabic phrases, including al-Mutanabi verses, and by using direct address to the audience. In particular, I investigate how this play, through the portrayal of a Chinese female Muslim character leading the militant resistance against the Japanese invaders, used an Eastern model of womanhood to participate in Nahdawi social discourses on the New Woman.

The Arabian Nights is the most famous Medieval Arabic collection of tales that brings together stories from different literary traditions, mainly Indian and Persian. It is a masterpiece of world literature, and there is an extensive body of scholarly work on it. Following its “rediscovery” by the French orientalist A. Galland in the 1700s and the publication of the printed Arabic editions in the 1800s, the collection became subject to prolific criticism. Over the past forty years, a new line of critical scholarship has concentrated upon the frame story of the Arabian Nights and its female protagonist Scheherazade. Perhaps inspired by the rewritings (and, thus, reinterpretations) of the tale in modern and contemporary fiction – like J. L. Borges, S. Rushdie, E. A. Poe, T. Hussein, N. Mahfouz and A. Djebar – the new criticism tries to engage real life with the tale and the figure of Scheherazade. This novel reception of the text testifies to a new sensibility in academic literature. Narrative is transformed into the open domain of different disciplines, as well as literary cultures at the confluence of the Arab world and the West. Feminist and gender approaches, psychoanalytic readings, and sociocultural and postcolonial perspectives combine literary theories with extra-literary areas of knowledge. The main subject of these analyses falls within the realm of otherness, i.e. the image of the other and the relationship with the other (sex) at the basis of the plot of the frame story, and its metaphorical implications. Their outcomes are often heterogeneous, to the point of generating, sometimes, diametrically opposed visions. Why is otherness in the frame story capable of embodying images (of the other sex) and meanings within but also outside the literary context? How have scholars received it? Why can their interpretations come to so different – even opposite - conclusions? The frame story of the Arabian Nights and its ample criticism deserves its own scrutiny. I will, therefore, provide an overview of the main trends in the interpretation of the tale, and how the image of the other and the relationship with the other sex is treated according to the intensions of the scholars, as well as to his/her area of study, theoretical framework and literary culture.

In “Which Languages?” (2013) Arabic literary scholar Wail Hassan proposes critical investigations of relations that do not center on the US or Europe but which form networks in which the US and Europe are nonetheless implicated. Hassan proposes that one way of doing this it to consider “tertiary relations” in which the west is not necessarily or always the controlling term. Analyzing representations of Egypt in Sudanese literature written in English, my paper proposes such a triangulation. Focusing on the Sudanese writer Leila Abouleila’s Anglophone novel Lyrics Alley (2010), I study the representation of Egypt from the vantage point of the Sudan set during a charged political moment -- the moment after Egypt’s independence from British colonial rule but before Sudan’s independence from Egypt. Inspired by the life of Abouleila’s paternal uncle, a popular Sudanese poet and lyricists, the novel focuses on unfulfilled love, marriage and interpersonal family relationships. In the text, Egypt, being both colonizer and colonized, is configured on the woman’s body. Although the anti-colonial uprisings of the 1950’s are absent in the novel, colonial injustice, gendered and non-gendered power relations between Egypt and Sudan are played out in the marriage plot. And, the same vectors or measures of civility that are perpetuated by western colonialism are metaphorized in the figures of the two wives – the Sudanese wife is seen as “backwards” and “traditional” while the Egyptian wife is portrayed as her European opposite. Focusing on the implications of the persistence of these Eurocentric frames of analysis, as well as the erasure of Egypt’s vexed position as both colonizer as well as colonized, I argue that the novel, despite its focus on the Sudan and Egypt, upholds a two-dimensional east/west model.