In line with "Without Boundaries," the annual theme of MESA 2018, this panel explores the receptions and translations of the Arab writer and intellectual Jurji Zaydan (1861-1914) beyond the boundaries of the Arabic-speaking world. Zaydan has long been recognized as a key figure in the Arabic nahda, in his capacity as a scholar, a writer of literature, and a publisher. He remains a key figure in new studies on Arab modernization, whether they focus on material histories, on theoretical debates of writing and genres, or on questions of modern nation-building.
The reach of Zaydan's influence extends far beyond the boundaries of Arabic writing or culture, be it through translations of his novels, reviews of his scholarship and achievements, or direct engagements. Furthermore, Zaydan has become a symbol of literary and cultural modernization, a token figure who carries meaning beyond the particularities of his writings or publications. An examination of his role in debates on modernization across Asia in the twentieth century sheds new light both on the influence of Zaydan as an individual, as well as on the shared concerns and interactions between modernizing intellectuals in the region.
The first paper explores the potentials of a comparative historiography of minoritization, examining connections between the Arab Christian Jurji Zaydan and the Indian Muslim intellectual Abul Kalam Azad. The second paper deals with the limits posed by sectarianism and identity on modernizing historiography through another Indian Muslim intellectual, Shibli Nu'mani, and his critique of Zaydan's "History of Islamic Civilization." The third paper takes up the question of "colonial time," surveying reviews of Zaydan in the nascent Hebrew Zionist press in Palestine and the manner that his writing was positioned as a possible solution to the impasses of modern Hebrew literature. The fourth paper closely reads Turkish translations of three of Zaydan's historical novels, and employs translation theory in order to explore how Zaydan's writing on gender, nationalism, and Islamic history are rendered in the Turkish language and public sphere.
These papers reveal a landscape of intellectual interaction and debate extending across the Middle East and South Asia, in which intellectuals, translators, and readers engage with parallel questions of modernization, literature, political structures, and relations of gender and religion. Connecting them all is Zaydan, a figure who deserves greater attention beyond the boundaries of Arabic, as this panel demonstrates.
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Dr. Esmat Elhalaby
Most histories of Middle East-South Asian interaction are histories of Muslims and Islam, the hajj and the ‘ulema, translational piety and dutiful exegesis across the umma. Some scholars have moved beyond the focus on Islam and Muslims by comparing the creation of Israel with that of Pakistan and India or the experience of India’s Muslims and Europe’s Jews. In these new accounts, race and the violence of settlement are elided and the European experience of modernity is taken as paradigmatic. Meanwhile, other work which pays attention to the global and imperial dynamics of Islamicate interactions aims to historicize the emergence of the “Muslim world” or trace something called “Muslim cosmopolitanism” between the Middle East and South Asia, but often jump from South Asia to Asia Minor, largely ignoring what is in between. The archives of intellectuals from Cairo, Beirut and Baghdad, especially those of Jews and Christians, are left largely untouched.
This paper engages this new historiography by considering a not so surprising convergence of colonial time which took place in the Asia that stretched from the Mediterranean to the Bay of Bengal in the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. In 1857, a revolt in the subcontinent ushered in a new mode British administration; in 1860, the end of a civil war in Mount Lebanon indelibly changed the relationship between the Ottoman Empire and its subjects. Minoritization would begin with a fury. For intellectuals in both places—Arab Christians and Indian Muslims in particular—these dates would come occupy their political imaginations. In 1947 and 1948, the same people who reckoned with those earlier events, faced what Edward Said once called “the parting gift of Empire.” In histories of the nation, these dates and the period between them took on a profound significance, thinking globally about 1857/60–1947/48 challenges these nationalist narrarations. I do this by comparing the work of—and following the connections between— two prominent Arab Christian and Indian Muslim intellectuals, Jurji Zaidan (1861-1914) and Abul Kalam Azad (1888-1958). Both founded journals entitled al-Hilal, “The Crescent,” one in Cairo and the other in Calcutta.
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Dr. Alexander Jabbari
This paper explores how identitarian concerns shape historiography by considering Indian Muslim responses to Jurji Zaydan’s history of Islam, focusing on the case of Shibli Nu‘mani (1857-1914), an Indian Muslim intellectual and religious reformer, who traveled across the Middle East in search of modernizing approaches to Islam. Through his travels he came to meet Jurji Zaydan (1861-1914), an Arab intellectual whom Shibli initially admired. However, after reading Zaydan’s History of Islamic Civilization, Shibli turned against him. In his scathingly polemical al-Intiqad ‘ala kitab al-tamaddun al-islami (“The Critique of the Book [History of] Islamic Civilization”), published in installments in the Egyptian magazine al-Manar in 1912, Shibli attacks Zaydan’s history. He accuses Zaydan, a Christian Arab, of hostility not only towards Islam, but towards Arabs in general.
How can we make sense of this non-Arab Muslim’s critique of an Arab proto-nationalist like Zaydan as “anti-Arab”? How do religious and ethnic identities overlap in debates about historiography in the period? This attack cannot be attributed simply to Zaydan’s Christianity - Shibli’s estimation of European Christian Orientalists is remarkably different in his other works. In the prologue to his Shi‘r al-‘ajam (“Poetry of the Persians”), for example, Shibli admires Orientalists and argues that Islamic scholars can and should benefit from Orientalist scholarship. The problem, then, is not Zaydan’s non-Muslim vision of Islamic history per se, for Shibli was able to tolerate the similarly critical views of Orientalists from European Christian backgrounds.
I argue that it is Zaydan’s very identity and subject position as an Arab Christian that poses the problem for Shibli. Shibli (like many of his Indian Muslim contemporaries) fetishizes Arabs as ideal Muslims, and therefore approaches Zaydan’s work in rigidly ethno-religious terms: he has a particular vision of what historiography, from an Arab perspective, should look like. Ironically, it is Shibli’s supposed esteem for the Arabs that leads him to dismiss an Arab modernizer and turn instead to the European Orientalists for models of modern approaches to historiography.
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Shir Alon
In the nascent Hebrew press of the Zionist settlers in Palestine at the beginning of the 20th century, questions of literary production were discussed as urgently as political strategies or economic policies. That Hebrew literary production was an accurate measure of the condition of the Hebrew nation was an unquestioned axiom. While the press featured literary reviews of both Hebrew and European literatures regularly, the series of essays reviewing the current state of Arabic literature, which appeared in the journal Hapoel Hatzair (The Young Worker) in 1911, were still unusual. The writer of the reviews was Yitzhak Shami, a Palestinian Jewish Hebrew writer from Hebron, and among his rather disparaging critiques he championed the author Jurji Zaydan as a model of a successful contemporary writer of Arabic literature.
Yitzhak Shami was a native Arabic speaker, well-versed in the debates of the Arabic nahda. A Zionist and enthusiastic follower of the emergent Hebrew literary scene, he took it upon himself to provide the East European Zionist settlers with knowledge and understanding of the native Arab population through his essays, his short stories, and his roles as political consultant. In this paper, I focus on Shami’s self-positioning as a bridge, introducing Arabic literary developments to the small settler colonial Zionist community. In particular, I examine the manner in which Shami recruits Zaydan in order to articulate the current problems, prospects, and possibilities of modern Arabic literature, and by extension, of modern Hebrew literature as well. Comparing this review to other works of literary criticism appearing in the Hebrew press in the same period, primarily by the influential editor and writer Y. H. Brenner, reveals how Arabic and Hebrew literatures both faced similar demands of modernization, articulated in almost identical terms.
Zaydan appears in this account as an author who has found a solution to the problem plaguing both Arab and Hebrew authors at the time – the problem of narrating a present of national revival, or a “revival modernity.” Studying his reception in the Hebrew press of the early 20th century is the basis for articulating a new understanding of the experience of revival modernities and the genres of writing they produce.
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Dr. Esra Tasdelen
This paper focuses on the application of translation theory, and specifically Lawrence Venuti’s theories of “foreignizing” and “domesticating” translation, to the analysis of Jurji Zaydan’s novels in Turkish translation. The novels I will be analyzing specifically are “Kurey? Bakiresi” (Adra Quraysh, 1899) “Abbase Sultan” (Abbasa Ukht al-Rashid, 1906) and “Fergana Güzeli”, (‘Arus Farghana, 1908). The translations of the novels came out in the second half of the 20th century and in the first few decades of the 21st, as Turkish readers became more and more interested (and invested) in Islamic history told in the form of historical novels.
By contextualizing the productions of translations and publications of these novels for the Turkish reading public, I will be exploring how Zaydan’s ideas on Arab nationalism, language, religion and gender are carried over into the Turkish language, and how the novels were received in the Turkish public sphere. Turkish is in a unique position as a language that has gone through significant reform at the beginning of the 20th century. The paper will also explore the prevalence of Arabic words in the Turkish language as well as the shifts in context and meaning occurring concurrently. Arabic terms such as umma have been incorporated into the Turkish language with changes in context and meaning, and the close textual analysis of these novels in translation gives us opportunities in which to explore how translation sets the tone of the fictional text.
In addition, all three of these novels feature female protagonists, providing the reader with opportunities to see how Arabic, a highly gendered language, is rendered in Turkish, a language that uses gender-neutral pronouns. Through this analysis, the paper will point out to specific choices that the translator has made, further bringing the presence of the translator into the analysis.
The main goal of this paper is to discover how translation acts as a bridge between two languages and two different contexts, and how Turkish and Arabic, two languages intermeshed in terms of vocabulary, act as tools for authors and translators to use their agency in transmitting their ideas on Islamic history, nationalism, gender and religion in the public sphere.
