What is the relationship between political reform, language reform, and translation in the Nahda? This paper demonstrates how the author and intellectual, Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq (1805-1887), developed an intricate system that linked politics to the role of Arabic as a living and autogenetic language in a global world. While the Nahda is usually read as a laboratory of language reform, these reforms have been read politically as ushering in early forms of Arabism or as capitulating to orientalist philological and linguistic paradigms. This paper will complicate this reception of Arabic language reform in the Nahda by arguing that al-Shidyaq’s theorization of language affords the Arabic language an inherent ability to renew itself, and more importantly, to engage with the other languages of the world. I argue that al-Shidyaq theorized language as a craft that ought to be in constant struggle with tradition as well as be porous to other languages of the world through translation. The paper closely treads al-Shidyaq’s journalistic writings on civilization and translation, and reads them in conjunction with his morphological studies, such as “The Secrets of Morphology and Metathesis” (1867). I show how these reflections on language and translation help us understand al-Shidyaq’s magnum opus, Leg Over Leg as an attempt to think of language as what we can transform in order to change not only ourselves but our world. I end by tracing the legacy of al-Shidyaq’s theory of language to other authors of the Nahda.

My paper examines the writings of Egyptian writer, journalist, and poet ‘Abdallah Nadim “Al-Nadim” (1842-1896) on the relation between language, history, and education. I focus on a series of articles that Nadim published in his journal Al-Ustadh in 1892 and 1893, which offer a periodization of the history of Egypt based on the diffusion, shifts in prominence, and disappearance of various languages, beginning with the advent of Arabic, through the Mamluk and Ottoman rule, until the diffusion of European languages and the British occupation. My paper’s analysis is threefold. Firstly, I examine how Nadim’s linguistic periodization shaped his conceptions of the nature and role of the Arabic language, particularly in the realm of education, and its relation to other languages in Egypt overtime. I situate the author’s analysis with respect to, on the one hand, the traditional corpus of Arabic scholarship on linguistic studies and, on the other hand, the emergence of modern linguistics in the nineteenth century and novel conceptions of linguistic exchange and translation during the Nahda. I argue that Nadim’s privileging of the linguistic metaphor to comment on his country’s past and current culture and society should be read as symptomatic of a broader tendency to put language and theories of linguistic exchange at the center of intellectual and political discussions during this period. Secondly, I focus on Nadim’s style, particularly his use of a comically disproportionate number of loan words in Arabic. In line with the author’s distinctive satirical and playful writing mode, such programmatic linguistic hybridity within the monolingual space of the Arabic text, I propose, works to reaffirm stylistically his historical argument. Finally, I turn to Nadim’s propositions regarding the future development of culture and politics in Egypt, chiefly through education. Just as his interpretation of the past was “language-centric,” so was his vision of the future. In particular, I connect Nadim’s lifelong commitment to reforming education across Egypt and engagement in nationalist politics to his call, in these articles, for the need of promoting monolingual instruction at a time of widespread pushes for foreign language education in schools across Egypt. Ultimately, my paper seeks to shed light on the historical relation between language and history in the nineteenth and early twentieth century generally, and in Nadim’s works specifically, maintaining that his vision of Egypt’s linguistic future should be understood as a comprehensive project of political and cultural reform.

In Beirut, Cairo and Istanbul just as in Paris and Berlin, the economic and social transformations of the long nineteenth century had been accompanied by a different, but not-unconnected, upheaval in conceptions of language. Arabic, indeed, was in crisis: urgent linguistic reforms had been instigated to render a language now considered “ornate” and “archaic”, “simpler” and “modern” – closer to the style of the French and English texts flooding the global literary market. However, an examination of how language and translation were theorized in debates held in Arabic in the early twentieth century finds nothing so simple as adapted European “thought” or style. In these debates, the notion of meaning in language is discussed in Arabic in terms of financial value and efficiency; translation is conceived as an exchange predicated on equivalence between languages and governed by abstract economic "law." Arabic theories of language and translation in the early twentieth century articulate the material and economic concerns of a British-ruled Egypt being gradually incorporated into a global capitalist economy. Arabic literary scholars have argued that colonial cultural violence structured the subsequent course of Arab literary production and its place within world and comparative literary studies; I ask how that place might be reconceived if early twentieth-century theories of literature and language – in particular, notions of equivalency and exchange between languages – are seen to be embedded not simply in colonial ideological paradigms, but in (imperial) capitalist logics of market efficiency and infinite exchangeability, and deep anxieties about surplus and debt. The vision of translation that appears in the texts I read here responds less to Orientalist scholarship than it does to the uneven process by which Egypt, at the hands of British rulers and European creditors, was incorporated into global markets as a primary commercial producer of cotton.

This paper focuses on the work of Syro-Lebanese intellectuals who took part in the First Arab Congress (al-Mu’tamar al-‘Arabi al-Awwal) of 1913, particularly that of Chekri Ghanim and Nadra Moutran. Many of these figures went on to advocate for a French advisory role in postwar Syria, and often gestured to language education as a means of strengthening commercial and cultural ties with Europe. At the time of the 1913 congress, however, they had called for a greater degree of autonomy for Arabs within the framework of Ottoman constitutionalism, and made reference to the dynamism of Nahda intellectual production as a justification for the recognition of Arabist political demands. What was the conception of language underwriting their visions of political reform? Existing scholarship focuses on these thinkers’ elaboration of important themes in a nascent Lebanese nationalist ideology, emphasizing their ties to exponents of French colonial expansion and their training in Jesuit institutions, and situating their work within currents of European thought on racial difference and social cohesion. It attends less to the ways in which they thought about the significance of language and linguistic diversity in a context marked by deep political uncertainty. By examining in closer detail these thinkers’ theorization of the relationship between language and community, without imposing a teleological reading that seeks to retrieve the origins of later iterations of nationalism, this paper contributes to a more nuanced understanding of Arab political thought on the eve of the postwar mandate settlement.