Elshakry-Knowledge in Motion

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Knowledge in Motion
The Cultural Politics of Modern Science
Translations in Arabic
By Marwa S. Elshakry*
ABSTRACT
This essay looks at the problem of the global circulation of modern scientific knowledge
by looking at science translations in modern Arabic. In the commercial centers of the late
Ottoman Empire, emerging transnational networks lay behind the development of new
communities of knowledge, many of which sought to break with old linguistic and literary
norms to redefine the basis of their authority. Far from acting as neutral purveyors of
“universal truths,” scientific translations thus served as key instruments in this ongoing
process of sociopolitical and epistemological transformation and mediation. Fierce de-
bates over translators’ linguistic strategies and choices involved deliberations over the
character of language and the nature of “science” itself. They were also crucially shaped
by such geopolitical factors as the rise of European imperialism and anticolonial nation-
alism in the region. The essay concludes by arguing for the need for greater attention to
the local factors involved in the translation of scientific concepts across borders.
I N AN ARTICLE on “language and composition,” the late nineteenth-century Egyptian

satirist !Abd Allāh Nadı̄m wrote: “If a student of chemistry … were to come to us now
and we asked him ‘What did you learn this year?’ he would say: ‘I acquired knowledge
of āzūtāt al-kalas, … wa-al-bārı̄t, … wa-al-s!ūd, … wa-al-kuūl, … wa-al-fusfūr, …
wa-al-balsam, … wa-al-rādyūm, … wa-al-kādı̄myūm, … wa-al-karbūn,’” and so forth—
that is, calcium acetate, barite, soda, alcohol, phosphorus, balsam, radium, cadmium, and
carbon. Nadı̄m’s list of transliterated chemical compounds was over three pages long. In
1892, when it was compiled, the majority of these words were no doubt incomprehensi-
ble—if not unpronounceable—to all but those students of chemistry he mocked.1
This satire points to the dilemmas involved in the importation of a Western scientific
* Department of History of Science, Harvard University, 1 Oxford Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138.
My thanks to Graham Burnett, Peter Galison, David Livingstone, Sue Marchand, Mark Mazower, Samah
Selim, and the editors and anonymous referees for Isis for their corrections, comments, and conversation. My
special thanks to Amila Buturovic and Ahmed Ragab for their help with the Arabic transliterations.
1 !Abd Allāh Nadı̄m, “al-Lughah wa-al-inshā"” [Language and Composition], al-"Ustādh, 1892, 1:169 –184;
the list is on pp. 180 –182. !Abd Allāh Nadı̄m (1845–1896) was the son of a banker who worked variously as
Isis, 2008, 99:701–730

©2008 by The History of Science Society. All rights reserved.
0028-9904/2008/9904-0028$10.00
701

702 KNOWLEDGE IN MOTION
vocabulary into Arabic at the end of the nineteenth century and to the specific problem of
finding appropriate and meaningful lexical equivalents in cross-lingual scientific dis-
course. For Nadı̄m, the wholesale transliteration of technical terms raised issues that went
to the heart of an intense, ongoing cultural and political debate over language. Involving
questions of linguistic tradition, cultural purity, and modernity itself, this debate played
out against the background of colonial rule. In short, it raises a general issue little tackled
by historians of science: the problem of translation.
Now well attuned to the sociocultural embeddedness and geopolitical situatedness of
science, historians of science have paid rather less attention to language as the medium
through which modern scientific ideas travel.2 It is an oversight that reveals a curious irony
in the historiography of science itself. On the whole, historians of science, particularly
since Thomas Kuhn, have largely revised the initial premises of logical positivism: they
have seriously challenged the idea that science contains a universal protocol language
founded in a shared rationality or that it possesses a fundamental unity of structure. For
Kuhn, as for others, the notion— or, rather, the metaphor— of translation was crucial to
this view of the disunity of science. Both Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend, for instance,
developed their theories of incommensurability by borrowing from W. V. O. Quine’s
ideas of radical translation and the indeterminacy of meaning.3 Antipositivists and later
historians and sociologists of science have similarly developed working metaphors for the
“translations” that occur in the contact zones between scientific theories and experimental
practices or between things and concepts. For the antipositivists, theories of pidginization
or creolization between contact languages offered metaphors for the process of translating
between the language and practice of theory and experimentation across disciplinary
cultures. For these later historians and sociologists of science, the “vocabulary of trans-
lation” is applied to a sociology of scientific knowledge and to the kinds of displacements
and transformations that are said to occur in the material-semiotic network that binds
together actors, interests, and objects in the social construction of science.4
Thus the philosophy of language has made its way into the history of science, both by
shaping the debate over the ontological and epistemological connection between words
and objects and by helping practitioners think through the stability, relation, or commen-
surability of theoretical schemes, disciplines, and experimental practices. Yet much like
philosophers of language themselves, historians of science on the whole have stopped
a tutor, a shopkeeper, and a professional zajjāl (popular colloquial poet). He founded al-"Ustādh, a short-lived
literary journal, in 1892 and died in exile in Istanbul some four years later.
2 There are, however, some notable exceptions, particularly for the early modern period. See, e.g., Scott
Montgomery, Science in Translation: Movements of Knowledge through Cultures and Time (Chicago: Univ.
Chicago Press, 2000), esp. Chs. 1– 4; Mohammed Abattouy, Jürgen Renn, and Paul Weinig, “Transmission as
Transformation: The Translation Movements in the Medieval East and West in a Comparative Perspective,”
Science in Context, 2001, 14:1–12; Jamil Ragep and Salley Ragep, eds., Tradition, Transmission, Transforma-
tion (Leiden: Brill, 1996); and Robert Wisnovsky, Avicenna’s Metaphysics in Context (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell
Univ. Press, 2003). For examples of later histories see Robert Proctor, “‘-Logos,’ ‘-Ismos,’ and ‘-Ikos’: The
Political Iconicity of Denominative Suffixes in Science (or, Phonesthemic Tints and Taints in the Coining of
Science Domain Names),” Isis, 2007, 98:290 –309; see also the references listed in note 6, below.
3 See Howard Sankey, “Kuhn’s Changing Concept of Incommensurability,” British Journal for the Philosophy
of Science, 1993, 44:759 –774. For the challenge to the unity of science see, e.g., Peter Galison and David Stump,
eds., The Disunity of Science: Boundaries, Contexts, and Power (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Univ. Press, 1996).
4 See Peter Galison, Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press,
1997); Michel Callon, “Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: Domestication of the Scallops and the
Fishermen of St. Brieuc Bay,” in Power, Action, and Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge, ed. John Law
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986), pp. 196 –233; and Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow
Scientists and Engineers through Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1987). See also Sundar
Sarukkai, “Translation and Science,” Meta, 2001, 46:646 – 662.

MARWA S. ELSHAKRY 703
short of inquiring into the actual process of translation and its implications for the
communication of scientific thought. The question of how translators work in practice is
one that has been left to philologists and to literary studies and translation studies scholars,
despite its vital importance for understanding the geography of knowledge, the way in
which science travels across borders and through time.5
Instead, with a few notable exceptions, historians of science have limited their discus-
sion of textual translation to questions of fidelity.6 Reception studies, particularly when
they stray outside the Anglo-American and continental European world, have viewed the
problem of translation as primarily technical, downplaying its epistemological, political,
and cultural complexities. This approach reflects a tendency to see the “receiving” culture
as purely passive—its choice of responses limited to either faithful receipt of the original
or regrettable incomprehension. What remains lacking is an analysis of the linguistic and
sociocultural strategies by which concepts, terms, and even theoretical constructs are
made legible across cultural borders and rendered stable over time.7
It is just here that the deep and still influential philosophical underpinnings provided by
logical positivism have been so misleading. “We say that scientific discourse is translat-
able, and mean by this that not only the difference between languages but, within each
language, the difference between operationally equivalent wordings has no scientific
effect”: such was Leonard Bloomfield’s early smoothing away of the problem in his 1939
contribution to the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science. “In scientific speech,”
he went on, “definition implies complete interchangeability of the new term with the old;
if this is not agreed upon, we cannot develop the kind of dialect that serves in scientific
use.”8 Even today, many implicitly agree with this view, and relatively few see the
language of scientific discourse as anything other than a body of what are in principle
perfectly translatable conventions, signs, and concepts. Hence the irony: although they
have moved far from the logical positivists in their view of “science” itself, historians of
science are still largely wedded to the positivist idea that it possesses a unified and
coherent “universal language.”
If we set aside the assumption that there is a culturally neutral scientific lingua franca,
or that science is “the view from nowhere,” a focus on the practice of translation can point
to where and how the local embeddedness of knowledge production matters.9
5 See, e.g., Rainer Schulte and John Biguenet, eds., Theories of Translation: An Anthology of Essays from
Dryden to Derrida (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1992); Lawrence Venuti, The Translation Studies Reader
(London: Routledge, 2000); and Harald Kittel, ed., Übersetzung: Ein internationales Handbuch zur Überset-
zungsforschung (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2004). See also Nicolaas Rupke, “Translation Studies in the History of
Science: The Example of Vestiges,” British Journal for the History of Science, 2000, 33:209 –222.
6 See, however, David Wright, “The Translation of Modern Western Science in Nineteenth-Century China,
1840 –1895,” Isis, 1998, 89:653– 673; Rupke, “Translation Studies in the History of Science”; Roger Hart,
“Translating the Untranslatable: From Copula to Incommensurable Worlds,” in Tokens of Exchange: The
Problem of Translation in Global Circulations, ed. Lydia Liu (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 2000), pp.
45–73; and Michael Dodson, “Translating Science, Translating Empire: The Power of Language in Colonial
North India,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 2005, 47:809 – 835.
7 See Lydia Liu, Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity: China,
1900 –1937 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Univ. Press, 1995); Abdelmajid Hannoum, “Translation and the Colonial
Imaginary: Ibn Khaldûn, Orientalist,” History and Theory, 2003, 42:61– 81; and note 6, above, for examples of
recent works that have challenged some of these older paradigms.
8 Leonard Bloomfield, Linguistic Aspects of Science (International Encyclopedia of Unified Science) (Chi-
cago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1939), pp. 265, 269.

9 On the place, or historical geography, of science see Steven Shapin, “Placing the View from Nowhere:
Historical and Sociological Problems in the Location of Science,” Transactions of the Institute of British
Geographers, 1998, 23:5–12. For more on the “place of science” see Adi Ophir and Shapin, “The Place of

In fact, the practice of translation involves often very substantial epistemological,

authorial, and literary shifts across cultures and over time. Through translation, texts are
literally relocated: “translatio” implies “carrying across” linguistic and conceptual
schemes or boundaries. Mediated by historical contingency and geopolitical and social
changes—as well as aesthetic preferences and arbitrary or individual judgments—trans-
lations can be seen as discursive engagements, as forms of syncretic knowledge, over-
lapping authorships, and intertwined sources of sociocultural authority.10
By means of literary accretions (prefaces, marginalia, footnotes, and commentary), as
well as through linguistic strategies (paraphrases, syntactic and lexical additions or
substitutions), translators shift the meaning and references of the originals they work from.
This need not imply an unawareness of, or complete lack of concern with, the problems
of fidelity. Indeed, fidelity itself could be said to be interpreted in various ways, depending
on the translator’s purposes, linguistic resources, and audience. Faithfulness to the original
is not always the primary consideration: it may compete with others, such as the need for
clarity or the desire to popularize new forms of knowledge. Removing texts from their
original sites of production and consumption, translators refashion them in the service of
readers whose epistemological orientations are usually far removed from those of the
original authors. This process is fundamentally open ended and indeterminate, since
translators can find themselves choosing between equally legitimate and plausible termi-
nological equivalents that do not necessarily exist in some idealized one-to-one relation-
ship with their foreign counterparts.11
In 1884, for instance, Shiblı̄ Shumayyil, a Syrian Catholic physician and radical
scientific materialist (then based in Egypt), published a translation of Ludwig Büchner’s
essays on Darwin. Shumayyil’s translation was by no means a straightforward correlation
of words, phrases, or even sentences, and strict fidelity to the original was not his chief
concern. As both translator and popularizer, his interest lay primarily in conveying the
essence of the new “philosophy of evolution and progress,” as he would later dub the
work. Indeed, his translation was not even based on the original 1868 German edition but,
rather, on Auguste Jacquot’s 1869 French translation. As such, he employed frequent
transliterations for French scientific terms and helped the reader along by “using Arabic
explanations according to what was needed.” Translating from translations might horrify
the purist historian of ideas, but it served Shumayyil’s purpose of conveying the essence
of important ideas to his readers as quickly as possible.12
This example is important for another reason as well. It shows us that the languages
between which scientific translation takes place may themselves be shifting and, indeed,
Knowledge: The Spatial Setting and Its Relation to the Production of Knowledge,” Sci. Context, 1991, 4:3–21;
David Livingstone, “The Spaces of Knowledge: Contributions towards a Historical Geography of Science,”
Environment and Planning D, 1995, 13:15–34; and Livingstone, Putting Science in Its Place: Geographies of
Scientific Knowledge (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2003).
10 See Lawerence Venuti, Scandals of Translation (London: Routledge, 1998).
11 Rupke, “Translation Studies in the History of Science” (cit. n. 5), pp. 209 –211.
12 The original German text is Ludwig Büchner, Sechs Vorlesungen über die Darwin’sche Theorie von der
Verwandlung der Arten und die erste Entstehung der Organismenwelt (Leipzig: T. Thomas, 1868); it was
published in French as Conférences sur la théorie darwinienne de la transmutation des espèces et de l’apparition
du monde orgainique, trans. Auguste Jacquot (Leipzig: T. Thomas, 1869). Shiblı̄ Shumayyil’s first translation
appeared as Ta!rı̄b li-sharh Bukhnir !alā madhhab Dārwı"n (al-Iskandarı̄yah: Mat!ba!at Jarı̄dat al-Mah! rāsah,
1884); it was republished in 1910 as part of Falsafat al-nushū" wa-al-irtiqā" (Mis!r: Mat!ba!at al-Muqtat!af, 1910)
(the quotation is taken from p. 39), with additional commentary, footnotes, and illustrations that were taken from
Arabic translations of Victorian popular science publications—such as those that appeared in the science journal
al-Muqtat!af (for more on which see below). For more on Shumayyil see Georges Haroun, Šibli Šumayyil (Beirut:
Univ. Libanaise, 1985).

altered by the process of translation itself. Shumayyil was well aware of the difficulties of
finding equivalents in Arabic, and he frequently deemed it necessary to translate a given
term in more than one way. One option was to coin a new word based on transliteration,
even though this might not actually mean anything to a reader coming across it for the first
time. When he did come up with a neologism derived from a European term, therefore,
Shumayyil typically added a second explanatory neologism, based on Arabic word roots,
for clarity. In his translation of the word “paleontology,” for instance, he supplemented the
transliteration, “al-baliyūntūlūjiyā,” with “ay !ilm al-ah! āfı̄r,” “or the science of excava-
tions”—simultaneously impressing upon his readers the novelty of this “new” science and
helping make it more legible through a more familiar paraphrase. In any case, an
important scientific term could itself have multiple meanings and hence might need to be
rendered in any number of ways.13 Each of these conveyed different shades of meaning
and carried different cultural and linguistic associations.
In the marketplace of ideas, these choices might start out as matters of individual
preference, but they quickly became the subject of broader scrutiny and debate. In fact, the
criteria for the acceptability of a newly translated term— be it invented, derived, para-
phrased, or resuscitated—were themselves the subject of intense discussion among Arabic
authors and translators for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Were a
translator’s choices based on correct linguistic derivations? Did they conform to existing
literary traditions? Or were they unwarranted foreign borrowings or improper assimila-
tions? Translated terms were continuously contested and reformulated on the basis of
epistemic, linguistic, and political concerns. The same enormous geopolitical shifts that
helped to explain the new interest in modern science, technology, and medicine were
accompanied by linguistic ferment and the emergence of language wars over the reform
of Arabic. Scientific popularizers took a leading part in these debates. Thanks to the
Arabic press, which emerged at precisely this time, discussions raised by translations of
science turned out to provide an unprecedentedly public—and highly contentious—way of
arguing about the nature of cultural authority, social change, and literary tradition.
NEW KNOWLEDGE COMMUNITIES
Behind these late nineteenth-century arguments about scientific translation stood the
profound reorientation of concepts of science and knowledge in Arabic that had been
going on for at least half a century, dating back in particular to the social and institutional
transformations that had taken place in Egypt under Mehmet Ali. As early as 1834, the
civil servant, state translator, and influential nineteenth-century intellectual Rifā!ah Rāfi!
al-T! aht!āwı̄ commented on the surprising ways in which the French classified their
knowledge communities. Having been sent on one of the first official Egyptian “student
missions” to France, T! aht!āwı̄ was struck in particular by the unfamiliarity of French
educational and epistemological categories—that elaborate “classification [created] by
French sages,” as he refers to it in his account of his travels in Marseille and then Paris,
Takhlı̄s! al-ibrı̄z fı̄ talkhı̄s! Bārı̄z [The Purification of Gold in Parisian Lore]. In France,
noted T! aht!āwı̄, he who is said to be an !ālim (savant or scholar; pl. !ulamā") is one who
has knowledge of the rational sciences. Thus, when the French say that one is an !ālim,
13 Depending on the context, Shumayyil sometimes rendered the term “evolution” as “tasalsul” (“chain of
transmission or graded transformation,” a resuscitated or archaic term), “tat!awwur” (“progression,” a derived

term), or “nushū" wa-irtiqā"” (“emergence and growth,” a paraphrase). For more on this, see below.

they do not mean that he is well versed in his religion (which, he noted, they classified
under “metaphysics”) but, rather, that he has knowledge of some other subject.14 For
T! aht!āwı̄, and for other Arabic speakers of the mid-nineteenth century, the !ulamā" were
first and foremost religious scholars, the elite who guarded the predominant community of
knowledge.
It was not long, however, before what it meant to be an !ālim changed in Egypt too.
Under the reforms initiated by Mehmet Ali and his Khedival successors (of which T! aht!āwı̄
himself was very much a part), new schools and educational curricula were created, and
qād! ı̄ courts were beginning to be supplanted by state courts and Qur’ānic law by new legal
codes. With these, and the Tanzimat reforms of the mid-nineteenth century, the number of
bureaucrats rose dramatically in Egypt, as throughout the Ottoman Empire at large.15 The
traditional scholarly classes— or the !ulamā", those who had long been the customary
authorities on education and law—were thus slowly but increasingly pushed to the
margins of public life. In their place emerged a new class of civil servants, educators, and
journalists, keen to immerse themselves in the new methods—and vocabulary— of “sci-
ence.”
The emergence of print-press capitalism in the region undoubtedly contributed to their
new public authority. It also led both to the rise of a new class of readers and to
accompanying pressure for language reform.16 The print revolution and the widespread
translation movement that contemporaries hailed as their “Renaissance” (Nahd! ah) helped,
in fact, to mark out these new communities of knowledge.17 For early readers of the Arabic
press were, on the whole, drawn neither from the traditional scholarly classes (the
!ulamā") nor from the masses. Low literacy rates confined the circulation of new ideas
and works to a relatively restricted class of readers, drawn chiefly from the civil service
or the political and professional elite. (This would change by the 1920s and 1930s with the
expansion of literacy rates throughout the Arabic-reading world, as elsewhere.) But
though they may initially have been few in number— compared at least with their
nineteenth-century European counterparts—these readers were of critical significance in
forging far-flung new socio-epistemological and geopolitical networks. The journals that
emerged at this time in the commercial centers of the Ottoman Arab provinces—Beirut,
Aleppo, Damascus, Baghdad, Alexandria, and Cairo— drew in subscribers from across the
14 T! aht!āwı̄ was sent to France in 1826; he stayed for some five years. In 1837 he became one of the first
directors of the School of Languages in Egypt (initially founded as the School of Translation in 1836). He is best
known for his 1834 travel narrative, which was republished several times and translated into Turkish: Rifā!ah
Rāfi! al-T! aht!āwı̄, Takhlı̄s! al-ibrı̄z fı̄ talkhı̄s! Bārı̄z (Mis!r: Mat!ba!at Būlāq, 1834) (here and throughout this essay,
all translations into English are mine unless otherwise indicated). A French translation was published as L’or de
Paris: Relation de voyage, 1826 –1831, trans. Anouar Louca (Paris: Sindbad, 1988), pp. 81, 161; the English
version is An Imam in Paris: Al-T! aht!āwı̄’s Visit to France (1826 –1831), trans. with an introduction by David
Newman (London: Saqi, 2004), pp. 255, 331.
15 See Kemal Karpat, Ottoman Population, 1830 –1914: Demographic and Social Characteristics (Madison:
Univ. Wisconsin Press, 1985).

16 See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1994), pp. 75– 80. See also Partha
Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments and Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton Univ. Press, 1993).
17 Identified as the Arab equivalent to the European Renaissance and Enlightenment combined, “Nahd ! ah” was
a label that stuck. Nineteenth-century ideologues of the Nahd! ah envisioned the movement as a translatio imperii
et studii— both a translation of knowledge and (it was hoped) a transfer of power from the West to the East that
would bring an end to European hegemony and colonial rule in the region. See, e.g., Salāmah Mūsá, Mā hiya
al-nahd! ah (Beirut: Maktabat al-Ma!ārif, 1962). For more on the intellectuals of the Nahd! ah see Albert Hourani,
Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1962); and Yves Gonzalez-Quijano, “Littéra-
ture arabe et société: Une problématique à renouveler: Le cas de la nahd! a,” Arabica, 1999, 46:435– 453.

confessional, social, and geographic divides of the empire (and beyond).18 Through the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the press thus mobilized an emerging professional
and political elite and helped it to take over both the new means and the new discourses
of knowledge production. It was this cross-regional and interconfessional class of readers
that helped ultimately to transform the notions of both !ilm and the !ulamā". The latter
term came to refer ambiguously both to the traditional religious scholarly classes—whose
prestige and standing were clearly waning—and, increasingly, to the new group referred
to by the nineteenth-century English neologism “scientists.”
SCIENCE, KNOWLEDGE, AND WISDOM
In the summer of 1882, in the chapel hall of the Syrian Protestant College in Beirut, an
American Protestant missionary-instructor delivered a speech in Arabic entitled “al-
Ma!rifah al-!ilm wa-al-h! ikmah”—“Knowledge, Science, and Wisdom.” Edwin Lewis, a
Harvard medical school and theological seminary graduate, delivered the speech to the
college’s sixteenth graduating class, a group of some dozen or so medical and “literary
school” students. Lewis offered a reflection on the nature—and limits— of science, a
reminder of the lessons these young men might take home after four years of a liberal
Protestant education in modern arts and sciences.19
But alongside the promotion of a healthy “Christian quest” for science, and for
knowledge and wisdom more generally, Lewis’s speech also testified to the radical
rescripting of categories of knowledge in Arabic. Knowledge, or ma!rifah, he announced,
is not science, or !ilm, for while the former involved the patient and thorough accumu-
lation of observations or facts, the latter constituted a higher order of being in that it
involved both the gathering of facts and, through induction, the formulation of causal
theories: “Science searches in nature for the causes of events and places them in their
correct context.” In this sense, Lewis brought together a neo-Baconian understanding of
scientific knowledge with an older Judeo-Christian one. For he also distinguished between
knowledge (ma!rifah) and science (!ilm), on the one hand, and wisdom (or h! ikmah), on
the other. By “wisdom” he meant divinely ordained truth, and he sought to draw a
distinction akin to the Greco-Latin distinction between sophia and episteme or sapientia
and scientia. As he put it, “through science man may know something about the existence
of God, the Cause of all Causes, but he fails to apprehend who and what God is.” For “no
telescope will show us God; no microscope will show us the soul of man; and no
chemistry will disclose the secret of life.” Science, he concluded, is therefore “limited,”
18 A number of recent works highlight the significance of this rise of the middle classes and print capitalism
in the commercial centers of the empire. See Jens Hanssen, Thomas Philipp, and Stefan Weber, eds., The Empire
in the City: Arab Provincial Capitals in the Late Ottoman Empire (Würzburg: Ergon, 2002); Hanssen, Fin de
Siècle Beirut: The Making of an Ottoman Provincial Capital (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2005), esp. pp.
138 –189; and Keith Watenpaugh, Being Modern in the Middle East: Revolution, Nationalism, Colonialism, and
the Arab Middle Class (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 2006), esp. pp. 68 –94. On the press more
generally see Ami Ayalon, The Press in the Arab Middle East: A History (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1995).
19 Edwin Lewis, “al-Ma!rifah al-!ilm wa-al-h ! ikmah” [Knowledge, Science, and Wisdom], al-Muqtat!af, 1882,
7:158 –167. The Syrian Protestant College, or al-Madrasah al-Kullı̄yah al-Sūrı̄yah al-Injı̄lı̄yah (renamed the
American University of Beirut in 1920), had been founded in 1866 by an interdenominational group of American
and British missionaries, philanthropists, and local or resident businessmen and educators with the express goal
of providing a “thorough scientific and professional education to the youth of Syria,” along “principles strictly
Protestant and evangelical.” See American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, Correspondence and
Reports, Vol. 545: Documents, Reports, and Letters, 1860–1871, no. 110: “Reasons for the Establishment of a
Syrian Protestant College,” n.d.

for though “man may attain its highest peaks,” he will “still find ahead of him peaks higher
than those which he has attained.” Lewis thus categorized !ilm as essentially knowledge
of things human and h! ikmah as knowledge of things divine, but he added to that a
neo-Baconian or inductive layer of meaning by distinguishing the former from mere
knowledge in its commitment to both positive facts and causal argumentation.20
Lewis’s lecture represented one intervention in the ongoing epistemological reorienta-
tion of the word “!ilm” (the broadest word in Arabic for “knowledge”) alluded to at the
end of the last section. In the Qur’ān, “!ilm” had come to be equated with both true human
knowledge and divine knowledge. In the classical lexicon the word thus referred to the
knowledge of “definite things,” a broad categorization that encompassed both revealed
and acquired knowledge and was variously equated with comprehending and obtaining,
perception and apperception (tas!awwur wa tas!dı̄q), intuition (al-badı̄hah), and believing
(i!tiqād bimā huwa bihi). “Ma!rifah,” more closely aligned with gnosis but also referring
to cognition, realization, and perception, had an equally complex genealogy and deploy-
ment; moreover, it was itself typically classified under the category of !ilm.21
Lewis took no account of any of this in the speech he delivered in Arabic that summer.
Glossing over centuries of philosophical debate and exegesis, he narrowed the meaning of
“!ilm,” defining it essentially in neo-Baconian terms as something equivalent to the
English “science.” In this way he took part in what Reinhart Koselleck has characterized
as a “dissolution of the old world and the emergence of the new in terms of [a]
historico-conceptual … process”— or “a complex network of semantic change” that took
place across both diachronic and synchronic registers.22
It is hard to see this as a mere oversight. After all, college instructors like Lewis were
deeply immersed in the problems of translation. Concerned with imparting a basic and
modern educational curriculum to their students— or “would-be converts,” as they took to
calling them—and with offering an edifying literary, scientific, and spiritual diet of texts,
tales, catechisms, and the Gospels, missionaries in Syria and the “Holy Land” spoke
frequently of the problems they encountered in their efforts at translation. From the 1840s
to the 1860s they were occupied with rendering the New Testament into Arabic (the first
results of this effort appeared in 1867), and their notebooks show how painstakingly they
searched for proper equivalences— both lexically and stylistically—for the language of
the Bible. The missionary-translators at work on this project were said to have compiled
long columns of synonyms “six or seven deep and high, above and below nearly every
20 Lewis, “al-Ma!rifah al-!ilm wa-al-h ! ikmah,” p. 166. See also Theodore Dwight Bozeman, Protestants in an
Age of Science: The Baconian Ideal and Ante-Bellum American Religious Thought (Chapel Hill: Univ. North
Carolina Press, 1977).
21 See Franz Rosenthal, “Muslim Definitions of Knowledge,” in The Conflict of Traditionalism and Modern-
ism in the Muslim Middle East, ed. Carl Leiden (Austin: Univ. Texas Press, 1966), pp. 117–133; and Rosenthal,
Knowledge Triumphant: The Concept of Knowledge in Medieval Islam (Leiden: Brill, 1970). Dictionary entries
for “!ilm,” “ma!rifah,” and “h! ikmah”— e.g., in Muh! ammad ibn Ah! mad Khuwārizmmı̄’s tenth-century ency-
clopedic compendium of the sciences Mafātı̄h! al-!ulūm, Muh! ammad ibn Mans!ūr’s classic thirteenth-century
dictionary Lisān al-!Arab, and Murtad! á al-Zabı̄dı̄’s eighteenth-century Tāj al-!arūs min jawāhir al-qāmūs, one
of the first modern dictionaries since Mans!ūr’s Lisān al-!Arab—reveal a complex genealogical and etymological
trajectory for all of these words, yet one in which “!ilm” clearly emerges as the most extensive category. By the
nineteenth century—with the appearance of such dictionaries as But!rus al-Bustānı̄’s well-known Muh! it! al-muh! it!
(Beirut, 1867–1870) and, later, Ismā!ı̄l Maz! har’s Nahd! ah Dictionary (Cairo: Renaissance Bookshop, 1950) and
the Majma! al-lughah al-!Arabı̄yah’s (Cairo Academy of Language’s) List of Scientific and Technical Terms
(Cairo, 1942)—the idea that “!ilm” could also refer more narrowly to science—as a more positive (and
increasingly experimental) technical field of expertise and inquiry— emerged.
22 See Keith Tribe, “Introduction,” in Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time
(New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2004), pp. vii–xx, on pp. xiv–xv.

important word in the line.” They and their “native assistants,” including such well-known
Arabists as But!rus al-Bustānı̄, Nās!ı̄f al-Yāzijı̄, and Yūsuf al-!Ası̄r, deliberately attempted
to “do away” with the “resonant decorative” style of the classical Arabic associated with
the Qur’ān.23 In the Syrian Protestant College itself, moreover, both missionary instructors
and native tutors taught a stripped-down syntax and prose.24 Indeed, they compiled novel,
and highly simplified, Arabic grammars under the influence of the new traditions of
European comparative philology and scholastic Orientalism, both of which similarly
stressed the need for standardization and concision.25
It is not surprising, therefore, that Lewis himself would speak an Arabic that was
simultaneously influenced by neo-Baconian, doxological, and Greco-Latin categories of
knowledge and by new literary conceptions concerning an “economy of style.” His faith
in the translatability of modern scientific terms and concepts meant that the historical
background of the very terms he used—including those for “science,” “knowledge,” and
“wisdom”—was something he felt he could ignore—indeed, that he may even have
wished deliberately to jettison and replace. Yet, by the same token, Lewis’s deployment
of all three terms—“!ilm,” “ma!rifah,” and “h! ikmah” —would have seemed unfamiliar to
most contemporary nineteenth-century Arabic speakers. Indeed, his speech would in all
likelihood have attracted little interest among the learned classes of the time had it not
been for the unintended afterlife it gained through the new Arabic press.
It was thanks to Lewis’s controversial praise of Charles Darwin—and to the
missionary-sponsored journal al-Muqtat!af—that the speech soon made its way to the
forefront of Arabic print-press debates on science. Upset at what they felt was a poor
“apology for Bible truths” and his acceptance of “yet unproven theories”—namely, the
theory of evolution by natural selection—senior missionaries at the college demanded that
Lewis be dismissed. Incidentally, translation played a key role here too: Lewis’s offended
colleagues had his speech translated by a local translation company to ascertain what,
exactly, he was saying, for it seems that not all of them had a command of Arabic
sufficient to follow the original. Lewis himself argued all along that his speech neither
supported an unqualified or heretical view of evolution nor posed an offense to the
evangelical spirit of the college. It was determined on the basis of the translation, however,
that the speech was an offense to Christian dogma, and the English translation was sent
to members of the Board of Trustees back at home as evidence. Lewis objected to the
translation, claiming that it distorted the true meaning of his message in the original
Arabic.26
The crucially important al-Muqtat!af was a “journal of science and industry” founded by
23 Isaac Hall, “The Arabic Bible of Drs. Eli Smith and Cornelius Van Dyck,” Journal of the American Oriental
Society, 1882–1885, 11:276 –286, on p. 283; and Susan Somekh, “The Emergence of Two Sets of Stylistic
Norms in the Early Literary Translation into Modern Arabic Prose,” Poetics Today, 1981, 2:193–200, on p. 197.
24 This proved a controversial endeavor. In 1871 Ah ! mad Fāris Shidyāq (1804 –1887), a well-known translator
and educator who taught Arabic for a time at the Protestant Evangelical Mission station in Malta, composed a
simplified Arabic grammar—first published in Istanbul in 1871 as Ghunyat al-t!ālib wa munyat al-rāghib—that
met with considerable criticism in its day, particularly from neoclassical purists such as But!rus al-Bustānı̄,
Ibrāhı̄m al-Yāzijı̄, and Sa!ı̄d al-Shartūnı̄. See Anwar Chejne, The Arabic Language: Its Role in History
(Minneapolis: Univ. Minnesota Press, 1969), p. 137.
25 See Carolyn Killean, “The Development of Western Grammars of Arabic,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies,
1984, 43:223–230, esp. pp. 225–226.

26 On the Lewis controversy see Nadia Farag, “The Lewis Affair and the Fortunes of al-Muqtataf,” Middle
Eastern Studies, 1972, 8:73– 83; Donald Leavitt, “Darwinism in the Arab World and the Lewis Affair at the
Syrian Protestant College,” Muslim World, 1981, 71:85–98; Shafı̄q Juh! ā, Dārwin wa azmat sanat 1882
bi-al-dā"irah al-t!ibbı̄yah [Darwin and the Crisis of 1882 in the Medical Department at the Syrian Protestant

native mission instructors Ya!qūb S! arrūf and Fāris Nimr in 1876 and quickly hailed as one
of the major vehicles of the Nahd! ah. Through its reporting, news of what would soon be
called the “Lewis affair” spread from Beirut to Tripoli, Damascus, Alexandria, and
beyond. The weekly Alexandria paper al-Mah! rusah, for instance, carried a significant
discussion of the affair based largely on articles from al-Muqtat!af. The journal reported
extensively on the student strikes and arrests that took place shortly after Lewis’s
dismissal and continued to publish responses from Lewis and other senior missionaries, as
well as from Christian and Muslim readers throughout the empire, for months after the
incident. Many of them reported surprise, if not dismay, at the actions of the Christian
educators at the college.
This key moment in the ongoing epistemological revolution in Arab lands was in fact
epitomized by the fate of al-Muqtat!af itself. S! arrūf and Nimr, the editors, had founded the
journal with the encouragement and support of their senior mission colleagues, who
initially shared their vision and aims as well as their conception of “science.” Their goal
was to provide précis of the latest scientific and technical works published abroad—
translated from such British and American periodicals (housed at the Syrian Protestant
College library) as Scientific American, the Natural History Journal, Popular Science
Monthly, the Spectator, Nineteenth Century, Fortnightly, and the Times.27 These were also
typically accompanied—at least initially— by a carefully constructed Christian commen-
tary.
But after the events of 1882 S! arrūf and Nimr felt disappointed in their American
missionary sponsors’ meddling in “questions of science,” and they themselves increas-
ingly came to define “!ilm” in more strictly positivistic terms. After the Lewis affair, they
began to preach their popularizing new “gospel of science”—a sphere of inquiry and
knowledge production that they increasingly defined as above and beyond (but therefore
ultimately compatible with) religious belief.28 Leaving both the Ottomans and their
Protestant mentors behind in Beirut, they transferred their operations south to British-
occupied Egypt, where they would participate in an even more radical rescripting of
categories of knowledge and an ever more ambitious project of scientific and technolog-
ical translation and transmission.
THE LEXICON OF SCIENCE
In order to impart this new cultural understanding of science, or !ilm, a new lexicon had
to be created around it. This was a task that required both conceptual and stylistic
inventiveness. In al-Muqtat!af ’s translations, for instance—and the journal was, particu-
larly at the start, a vehicle for little else—S! arrūf and Nimr not only reworked older terms
but also provided transliterations and neologisms accompanied by explanations and
definitions. “New discoveries in science and technology require new terminology,” they
College] (Beirut: American Univ. Beirut Press, 1991); and Olivier Meı̈er, Al-Muqtataf et le débat sur le
darwinisme: Beyrouth, 1876 –1885 (Cairo: CEDEJ, 1996).
27 Other journals from which al-Muqtat!af took its material included the American Artisan, the American
Journal of Science, Knowledge, and the Economist. Popular Science Monthly and Nineteenth Century were the
two journals S! arrūf and Nimr relied on most. Popular Science Monthly, like al-Muqtat!af itself, also drew
liberally on other journals, such as Edinburgh, Fortnightly, Cornhill Magazine, Chambers Journal, the Spec-
tator, and Nature. See Nadia Farag, “Al-Muqtataf, 1876 –1900: A Study of the Influence of Victorian Thought
on Modern Arabic Thought” (D.Phil. thesis, Univ. Oxford, 1969), pp. 119 –131.
28 See Marwa S. Elshakry, “The Gospel of Science and American Evangelism in Late Ottoman Beirut,” Past
and Present, 2007, 196:173–214.

noted enthusiastically in 1883 when they inaugurated a column, entitled “Mu!arrabāt,” or

“Arabicizations,” on technical terms translated from English, French, Latin, and Greek.29
They were, of course, by no means the first to engage in such a process of domesticating
or Arabicizing foreign terms: in their introduction to the column, the editors themselves
referred their readers to the translation movement of the !Abbasids in the late eighth to
eleventh centuries, which had laid the foundation for the medieval Arabic lexicon of
science, philosophy, logic, and grammar. They also acknowledged their indebtedness to
the founders of the modern “translation movement” under Mehmet Ali and his successors
in Egypt who translated literary, scientific, and technical texts from French, Italian,
Spanish, and English.30
In fact, in many ways the al-Muqtat!af column updated and popularized the very
extensive glossaries published in T! aht!āwı̄’s state-commissioned translations of half a
century earlier. T! aht!āwı̄’s 1833 translation of Georges-Bernard Depping’s Aperçu histo-
rique sur les moeurs et coutumes des nations, for instance, included a glossary of
Arabicized French words that ran to some 105 pages—nearly as long as the 112-page text
itself.31 In translating a number of classic modern French literary works, as well as texts
on geography, geometry, engineering, history, and language, T! aht!āwı̄ had already en-
countered the problem of finding appropriate Arabic equivalents for foreign terms and
concepts. He thought that this was particularly difficult when translating technical terms
in the sciences and took a flexible line similar to that taken by his successors. Writing on
the “art of translation,” he observed that “this is among the most difficult arts, particularly
the translation of scientific books, which requires knowledge of the terminology used for
the basic principles of the science to be translated.” T! aht!āwı̄ recommended that “if … the
translator intends to translate scientific books, he will be obliged to avoid translating word
by word; when necessary, he ought to coin terminology appropriate to the intended
meaning.” In dealing with words “for which Arabic equivalents were difficult to find,” he
wrote, “I preserved their pronunciation and represented them [in Arabic script] to the
extent that it could be done. Sometimes I added some finer explanations.” (When
transliterating terms, he also added a pronunciation key that spelled out each letter and the
accompanying, and typically unrepresented, diacritical marks or vowels included.) In this
way T! aht!āwı̄ coined such terms as “karantı̄nā” (“quarantine”), “apnūmātı̄qı̄yah” (“pneu-
matique”), “atı̄mūmitr” (“thermometer”), and “bārātūnı̄rah” (“paratonnerre”), by and
large preserving the basic morphology and phonology of the original French but utilizing
29
“Mu!arrabāt” [Arabicizations], al-Muqtat!af, 1883, 8:107–108. This column appeared primarily between
1883 and 1884.
30 According to a recent survey of a variety of nineteenth-century North African and Syro-Lebanese
translations into Arabic, the relative percentage of foreign lexical borrowings that came from French at that time
could be as high as 70 percent, with less than a quarter coming from Italian and under 5 percent from English
and Spanish. Words relating to the state and the economy made up just over a quarter of the total, with science
and technology loan words coming in a close second, followed by words related to transport, art and education,
the military, measures, food, and, finally, Christian theology. See Daniel Newman, “The European Influence on
Arabic during the Nahd! ah: Lexical Borrowings from European Languages (ta!rı̄b) in Nineteenth-Century
Literature,” Arabic Language and Literature, 2002, 5:1–32, esp. p. 10. On the nineteenth-century translation
movement in Egypt see Jak Tājir, H ! arakat al-tarjamah bi Mis!r khilāl al-qarn al-ta! si! !ashar (Mis!r: Dār
al-Ma!ārif, 1945).
31 T
! aht!āwı̄’s translation of Depping’s text was published in Arabic as Kitāb qalā"id al-mafākhir fı̄ gharı̄b
!awā"id al-awā"il wa-al-awākhir (Būlāq: Dār al-t!ibā!ah al-!āmirah, [1833]). See Mohammed Sawaie, “Rifā!ah
Rāfi! al-T! aht!āwı̄ and His Contribution to the Lexical Development of Modern Literary Arabic,” International
Journal of Middle East Studies, 2000, 32:395– 410, esp. n. 37.

Arabic lexical additions in the process—for example, adding vowels to break up conso-
nantal strings.32
In addition to such direct Arabicizing, T! aht!āwı̄ also created neoclassical hybrid com-
pounds through a kind of descriptive paraphrase— or else he simply resuscitated older
terms. Thus he referred to the science of hydraulics as “fann al-miyāh” (“the art or craft
of liquids”) and to mechanics as “!ilm al-h! iyal” (“the science of devices”); in both cases
he used terms with a long history but updated his descriptions to fit the new uses. Whether
imported or resuscitated, however, not all such terms would have been immediately
recognizable to many readers of the time. In order to make them more legible to his
readers, he therefore adopted the habit of adding indexes with each main entry, listing
various other lexical renderings or alternative translations and offering a full pronuncia-
tion key (T! aht!āwı̄ wrote out all the vowels and the full inflection for each of the terms he
Arabicized). These were then followed by an exposition and, sometimes, a brief history
of the term or concept. T! aht!āwı̄ encouraged his students in the School of Languages to
compile similar glossaries of “all foreign neologisms that have no counterparts or syn-
onyms in the language of the Arabs or Turks”; over time, he thought, these would amount
to a full-fledged Arabic scientific dictionary. In fact, T! aht!āwı̄ saw the difficulties he and
his students faced as part of an old and familiar problem: he compared the process of
translating “Frankish” words to the challenge that had faced earlier generations of
medieval translators who had Arabicized terms from Persian and Greek.33
Decades later, the editors of al-Muqtat!af broadly followed T! aht!āwı̄’s approach and used
their journal to create a systematic and extensive vocabulary for the new sciences. As
scientific discoveries and technological inventions were transferred (or translated) from
one country to another, the editors wrote in 1883 in the introduction to their new column,
they were typically transposed with the original name assigned, as had been the case with
the sciences translated into Arabic from Greece and Persia and, later, those translated by
the Franks from the Arabs. “Modern Syrian and Egyptian writers,” they continued, “have
gone in much the same direction in their translations of the recently invented [or newly
named] sciences, and we have followed them in what they have written on science and
industry and so we have also Arabicized Frankish words.”34
Like T! aht!āwı̄, S! arrūf and Nimr were pragmatic in their approach to translation and saw
the construction of transliterated neologisms as a legitimate means of expanding the
language. Indeed, they relied much more heavily than had T! aht!āwı̄ on transliteration when
they described new scientific instruments, such as al-mikrūskūb or al-tilı̄skūb or al-
tilı̄ghrāf, and new disciplines, such as al-biyūlūjiyā, al-balintūlūjiyā, or al-bathūlūjiyā.
The classically trained T! aht!āwı̄, by contrast, had used derived neoclassical equivalents
where he could. To give but one example, he rendered “telescope” as “al-na!zārāt
al-mu!!zimah,” or “magnifying glasses,” rather than as “al-tilı̄skūb.” S! arrūf and Nimr
methodically imported into Arabic chemical and medical terminology such as “bı̄kārbūnāt
al-s!ūdah” and “al-amfı̄zı̄mā.” They even used their column to provide long didactic
discussions of such novel substances as al-bı̄rah (beer) and al-jinn (gin), rendering the
32 Sawaie, “Rifā!ah Rāfi! al-T

! aht!āwı̄,” pp. 399, 402; and T! aht!āwı̄, Imam in Paris (cit. n. 14), p. 113. For a list
of other neologisms used in T! aht!āwı̄’s works see J. Heyworth-Dunne, “Rifā!a Badawı̄ Rāfi! al-T! aht!āwı̄: The
Egyptian Revivalist,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental Studies, 1940, 10:399 – 415.
33 Sawaie, “Rifā!ah Rāfi! al-T
! aht!āwı̄,” p. 400; and T! aht!āwı̄’s introduction to his Parisian lore in An Imam in
Paris.
34 “Mu!arrabāt,” al-Muqtat!af, 1883, 8:107–108; for more from this column see ibid., pp. 212–216, 294 –296,
341–346, 401– 402, 467– 469.

latter as “"alif-lām-jı̄m-kasra-nūn-shaddah”—the same spelling for the Arabic “jinn,”

meaning “djinn” or “demons” (a homonym that mimics the double meaning of “spirits”
in English).35
However odd neologistic constructions such as these may have seemed—as James
Clifford has pointed out, “radical indeterminacy is the essence of neologism[s],” and thus
their use involves de facto a “poetics of cultural invention”—they nevertheless proved an
essential interlingual tool for Arabic translators. In creating words that simultaneously
represented and replaced foreign ones, translators could play off the linguistic tension
involved in the search for equivalences by creating idioms that could be identified as
simultaneously foreign and domestic.36
Yet there was a cost, for in the process S! arrūf and Nimr eschewed centuries of contested
deliberation over the proper rules and regulations dictating the extension of Arabic’s
triconsonantal root morphology—such as the classical Arabic rules pertaining to analog-
ical root derivations (ishtiqāq), compounding (nah! t), and the calquing or direct borrowing
(ta!rı̄b) of newly assigned words. Ever the positivists, the editors preferred instead to
emphasize what they saw as the universal nature of science by carrying over its termi-
nology wholesale. Tightly linked to the ongoing debate over the creation of a “modern”
Arabic language and the move away from classic models and linguistic traditions, this was
an issue that had significant political implications at its core.
THE POLITICS OF NEOLOGISMS
In tackling the challenge of scientific popularization, al-Muqtat!af forged the way toward
a radical stylistic break with the past. Targeting a new cross-regional and cross-
confessional readership, it was an avowedly popular journal that aimed to write in “a
language at once comprehensible to the lay and acceptable to the educated.” (!Abd Allāh
Nadı̄m, the satirist who had an aversion to excessive transliteration, made a similar claim
in his al-Tankı̄t wa-l-tabkı̄t—namely, to write “in a style which the learned will not
despise and the ignorant will not need to have interpreted.”) As such, they sought to
“select correct and familiar words and simple phrases whenever possible.” Yet this
commitment to an easily understood prose in the service of the popularization of knowl-
edge also set constraints on their use of neologisms and transliterations, which is why they
sometimes moved between the reassignment of older terms and the construction of new
ones. In fact, different strategies of translation allowed them to mediate between differing
socio-epistemological connotations and semantic values.37
The often ambiguous nature of newly translated concepts— or what Quine would take
as the ultimate indeterminacy of meaning in interlinguistic synonymy—also meant that
some terms could inevitably be rendered in multiple ways.38 Arabic translators knew well
that each possible variant carried a slightly different shade of meaning, implied a distinct
35 Ibid., pp. 107–108. For a discussion of the role of al-Muqtat!af in the popularization of science see Dagmar
Glaß, “Popularizing Sciences through Arabic Journals in the Late Nineteenth Century: How al-Muqtataf
Transformed Western Patterns,” in Changing Identities: The Transformation of Asian and African Societies
under Colonialism, ed. Joachim Heidrich (Berlin: Verlag Das Arabische Buch, 1994), pp. 323–364.
36 James Clifford, “A Politics of Neologism: Aimé Césaire” in The Predicament of Culture (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1988), pp. 175–181, on pp. 176 –177. See also Liu, ed., Tokens of Exchange (cit.
n. 6), esp. the introduction.
37 al-Muqtat!af, 1876, 1:1–2; and Pierre Cachia, “The Development of a Modern Prose Style in Arabic
Literature,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 1989, 51:65–76, on p. 69 (quoting Nadı̄m).
38 W. V. O. Quine, Word and Object (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1964), p. 75.

style of reasoning, and might bring with it a new way of thinking. Büchner’s translator,
Shiblı̄ Shumayyil, for example, described his new “school” of materialism as “al-
madhhab al-māddı̄,” deploying the term “al-māddı̄yah” for “materialism” rather than
relying on “al-dahrı̄yah,” with its long-standing connotation of “irreligiosity” and “un-
belief.” (In certain verses of the Qur’ān the term “dahrı̄yah” was used in connection with
the ungodly and erring—those who claimed “What is there but our life in this world? We
shall die, we live, and nothing but time [or ‘dahr’—literally, ‘the course of time’] can
destroy us.”)39 In contrast, the Azharı̄ Shaykh Muh! ammad !Abduh, in his translation of
Afghani’s polemic against the materialists (published originally in Persian), used the terms
“al-dahrı̄yah” and “al-māddı̄yah” interchangeably and thereby implied that he made little
distinction between scientific materialism and the enemies of the faith.40
Older terms could thus naturalize new concepts and draw their sting. Using the term
“madhhab Dārwı̄n” to translate “Darwinism,” rather than “al-Dārwı̄nı̄yah” (an occasional
alternative), allowed translators to deploy the term “madhhab,” which referred primarily
to one of the orthodox schools of fiqh (or Muslim law), and secondarily to a philosophical
system, in order to impart and bolster a sense of the theory’s standing as a new and
authoritative school of thought. In a similar vein, the phraseology “al-"us!ūl [or al-nus!ūs!]
al-sharı̄!ah al-t!abı̄!ı̄yah” was frequently used to refer to “the [general] laws of nature,”
once again reworking a concept—sharı̄!ah—from Muslim jurisprudence.
“Race” was another increasingly popular nineteenth-century term with no universally
agreed equivalent in Arabic. Nineteenth-century Arabic science journals found that they
had to render new concepts of race— often ambiguous in the original too, of course—in
various ways. Some translators played off older classical or religio-moral notions of
human difference by using the phrase “t!abaqāt al-"ummah” (literally, “strata of people”),
utilizing the classical term “"umma” (as in the concept of a Muslim "umma), meaning
“community,” “peoples,” or, later, “nation.” Other renditions, such as “al-"as!nāf al-
basharı̄yah” or “al-"anwā! al-basharı̄yah” (meaning “human types” or “human kinds,”
respectively), gave general terms for “type” or “kind” the specifically biological conno-
tation of “species”: Darwin’s Origin of Species, for instance, was similarly rendered into
Arabic as "As!l al-"anwā!. In this way, older terms for human “variation” or “difference”
could be reworked so as to stress the new racial sciences’ emphasis on physico-moral
differences between people, replacing older conceptions of the affinity and distinction
between collective human groups and ethical communities with novel ones that pointed,
particularly, toward the importance of physical differences or markers—for humans as
with animals.
It was especially troublesome that there was no specific word in Arabic for “spe-
cies”—a fact that had significant implications for those who attempted to describe
Darwin’s “school of thought” in Arabic. Ismā!ı̄l Maz! har, for instance, in his translation of
Darwin’s discussion of the “difficulty of distinguishing between variety and species” in
the Arabic Origin of Species, used derivations of the root “naw!” (plural, “"anwā!”) for
39 In this way, Abū H ! āmid al-Ghazālı̄, among others, spoke of those who “professed the dahr” (“al-qawl
bi-al-dahr”). The term denoted those who believed in the eternity of the world, past and future, and who, as a
result, denied resurrection and a future life. In essence, it implied a mulh! id, one who deviated from the true faith.
See al-Qur’ān, Surah 45:24; 76:1; “Dahriyyah,” Encyclopaedia of Islam (Leiden: Brill, 2007).
40 Jamāl al-Dı̄n al-Afghānı̄, al-Radd !alá al-Dahrı̄yı̄n (Mis
!r: Mat!ba!at Muh! ammad Muh! ammad Mat!ar, n.d.).

both “variety” and “species”— using “"anwā!” for “species” and coining the term for
“varieties” from the derived verbal noun “tanawwu!āt.”41
The concept of “evolution” posed similar problems. With no simple accepted Arabic
equivalent, the word was variously translated as “tasalsul,” “tat!awwur,” “nushū",” or
“irtiqā".” The first (“tasalsul”) implied “descent” (literally, “to follow in a chain”); the
second (“tat!awwur”) was a neologism implying “development”; and the latter two meant
“growth” and “ascent,” respectively, both implying “progress.” Shumayyil’s invented
phraseology “madhhab al-nushū" wa-l-irtiqā"” (literally, “the school of growth and
ascent,” rendered more aptly in English as “the theory of evolution and progress”) thus
added a completely new layer of meaning to Darwin’s ideas by giving them a teleological
and politicized character.42
Because—to put it mildly—not all these newly coined or refashioned terms and
expressions were equally accepted, translators had to justify their choices. For instance,
the appropriateness of the term “tat!awwur” for “evolution”—it was derived from the
verbal noun “al-t!awr” (pl. “al-at!wār”), meaning “state,” “stage,” or “phase,” and had been
used by the al-Muqtat!af group since the late 1870s to popularize Darwinian ideas of
evolution—was debated by many well into the twentieth century. H ! asan H! usayn, in his
1924 translation of Ernst Haeckel’s Der Kampf um den Entwickelungs-Gedanken—which
he translated from the English Three Lectures on Evolution—had this to say: “I agreed to
translate this into Arabic … because we live in an age overshadowed by ‘evolution’
[al-tat!awwur].” But he clarified his use of the term with the following footnote: “Now
some would criticize us for using this term and would say that the language does not know
of ‘al-tat!awwur’ but only of al-t!awr and al-at!wār. But we chose to use it for two reasons.”
First, having read interpretations of the Qur’ānic verse 71:14, “wa qad khalaqakum
at!wāran” (“He created you in stages”), and others— on the development of men in stages
from a “drop of sperm” to a blood clot, germ-cell or embryo, and so forth—H ! usayn felt
that the derivation “tat!awwur” was in fact appropriate for the intended meaning of the
foreign word “evolution.”43 Second, there was the sociological or populist argument: the
word had long been incorporated into people’s utterances, he argued, such that “it is now
well-known and established among them.”44
Much of this was about making the unfamiliar familiar and therefore acceptable. For
example, the editors of al-Muqtat!af sometimes described the theory of evolution itself as
41 Ismā!ı̄l Maz ! har, As!l al-anwā! wa-nushū"ihā bi-al-intikhāb al-t!abı̄!ı̄ (Cairo: Dār al-!as!r lil-t!ab! wa-al-nashr,
1928).
42
See Haroun, Šibli Šumayyil (cit. n. 12), pp. 116 –119, for a full list of Shiblı̄ Shumayyil’s neologistic
constructions.
43 H! usayn published his translation as Fas!l al-maqāl fı̄ falsafat al-nushū" wa-al-irtiqā" (al-Qāhirah: Mat!ba!at
al-Shabāb, 1924)—“The Definitive Treatise on the Philosophy of Growth and Ascent”—which was reminiscent
of both the title of Joseph McCabe’s English translation of Ernst Haeckel, Last Words on Evolution (London:
A. Owen, 1906), and of Ibn Rushd’s Kitāb fas!l al-maqāl wa-taqrı̄r mā bayna al-sharı̄!ah wa-al-h! ikmah min
al-ittis!āl, on the relation between revelation and philosophy. My thanks to the anonymous referee who pointed
out this connection. For pertinent Qur’ānic verses see 16:4, 18:37, 22:5, 23:13, 23:14, 35:11, 40:67, 53:46, 80:19.
44 H! usayn, Fas!l al-maqāl fı̄ falsafat al-nushū" wa-al-irtiqā", p. 7. According to Jaroslav Stetkevych, the verb
“tat!awwara” (of which “tat!awwur” would be the verbal noun) (“to develop or evolve”), a Form V derivation that
made possible the more recent Form II derivative (“t!awwara”), does not in fact constitute a modern derivation
and was used by Arabic scholars as early as the tenth century (and later by Ibn Khaldun). Its modern meaning—if
not its form—is, however, novel: it originally meant “to disguise oneself,” from the noun “t!awr” or “time”
(synonym of “t!ārah”: “state,” “condition,” “manner”). See Jaroslav Stetkevych, The Modern Arabic Literary
Language: Lexical and Stylistic Developments (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1970), p. 42. See also Majma!
al-lughah al-!Arabı̄yah (Cairo Academy of Language), Majallat al-majma! al-!ilmı̄ al-!arabı̄, 1953, 28:502–
503.

“an old idea”: both ancient Greek and medieval Arab philosophers, they suggested, had
come to similar conclusions. Indeed, this kind of appropriation evidently struck a chord
with the journal’s readers, for the editors received scores of letters on the subject, and
many later Arab thinkers would replicate and elaborate on this line of argument.45 In 1885,
for instance, Amı̄n Shumayyil (the proprietor of the early law journal al-H ! uqūq and
brother of the well-known Shiblı̄) sent a letter to the editors in which he declared Darwin’s
theory of evolution to be nothing but a reformulation of medieval Arabic ideas: “Darwin’s
school of evolution is not new. Arabs, Hindus, and many others held to similar ideas. …
Ibn Khaldūn said all species evolve from one to another, from metals to plants to
animals.”46
The editors of al-Muqtat!af themselves, however, soon wearied of this kind of approach:
in response to a reader’s question in 1890 —“Was Darwin’s theory known among the
Arabs and Persians?”—they replied curtly: “Darwin’s theory, meaning the transformation
of species by natural selection, was not known among the Arabs or Persians or anyone
else, otherwise scientists today would not have ascribed this theory to him.” While the
editors had initially highlighted such a genealogy to give Darwin respectability, or to
defend him against those who ridiculed him for claiming that “man was descended from
monkeys,” they never engaged in a systematic comparison of his theories with older
notions of transmutation, preferring in most cases to stress the novelty, or modernity,
rather than the antiquity of contemporary scientific concepts. In fact, if they made any
sustained attempt to construct an older philosophical tradition for current thought, S! arrūf
and Nimr typically looked to the works of the ancient Greeks, which they believed offered
a more appropriate genealogy for the language of modern science and Western modernity
than did medieval Muslim thought. Indeed, like many Nahd! awı̄ (“men of the Nahd! ah”),
they saw the revival and renaissance of ideas they were participating in as itself inspired
by the success and power of scientific and technical advances in the West. As the author
Jirjı̄ Zaydān would later write, “It is well known that the makings of our recent scientific
renaissance are derived, wholly or in part, from the Europeans.”47
What stood behind these choices was an increasingly charged debate over what James
Clifford has described in another context as the “politics of neologism”—and over the
meaning of science itself.48 The use of neologisms, particularly of those Arabicizations
that carried over foreign words wholesale (or mu!arrabāt)—the kind that S! arrūf and Nimr
had hoped to popularize in their column— came under heavy criticism in the years that
followed the 1882 British occupation of Egypt and the rise of a nationalist opposition. In
1891, for instance, al-Muqtat!af received a letter from a reader: !Ali Rid! ā, then the director
of Fayūm province, complained of the editors’ excessive use of “foreign words” (al-
kalimāt al-a!jamı̄yah). Despite the fact that “the noble Arabic language was one of the
most comprehensive languages in grasping a whole host of meanings and expressions,”
many Arabic journals “are stuffed with expressions full of foreign words.” According to
45 See “Hal kāna madhhab Dārwı̄n ma!lūman !inda al-!Arab wa-al-Furs” [Was Darwin’s Theory Known
among the Arabs and the Persians?], in “Masā"il wa-ajwibatuhā” [Questions and Their Answers], al-Muqtat!af,
1890, 14:359; “Mā alladhı̄ atà bihi Dārwı̄n” [What Did Darwin Achieve?], ibid., 1908, 33:878; and “Madhhab
Dārwı̄n !ind al-!Arab” [Darwin’s Theory among the Arabs], ibid., 1909, 35:1022.
46 “Madhab Dārwı̄n !ind al-aqadimı̄n” [Darwin’s School of Thought among the Ancients], in “Masā"il
wa-ajwibatuhā,” al-Muqtat!af, 1885, 10:145–146.

47 “Hal kāna madhhab Dārwı̄n ma!lūman !inda al-!Arab wa-al-Furs” (cit. n. 45), p. 359; and Cachia,
“Development of a Modern Prose Style in Arabic Literature” (cit. n. 37), pp. 70 –71 (quoting Jirjı̄ Zaydān).
48 Clifford, “Politics of Neologism” (cit. n. 36).

Rid! ā, this over-reliance on Arabicizing (ta!rı̄b) new words in al-Muqtat!af, as in other
Arabic papers and journals of the time, was a corruption of the rules of proper or classical
Arabic. These words, he claimed, could be expressed in proper Arabic— or, at the very
least, their meanings could be expressed and explained in the language itself. The editors
responded by thanking Rid! ā for bringing these issues to their attention but then respect-
fully disagreed: “what you ask us to do is to strip the goat’s thorn of its leaves (by hand)
[dūn khart al-qitād; i.e., do the impossible], because the majority of the foreign words we
use in al-Muqtat!af have no synonyms [murādif ] in Arabic, like al-uksjı̄n, al-haydrūjı̄n,
al-klūr and al-flūr [oxygen, hydrogen, chloride, and fluoride].” And while some of these
terms may have an appropriate Arabic synonym, they observed, the imported term was
still generally better known: “like the word bismuth which is better known than [the
archaic] murqashı̄yah.” S! arrūf claimed that while it was not possible to explain a new
word fully each time it was mentioned—“otherwise al-Muqtat!af would become a lan-
guage book like al-Fı̄rūzābādı̄’s dictionary or the S! ih! ah! of Jawharı̄”— earlier glossaries the
journal had provided had gone some way in this direction. They hoped, wrote S! arrūf, to
publish a more comprehensive dictionary of some kind in the future. For al-Muqtat!af, in
other words, these Arabicizations were not in any way harmful to the language. The
editors reminded readers that generations of Arabic scholars, such as Ibn Sı̄nā and al-Rāzı̄,
had engaged in the same process.49
For S! arrūf and Nimr, the politics implicit in such transliteration strategies were entirely
positive in their implications. There was no shame in borrowing from another culture, they
wrote. They held that the current practice of importing and borrowing scientific and
technological terms and concepts from the West resembled the translation movements of
the past— except that in the past it was the Arab East that transmitted its scholarship,
philosophy, and science to the West. In 1890, reviewing the various scientific advances
they had publicized in the journal’s first fourteen years, they reminded their readers that
“borrowing from the West does not impede the advance of knowledge in the East.”
Science offered benefits to all: “There is no need to be hindered by our pride, for science
belongs to everybody. The West has borrowed from us when we were once great, and now
it is our turn to take from the West.” “The real shame would be if we insisted on starting
from where Europe did two hundred years ago! That would be like one who abandons a
steam engine for a simple tool.”50
The concern with tradition raised the question of linguistic change and canonical
fidelity. In the face of growing criticism that they had abandoned the guidelines provided
by classical Arabic debates over naming and assigning meaning to terms (or al-mawd! i!
wa-l-is!!tilāh! ), modernizers increasingly felt it necessary to justify their use of translitera-
tions.51 They did so by introducing the distinction between dynamic and stagnant cultures
and by appealing in particular to the growth of what they termed “contiguous languages.”
They repeatedly claimed that there was “no shame” in Arabic continuing the tradition of
49 “al-Kalimāt al-a!jamı̄yah” [Foreign Words], al-Muqtat!af, 1891, 15:52–53; see also Adrian Gully, “Arabic
Linguistic Issues and Controversies of the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries,” Journal of Semitic
Studies, 1997, 42:75–120, esp. p. 99. The editors referred to the dictionaries of Muh! ammad Fı̄rūzābādı̄ (d. 1414)
and Ismā!ı̄l al-Jawharı̄ (d. 1003).
50 “Muqaddimat al-sanah al-khāmisah !ashar” [Introduction to Volume 15], al-Muqtat!af, 1890, 15:1–2; and
“al-"Amı̄rah al-Mis!rı̄yah” [The Egyptian Princess], ibid., 1899, 23:66.

51 On the significance of these medieval debates over the sacral nature of Arabic and the problem of linguistic
innovation see Michael Carter, “Adam and the Technical Terms of Medieval Islam,” in Words, Texts, and
Concepts Cruising the Mediterranean Sea, ed. Rüdiger Arnzen (Leuven: Peeters, 2004), pp. 439 – 454.

linguistic borrowings and transpositions. In fact, they argued, it was in this way that an
organic genealogy of languages was created and notions of knowledge exchanged and
revived. While the new discipline of comparative philology (a major influence on mis-
sionary educators’ views of language in general and translation in particular) further
challenged the older emphasis on the neoclassical rules and uniqueness of the Arabic
language, evolution itself could be invoked as a justification for this process by empha-
sizing the “growth and evolution of languages” more universally.
The idea that language itself was a “living entity”— one that was born, grew, and could
die—that followed the rules of the evolution of life proved a popular theme: it was Jirjı̄
Zaydān who first explored this idea in his 1886 al-Falsafah al-lughawı̄yah [The Philos-
ophy of Language] and again in his 1904 al-Lughah al-!Arabı̄yah kā"in h! ayy [The Arabic
Language, a Living Entity]. Borrowing both from the works of European philologists,
philosophers, and evolutionists of the nineteenth century and from medieval Arabic
grammarians regarding the origin of language, Zaydān argued that all languages began
from the “imitation of sounds in nature” and later developed according to the “natural
laws” of evolution. He examined the historical development of semantic substitution
(al-ibdāl), metathesis (al-qalb), and derivation (ishtiqāq) of nouns and verbs in Arabic
(and other Semitic languages) as examples of this evolutionary process of language
growth and change. He also provided a historical account of the transformation of Arabic
over different historical epochs, from the pre-Islamic era to the “linguistic renaissance” or
Nahd! ah of his own time, providing examples of borrowings, substitutions, and derivations
in each period. Zaydān developed these ideas in order to emphasize the point that changes
in Arabic style and lexicon—particularly ta!rı̄b—were part of an entirely “natural”
process and to support the notion that Arabic was perfectly able to regenerate itself and
to adapt to modern ideas and concepts.52 (This was, incidentally, also a challenge to the
works of European philologists, Orientalists, and Semitists who argued otherwise.)
The attempt to naturalize the assimilation of foreign words was also made more widely.
Another Syrian Protestant College Arabic instructor, Jabr D ! ūmit! (1859 –1929), added his
voice to those defending the idea of wholesale transliteration.53 But it was certainly not
only the products of the missionary schools who took such a view, for there were many
arguments made to justify the expansion of language through assimilation and borrowing.
The traditionally trained Shaykh !Abd al-Qādir al-Maghribı̄, for instance, drew on the
analogy between ishtiqāq (derivation) and tawallud (the natural increase of the Arab
"ummah), on the one hand, and ta!rı̄b (Arabicization) and tajannus (the assimilation or
naturalization of non-Arabs into Arab society and culture), on the other. His 1908 Ishtiqāq
wa-al-ta!rı̄b [Derivation and Arabicization] drew repeated parallels between the growth
and evolution of language and that of a people (or, indeed, life): much like Zaydān, he
sought in this way to naturalize the process of ta!rı̄b itself. Maghribı̄ even listed Arabi-
52 See his list of borrowings in the last section of Jirjı̄ Zaydān, al-Lughah al-!Arabı̄yah kā"in h
! ayy (Cairo: Dār
al-hilāl, n.d.).
53 D
! ūmit! published essays on the evolution of language in Zaydān’s al-Hilāl and in al-Muqtat!af between 1888
and 1928. These included such studies as “The Evolution of the Arabic Language,” “Arabic: What It Took and
What It Gave,” “Origins of the Semitic Peoples,” and “America and American” (a study of deriving adjectives
from assimilated words). D ! ūmit! was also interested in the genesis and historical development of Arabic as
evidence of its ability to adapt to the times. These articles were published by the Muqtat!af Press in Cairo as
Falsafat al-lughah al-!Arabı̄yah wa tat!awwuruhā [The Philosophy of Arabic and Its Evolution] in 1929.

cized terms in the Qur’ān in order to make borrowing more acceptable to those neoclas-
sical purists who denounced it as an undesirable innovation.54
Many, however, pointed to the dangers of excessive borrowing as a sign of political
subservience, a reflection of a kind of cultural inferiority complex. While al-Maghribı̄’s
al-Ishtiqāq wa-al-ta!rı̄b took a relatively pragmatic approach to the kind of Arabicizations
S! arrūf and Nimr helped to popularize, he still recognized the need for limits: “We
pronounce tilı̄ghrāf (telegraph), tilı̄fūn (telephone), fūnūghrāf (phonograph), utūmūbı̄l
(automobile) … as they come down in their pronunciation, yet we term them arabicized
(mu!arrabah) … in accordance with the method of the blessed Sibawayh” (the well-
known eighth-century linguist). But, warned al-Maghribı̄, “it is necessary that in our
indulgence we should stop at a certain limit. Otherwise foreign words of different types
and forms will multiply in our literary language to the extent that … it might lose its
character and become a hybrid language—neither Arabic nor foreign—something like the
language of Malta”—a cultural and political amalgam and, in other words, a sign of
political weakness.55
Many translators in fact deliberately avoided transliteration for this reason, particularly
after the 1919 revolution in Egypt and the rise of anti-imperial and nationalist aspirations
raised the political stakes. In the 1920s, in his glossary of translated technical terms, H! asan
H! usayn relied almost entirely on revived archaic terms or descriptive paraphrase. Rather
than render “pithecanthropus” as “bithekanthrubus,” for instance, he listed the term as
“al-qird al-insānı̄,” or “ape man,” while for “lemur” he coined “al-qird al-kādhib,” or
“sham monkey.” Similarly, Ismā!ı̄l Maz! har, in his 1928 translation of the Origin of
Species (as "As!l al-"anwā!), Arabicized terms through the use of descriptive paraphrase
and archaic resuscitations in preference to transliteration. Like the editors of al-Muqtat!af,
he too made a consistent effort to provide readers with the proper historical or etymo-
logical background for the resulting new terms. When referring to species that were
unfamiliar to his Arabic readers, like “terrier” (kalb al-"ard! —literally, “ground dog”) or
“woodpecker” (thaqqāb al-khashab, a “wood borer”), he typically provided a classifica-
tory etymology. He described the former as “a name derived from Terra, or ‘the ground’
in Latin characters [ay al-ard! fı̄ al-lātı̄nı̄yah],” and added a brief description (“a small
bold, intelligent, sprightly, and quick moving breed”). He explained the latter by providing
the genus ("ism al-jins) Dendrocopus and the genus and species names of the two most
common species in Europe (D. major and D. minor); here too he added a basic description
(“a bird that moves quickly and eats insects beneath the bark of trees”).56
Against the background of growing anti-imperial feeling, many even questioned the
Western origins of science itself and looked both west and east for their inspiration. While
H! usayn, in the introduction to his 1924 translation of Haeckel, acknowledged that the role
of the translator was to transfer that which is “most beautiful … and gratifying of those
books written in a language not his own,” so as to “enliven his own language” while
“connecting the generations … and the known tribes of the world,” he nevertheless looked
to both the ancients and the moderns, both east and west, for inspiration. For H ! usayn, the
theory of evolution that Darwin and Haeckel had helped to popularize was itself but the
last in a long line of scientific deliberations on the subject. In fact, he claimed, it was the
54 !Abd al-Qādir Maghribı̄, Kitāb al-ishtiqāq wa-al-ta!rı̄b (Mis !r: Mat!ba!at al-Hilāl, 1908), pp. 6 –7, 18 –25,
47–29; and Stetkevych, Modern Arabic Literary Language (cit. n. 44), p. 6.
55 Maghribı̄, Kitāb al-ishtiqāq wa-al-ta!rı̄b, pp. 119, 135.
56 Maz! har, As!l al-anwā! wa-nushū"ihā bi-al-intikhāb al-t!abı̄!ı̄ (cit. n. 41), Vol. 1, pp. 189, 238.

Arabs who had invented the notion of evolution, and he devoted a good part of his
introduction to theories of evolution among the Arabs (and to Ikhwān al-S! afā, al-Ma!arrı̄,
and Ibn Khaldūn in particular). H ! usayn concluded that Darwin’s Origin was nothing but
a “collection of old opinions … modeled and refined in the light of modern discoveries.”57
Similarly, Ismā!ı̄l Maz! har, in his introduction to his translation of the Origin of Species,
wove together a complex genealogy and etymology of both Western and Eastern prece-
dents to Darwin’s ideas. In this sense, many translators saw the process of translation itself
as a kind of interweaving of conceptual, linguistic, and authorial traditions—a means of
highlighting modernity’s reassuring antiquity and of demonstrating the indebtedness of
foreign knowledge to one’s own tradition.
The backlash against coining neologisms and the process of defending them thus took
many forms. If some looked to a comparative philological tradition to argue more
universally about the patterns and rules of linguistic change and growth, others argued
from within the tradition of Arabic linguistics and semantics to justify the expansion and
assimilation of technical terminology or else sought to expand the range of meanings
through the kinds of descriptive paraphrase outlined above. Yet whether they believed that
language constantly evolved through borrowing or, instead, that one should coin new
terms on the basis of the old rules, in practice translators often wavered between
alternative strategies, even as the politics of language—like the politics of science
itself—shifted ground.
THE PEOPLE’S PROSE, THE PEOPLE’S SCIENCE
Debates over science in translation were not only about the creation of new words or the
politics of neologism: they also raised fundamental issues of literary style, aesthetics,
taste, and rhetorical tradition. For those educated in the old madrasah system, translation
had typically involved a commitment to certain “neoclassical” forms. T! aht!āwı̄, for in-
stance, in his 1867 translation of François Fenelon, had made frequent use of parallel
clauses, collocations or synonymic pairings, rhymes, and meters (or saj!)—in a tradition
ultimately drawn from the classical Arabic of the Qur’ān itself.58
This stylistic tradition lingered on through the nineteenth century. As late as 1897, !Abd
Allāh Nadı̄m composed a rhymed allegory of a train and a steamboat competing with one
another: “Soft, O Father of the Flames, you have exceeded the bounds of courtesy! …
Rage is so firmly established and so confined in you that it has become a head of steam.
… When your nose emits smoke, the entire sight of you is blotted, and if some day you
go thirsty, your boiler bursts. … How filthy your attendants are, and how limited is your
scope, O you who part lovers and terrify passengers! More desirable is my drowning than
your burning, and safer is my river than your track.” Nadı̄m modeled the encounter on the
maqāmāt (a genre of rhythmic prose) of classical Arabic poetry. As was common in that
genre, he drew on Qur’ānic allusions, as when he referred to the train as “Father of the
Flames” ("abū al-lahab), the Qur’ānic term for the archenemy of the Prophet. The link
between the Arabic language and the Qur’ān was for Nadı̄m absolutely critical: “Lan-
guage is tied to religion,” he wrote in another context, “like a body is to the soul.”59
57 H! usayn, Fas!l al-maqāl fı̄ falsafat al-nushū" wa-al-irtiqā" (cit. n. 43), esp. pp. 26 –29, 51–59, 61 (quota-
tions).
58 See Somekh, “Emergence of Two Sets of Stylistic Norms” (cit. n. 23), p. 197.
59 !Abd Allāh Nadı̄m, Sulāfat al-Nadı̄m (Mis !r: Mat!ba!ah Hindı̄yah, 1914), cited from Cachia, “Development

By the late nineteenth century, however, this style was under fire for its overly
poeticized, complex, and cumbersome quality. Ideas of taste—and literary appeal and
sophistication—were clearly changing. As Ah! mad Fāris al-Shidyāq, a translator and
educator who helped with the London-commissioned translation of the Bible that ap-
peared in 1848, would later write in his fictionalized autobiography, al-Sāq !alá al-sāq fi
mā huwa al-fāryāq: “Rhymed prose is to a writer what a wooden leg is to a walker: I must
not lean upon it in all manners of discourse lest it prove too limiting or lead me into a tight
corner where there is no escape. … Let him who wishes to hear discourse that is rhymed
throughout interspersed with metaphors and decorated with metonymies, betake himself
to the maqāmāt of al-Harı̄rı̄ or the nawābigh of al-Zamakhsharı̄.” And he cautioned his
readers that his own prose would not be “spiced with paronomasias, allusions, metaphors,
and metonymies.” “Our purpose here,” he wrote, “is to weave our narrative in a form
acceptable to any reader”—a refrain, as we saw earlier, that had become common among
late nineteenth-century Arabic writers and early press proprietors in particular. Even
Nadı̄m himself, an adherent of the classical prose tradition, was forced to acknowledge its
inappropriateness as a language for the new mass readership of the press. Indeed, in 1881
he announced to readers of his short-lived journal al-Tankı̄t wa-l-tabkı̄t that he would
undertake to write in a new, simplified prose style, accessible to all and offensive to
none.60
This attempt to create a new and concise prose—the key linguistic achievement of the
Nahd! ah—was in many ways driven by the press. Contemporaries hailed al-Muqtat!af for
its innovative “telegraphic” style and saw the journal, along with Jirjı̄ Zaydān’s al-Hilāl,
as the vehicle for a new “scientific” form of Arabic writing. al-Muqtat!af’s own dedication
to the “diffusion of useful knowledge” meant that its editors placed a premium on clarity
and communicability.61 In this respect, the editors and early contributors were deeply
influenced by their former mission patrons, who—as we saw earlier— had initiated the
simplification of Arabic syntactical, lexical, and phonological forms, deliberately doing
away with any resonant, Qur’ānic, or “decorative” renditions in their translations of the
Old and New Testaments.
Yet if the debate over prose—and the style that best suited modern needs—reflected
critical political debates of the period, the same could be said of the dilemmas of what
M. M. Bakhtin termed a “linguistic polyglossia.” This was evident as early as 1881, when
al-Muqtat!af published a short article on “the Arabic language and its success.” The
previous issue had carried a potted biography of the railway engineer George Stephenson
of a Modern Prose Style in Arabic Literature” (cit. n. 37), p. 67 (the rhyming is, of course, not fully captured
in this translated selection); and Nadı̄m, “al-Lughah wa-al-inshā!” (cit. n. 1), p. 179.
! mad Fāris al-Shidyāq’s al-Sāq !alá al-sāq fı̄ mā huwa al-fāryāq was published in Paris in 1855; see La
60 Ah
jambe sur la jambe (Paris: Phébus, 1991). For more on al-Shidyāq see note 24, above. The passages in the text
are cited from Cachia, “Development of a Modern Prose Style in Arabic Literature,” p. 68. Another Arabic writer
who, like al-Nadı̄m, attempted to continue the classical prose tradition was Nās!ı̄f al-Yāzijı̄, who published a
collection of maqāmāt, Majma! al-bahrayn, in the nineteenth century. On the latter see Gully, “Arabic Linguistic
Issues and Controversies” (cit. n. 49), p. 78. On the announcement to the readers of al-Tankı̄t wa-l-tabkı̄t see
Cachia, “Development of a Modern Prose Style in Arabic Literature,” p. 69; Muh! ammad Rashād H ! amzāwı̄,
!Amal majma! al-lughah al-!Arabı̄yah bi-al-Qahira (Beirut: Dār al-gharb al-Islāmı̄, 1988); and Rashād
H! amzāwı̄, L’Academie de Langue Arabe du Caire (Tunis: Univ. Tunis, 1975), p. 34.
61 For the remarks of contemporaries see “T ! abaqāt al-kuttāb” [Classes of Writers], Majallat sarkis, 1910,
13:253–259, which classified Ya!qūb S! arrūf’s style as “scientific” and Fāris Nimr’s as “journalistic”; Farag,
“Al-Muqtataf, 1876 –1900” (cit. n. 27), p. 92; and Salāmah Mūsá, Tarbiyat Salāmah Mūsá (Cairo: Dār al-Kātib
al-Mis!rı̄, 1947), p. 38, which describes S! arrūf’s style as “telegraphic.” See also Somekh, “Emergence of Two
Sets of Stylistic Norms” (cit. n. 23), p. 197; and Killean, “Development of Western Grammars of Arabic” (cit.
n. 25), pp. 225–226.

(taken from an account by the Victorian self-help advocate Samuel Smiles). Despite
having no more than what they described as a basic reading knowledge of the English
language, the editors pointed out, Stephenson had nevertheless mastered mechanical
engineering and shown himself to be a “genius” in inventing new instruments in his trade.
Among the Franks, they went on (echoing observations T! aht!āwı̄ had made fifty years
earlier), everyone— even the lowliest laborer— could be taught the higher sciences be-
cause their written language differed only slightly from the spoken one. In the West,
spoken dialects had replaced the archaic literary language of Latin; as a result, the power
of invention and scientific achievement was available to all, the masses and the educated
elite alike. The editors thus attributed the discrepancy between East and West in terms of
contemporary scientific achievements to the gulf between written and spoken Arabic.62
S! arrūf and Nimr outlined three possible solutions to the problem: that Arabic be
replaced by another language entirely; that the written literary form of Arabic be replaced
by a written colloquial variant; and, finally, that spoken dialects be replaced by a kind of
simplified “correct” Arabic (al-!Arabı̄yah al-s!ah! ı̄h! ah). The first suggestion they dismissed
as distasteful, the second as undesirable politically (since it would inevitably fragment the
Arab-speaking world); the third thus stood as their preferred solution, one that, they felt,
would “do a great service to the wat!an [homeland].” Arabic, they claimed, was more
flexible than most languages in that it could easily adapt to the demands of new scientific
terminology through Arabicizations (ta!rı̄b), extensions of its trilateral forms, and com-
pound formation (nah! t). They advocated the establishment of some sort of language
academy to monitor those developments, and they envisioned that, with proper instruction
in the schools, a new standardized language could spread in a mere two or three decades.63
The editors’ suggestions elicited many responses, for the topic lay at the heart of
cultural debate in the Arab world at this time.64 Save one anonymous critic who went by
the pen name of “The Possible” (al-Mumkin), almost all the respondents agreed that the
disparity in dialects among Arabic speakers meant that it would be impractical to replace
the literary form of the language with the colloquial. al-Mumkin himself accepted that the
language of science in Arabic was currently beyond the comprehension of most people,
but he proposed instead that a standardized colloquial Arabic form the new lingua franca.
(He also argued that the classical Arabic and religious texts should remain in their original
form and be read and interpreted by specialists, much like Latin and Greek texts in the
Western world.) The creation of a standardized colloquial language, al-Mumkin empha-
sized, would be particularly helpful for translating foreign works on industry, farming,
commerce, and modern science, which he felt should be rendered in a language that could
be easily comprehended and appreciated by the masses. In this sense, like al-Muqtat!af, he
took a positive view of the popularization of knowledge; yet his position was an extreme
62 “al-Lughah al-!Arabı̄yah wa-najahuhā” [The Arabic Language and Its Success], al-Muqtat!af, 1881,
6:352–354. For a full discussion of this debate see Dagmar Glaß, Der Muqtat!af und seine Öffentlichkeit:
Aufklärung, Räsonnement und Meinungsstreit in der frühen arabischen Zeitschriftenkommunikation (Würzburg:
Ergon, 2004), pp. 437– 451.
63 “al-Lughah al-!Arabı̄yah wa-najahuhā.” See also Glaß, Der Muqtat!af und seine Öffentlichkeit, pp. 437– 451.
64 All in all, ten reactions were published between 1881 and 1882 in the section on “Debates and Views,”
including responses from such well-known literary critics as Khalil al-Yāzijı̄ (the youngest son of Nās!ı̄f) and
As!ad Dāghir, from the Damascus Literary Society, and from several anonymous commentators. See Khalil
al-Yāzijı̄, al-Muqtat!af, 1881, 6:404 – 405; al-Mumkin, ibid., pp. 494 – 496; As!ad Dāghir, ibid., pp. 551–560;
al-Mumkin, ibid., pp. 618 – 621; and al-Jam!ı̄yah al-adabı̄yah fı̄ Dimashq, ibid., pp. 694 – 697. See also Glaß, Der
Muqtat!af und seine Öffentlichkeit, pp. 437– 451.

version of their own populist agenda in that it prioritized social over geographical
inclusiveness.
Perhaps for this reason, his suggestions elicited a strong reaction. As!ad Da" ghir, a major
literary critic, referred to him as “the Impossible” (al-mustah! ı̄l) on account of his “infea-
sible and impractical ideas.” Da" ghir pointed out that any specific spoken dialect had a
much narrower geographical appeal than the classical lingua franca: he noted, for
instance, that when he traveled abroad people understood his explanations of religious and
historical subjects much more easily when they were presented in classical rather than
colloquial Arabic. The Damascus Literary Society (al-Jam!ı̄yah al-adabı̄yah al-
Dimashqı̄yah) felt much the same way. Almost all of the contributors to the debate pointed
to the cultural heritage of the Arabs, the united character of literary Arabic, and the
importance of preserving its classical identity as the language of Islam.65
Their anxieties must have been confirmed by the fact that many foreigners were also
promoting the colloquial option. The American Willard Fiske (1831–1904), for instance,
proposed moving to the Latin alphabet as part of a strategy of popularizing a standardized form
of colloquial Egyptian Arabic, while Lord Dufferin, the British commissioner in Egypt after
the invasion, felt that the education of the masses in Egypt was destined to fail so long as
schools insisted on teaching in the language of the Qur’ān instead of the ordinary speech of the
people.66 More junior British colonial officials also supported the colloquial variant. William
Willcocks (1856 –1932), an irrigation engineer in the employ of the Egyptian government, for
instance, was a tireless champion. In 1892 he presented a paper entitled “Why Do the
Egyptians No Longer Have the Power of Invention?” in which he argued that progress would
never be achieved in Egypt so long as it continued to use an immutable literary language. Only
by replacing classical with colloquial Arabic, he insisted, would Egyptians be able to recover
the “power of invention” and begin to advance in the sciences. (Perhaps not coincidentally, he
also regarded colloquial Egyptian as the key to a Christianized Egypt; he would later translate
the New Testament and the “Teachings of Christ” into colloquial Egyptian Arabic.) Willcocks
also espoused a theory of the Punic origins of Egyptian Arabic—a “language of a people with
vast business and commercial undertakings [and] of sailors and sea faring men accustomed to
quick words which carried far and had to be promptly acted on.” Thus Willcocks lamented the
“infinite loss of all business qualifications in the Egyptian nation” and the “squandering [of ]
its national wealth at the bidding of dreamy pedants and professors of one language for its own
65 As!ad Dāghir, al-Muqtat!af, 1881, 6:551–560. Over the coming years, al-Muqtat!af, like many other
scientific and literary journals of the time, would return to this debate frequently. In 1887, for instance, the editors
addressed the problem of reforming Arabic grammar and script. See Ni!mah Shadı̄d Yāfith, “Najāh al-!Arab bi
tahsı̄n lughatihim” [The Success of the Arabs with the Reform of Their Language], al-Muqtat!af, 1887, 12:12–16;
As!ad Dāghir, ibid., pp. 77– 83; Ya!qūb S! arrūf and Fāris Nimr, ibid., pp. 224 –231, 298 –230; “Tarı̄qah jadı̄dah
li-kitāb al-!Arabı̄ bi-h! urūf ifranjı̄yah” [A New Way of Writing Arabic with Foreign Characters], ibid., 1888,
13:245–248; and Gully, “Arabic Linguistic Issues and Controversies” (cit. n. 49), pp. 99 –100. Other journals of
the time, including Jirjı̄ Zaydān’s al-Hilāl and !Abd Allāh al-Nadı̄m’s al-"Ustādh, carried similar debates. See
Rāshad H ! amzāwı̄, L’Academie de Langue Arabe du Caire (cit. n. 60), p. 34, on al-"Ustādh. Indeed, Nadı̄m
claimed in al-"Ustādh that the colloquial—which he utilized frequently in dialogue form—was preferable to the
introduction of foreign terms.
66 Fiske had composed An Egyptian Alphabet for the Egyptian People in 1897; it later appeared in Arabic as
Agrûmyja Mas!ry maktûba bil lisân el Mas!ry, we ma!ha amsila (Florence: Mat!ba!et Landy, 1904). He also
published Kilmât !Araby merattibe !ala h! asab tartyb alifbê, ma! agrûmyje muh! tas!ara [Alphabetical List of
Arabic Words and Exercises in Reading] (Florence: Mat!ba!et Landy, 1893) and An Egyptian Post Office List in
the Egyptian Language (Cairo, 1898). For Lord Dufferin’s views see Gully, “Arabic Linguistic Issues and
Controversies,” p. 87. For further debates in al-Muqtat!af see Glaß, Der Muqtat!af und seine Öffentlichkeit (cit.
n. 62), pp. 453– 477.

sake.”67 John Seldon Willmore (1856 –1932), a British colonial official who had served for a
time in the native courts of appeal in Cairo, similarly argued in favor of a new standardized
colloquial language, written in a Latin script. (Willmore used his experiences in court to bolster
his argument: he pointed out that testimonies given in colloquial Arabic were recorded in the
literary form, often to the detriment of the testifiers and judges alike.)68
No doubt precisely because so many of these foreigners were involved in British
colonial rule, their suggestions came in for fierce criticism. Jirjı̄ Zaydān pointed out that
they would fragment the Arab world and that they ignored the flexibility and adaptability
of classical Arabic, which was anyway closer to the colloquial form than its detractors
suggested. He also made the point that popularization should not preclude a specialized
vocabulary, especially in the sciences. S! arrūf similarly countered Fiske’s arguments in the
pages of al-Muqtat!af in 1897. Others, including As!ad Dāghir and the neoclassicist
literary critic Ibrāhı̄m al-Yāzijı̄, criticized Willmore and the British in general for serving
their own interests and for attempting to carry out an “assault on [the Islamic] religion.”
(al-Yāzijı̄, in his journal al-D ! iyā", even accused the British of putting pressure on the
Egyptian Ministry of Education to reform the script.)69
There was nevertheless widespread agreement, among all concerned, that the written
language needed to be simplified and that some new and concise style should be promoted.
Nor did hostility toward the British occupation in any way curb the influence of British
thinkers on this debate. On the contrary, Herbert Spencer’s writings on language in
particular were translated and studied closely. Jabr D ! ūmit! borrowed his argument about
the need for a “principle of economy applied to words.” (“Regarding language as an
apparatus of symbols for the conveyance of thought,” Spencer had written, “we may say
that, as in a mechanical apparatus, the more simple and better arranged its parts, the
greater will be the effect produced.”) In 1896 D ! ūmit! published an annotated translation of
Spencer’s Philosophy of Language (as Falsafat al-balāghah). When Spencer praised
Emerson’s use of the compound metaphor, for instance, D ! ūmit! backed this up by referring
to the effectiveness of similes in Ghazālı̄’s "Ih! yā" !ulūm al-dı̄n; he also paralleled
67 He presented the speech at the Ezbekiyya Club in Arabic as “Limā lam tūjad quwwat al-ikhtirā! ladā
al-Mis!riyyı̄n.” Willcocks also worked for a while as the manager of the Cairo Water Company. For the New
Testament translations see al-"Arba! bashāyı̄n bi-al-lughah al-Mis!rı̄yah (Cairo: Matba!at al-Nı̄l al-Ması̄hı̄yah,
1924), later published as The New Testament in Egyptian (Cairo: Nile Mission Press, 1932); on the “Teachings
of Christ” see Aqwāl wa a!māl sayidinā al-Ması̄h! (Cairo: Matba!at al-Nı̄l al-Ması̄hı̄yah, 1922). For his view on
the Punic origins of Egyptian Arabic see Sir William Willcocks, Syria, Egypt, North Africa, and Malta Speak
Punic, Not Arabic (Cairo: Imprimerie de l’Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale, 1926). See Samah Selim,
The Novel and the Rural Imaginary (New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004), p. 38, for similar critiques made
earlier by the German Orientalist Wilhelm Sebta.
68 Willmore had served in various posts, including in Macedonia, before being appointed to the Committee of
Judicial Reform in Egypt. In 1901 he published The Spoken Arabic of Egypt (London: D. Nutt, 1901), where he
laid out many of his proposals regarding the use of colloquial Arabic in Egypt. For debates in al-Muqtat!af on
the Latinization of Arabic script see Glaß, Der Muqtat!af und seine Öffentlichkeit (cit. n. 62), pp. 479 –504.
69 See Gully, “Arabic Linguistic Issues and Controversies” (cit. n. 49), pp. 89 –92. The politics of language
in state schools proved a pervasive theme for critics throughout much of the early twentieth century. In 1936 Zakı̄
Mubārak, for instance, wrote a scathing critique of the pervasiveness of English- and French-language instruc-
tion in Egyptian universities of the time. He also countered the argument that the use of English and French
science textbooks in universities and medical schools was justified because the scientific terminology in them
was derived from or based in those languages. As these terms were themselves derived from Greek or Latin, he
pointed out, there was no reason why they should not be similarly Arabacized so as to make it possible to teach
using Arabic textbooks. See Zakı̄ Mubārak, al-Lughah wa-al-dı̄n wa-al-taqālı̄d [Language, Religion, and
Imitation] (Cairo: Mat!ba!at !Isá al-Bābı̄ al-H
! alabı̄, 1936), p. 15; see also Giora Eliraz, “Tradition and Change:
Egyptian Intellectuals and Linguistic Reform, 1919 –1930,” Asian and African Studies, 1986, 20:233–262, esp.
p. 250.

Spencer’s criticism of Pope and Bacon for “constantly employing forcible forms of
expression” with a criticism of the tiresome overuse of rhymed prose in Arabic. A
proponent of the idea that Arabic grammatical rules needed to be “released from imita-
tion” of the past to suit modern needs, D ! ūmit! composed a new grammar for use in
preparatory schools, tellingly entitled Fakk al-taqlı̄d [Emancipation from Imitation].70
Yet while many agreed on the need for a new prose style, there was no intellectual or
institutional consensus as to what it should look like. The new grammars produced by
mission school educators and British administrators did not persuade everyone.71 Indeed,
many—particularly those with a more traditional education—felt that the impulse to
simplify and popularize was leading to linguistic errors and corruptions. So what now
constituted “correct” Arabic?
The Nahd! awı̄ of the late nineteenth and the twentieth century had their own way of
judging what made for a “good translation.” Popular journals of the time commented on
the purported value and elegance of translated works—al-Muqtat!af, for instance, regularly
featured reports of new translations that were accompanied by a discussion of the relative
merits of the Arabic translation and the original. For them, good translations were
essentially reformist in nature: they upheld the basic architecture of the classical language
while nevertheless making its lexical and prose style more supple. Translators were
expected to manipulate language to accommodate the original while simultaneously
“forcing open the lexical and syntactical canons of classical Arabic.”72 Communicability,
elegance, and simplicity were prioritized, but so too were lexical restructuring and
conceptual inventiveness—preferences that were radically and increasingly counterposed
against those of previous classical models.
Neoclassical purists, on the other hand, bemoaned the assault on the forms and rules of
the classical language that they found in the press and made much of the linguistic
incompetence of journalists (and bureaucrats). In 1901, for instance, Ibrāhı̄m al-Yāzijı̄
published Lughat al-jarā"id [The Language of the Press], a scathing critique of his
contemporaries’ grammatical errors, malapropisms, solecisms, stylistic infelicities, and
other errors.73 Among al-Yāzijı̄’s complaints was the ubiquitous appearance of newly and
(according to him) improperly coined terms: “We continue nevertheless to see in our
journals terms which constitute an anomaly in the language we have inherited. They are
used where they ought not to be or they are incorrectly employed in such a manner that
they result in a kind of deformed expression. … Many of the terms appear frequently in
70 Jabr D ! ūmit!, Fakk al-taqlı̄d (Beirut: al-Mat!ba!ah al-Adabı̄yah, 1908); and Herbert Spencer, The Philosophy
of Style (Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 1892), p. 3.
71
The criticism that met Ah! mad Fāris Shidyāq’s Ghunyat al-t!ālib wa munyat al-rāghib has already been
noted; see note 24, above.
72 Samah Selim, “The Nahda, Popular Fiction, and the Politics of Translation,” MIT-EJMES, 2004, 4:71–90,
on pp. 84 – 85.
73 Ibrāhı̄m al-Yāzijı̄, Lughat al-jarā"id (Mis !r: !Alı̄ Mah! mūd al-H
! at!!tāb, 1901). This book—and the articles,
published in his journal al-Diyā", that preceded the bound collection—received considerable attention from other
writers. In 1899 !Abd al-Rahmān Salām published Daf! al-awhām (Beirut: al-Mat!ba!ah al-Adabı̄yah), which
attacked what he saw as the weakness of al-Yāzijı̄’s examples. Ah! mad Fāris al-Shidyāq also frequently attacked
al-Yāzijı̄’s claims in the press. See Gully, “Arabic Linguistic Issues and Controversies” (cit. n. 49), pp. 109 –115;
Chejne, Arabic Language (cit. n. 24), pp. 135–137; and Ant!unyus Shiblı̄, al-Shidyāq wa-al-Yāzijı̄: Munāqisha
!ilmı̄yah adabı̄yah sanat 1871 bayna al-Shaykhayn Fāris al-Shidyāq wa Ibrāhı̄m al-Yāzijı̄ (Juniya: Mat!ba!at
al-Mursalı̄n al-Lubnānı̄yı̄n, 1950). It should be noted that al-Yāzijı̄ also covered linguistic errors in the writings
of the ancients. Other examples of this genre include Rashı̄d Shāhı̄n !At!ı̄yah’s al-Dalı̄l ilā murādif al-!āmmı̄
wa-al-dakhı̄l (Beirut: Mat!ba!at al- Fawā!id, 1898). For more on criticisms of the language of clerks in
government positions (lughat al-dawāwı̄n) see As!ad Dāghir, Tadhkı̄rat al-kātib (Mis!r: Mat!ba!at al-Muqtat!af
wa-al-Muqat!!tam, 1923), pp. 5– 6; and Gully, “Arabic Linguistic Issues and Controversies,” pp. 80 – 81, 104 –105.

these papers and require an entire dictionary [of their own].”74 For Yāzijı̄, as for others, the
authority of classical Arabic itself was under attack on all sides—from British colonial and
Turcophone officials, popularizing journalists, and colloquialist intellectuals alike.
SCIENCE STANDARDIZED
These debates all raised the ultimate question of who held authority over the language and
how it should be made uniform, or standardized. For the controversy over language
reform—which “renaissance” critics and stylists characterized as the essence of the
Nahd! ah movement itself—was, as Samah Selim has argued, above all “disciplinary” in
nature. Because translation provoked fundamental anxieties over textual or discursive
authenticity and authority—and represented “a potentially unregulated source of cultural
and linguistic transfer” or “contamination”—reformists and purists alike began to call for
greater linguistic supervision and standardization. (Some even advocated for such critical
attention as a kind of “government for literature” that would protect it against anarchy and
attend to its proper regulation.)75 Hence it was not long before institutions emerged in the
Arabic-speaking provinces of the empire, as elsewhere, that were intended explicitly to
coordinate and unify elite philological authority. Many of them were modeled on Euro-
pean institutions, particularly the Académie Française. As early as 1881, al-Muqtat!af had
suggested that a body of scholars should organize an Arabic academy to oversee the
reform and standardization of Arabic prose. Many others, including !Abd Allāh Nadı̄m
and Jirjı̄ Zaydān, made similar pleas.76 By the turn of the century, both purists and
pragmatists agreed on the need to set up such bodies to help sort out the prevailing
linguistic disagreements.
Under the British, the initial results were not promising. Three efforts to establish
language academies failed in Cairo alone between 1892 and the end of World War I.77 But
the situation changed with the establishment of nominally independent monarchies after
1918. The division of the region by the British and French at Versailles resurrected the
earlier fear in the minds of many that Arabic itself would undergo a similar fragmentation,
and this anxiety made standardization seem even more urgent. Institutions founded during
the era of nation-state formation in the Middle East were early examples of government
initiative: they were designed to exert state jurisdiction over the language question as part
of a claim to sovereignty by newly established monarchs and as assertions of regional
power within the broader Arab world as well. The 1919 Arabic Academy in Damascus
(al-Majma! al-!ilmı̄ al-!Arabı̄) was subsidized by King Fays!al, while the 1932 Royal
74 al-Yāzijı̄, Lughat al-jarā"id, p. 3; Gully, “Arabic Linguistic Issues and Controversies,” p. 82; and Rāshad
H! amzāwı̄, L’Academie de Langue Arabe du Caire (cit. n. 60), p. 35.

75 Selim, “Nahda, Popular Fiction, and the Politics of Translation” (cit. n. 72), pp. 85, 86 (citing H ! asan
al-Sharı̄f ).
76 On pleas for the founding of an Arabic academy to oversee reforms see Rāshad H ! amzāwı̄, L’Academie de
Langue Arabe du Caire (cit. n. 60), pp. 34 – 44. Mans!ūr Fahmı̄, the first secretary of the Royal Academy of Cairo,
for instance, had early on described the Académie Française as a model for the rest of the world, and the Cairo
academy’s constitution was strongly inspired by that of the Académie Française: ibid., pp. 54 –57.
77 A short-lived Arabic academy was formed in Cairo as early as 1892, under the directorship of Muh ! ammad
Tawfı̄q al-Bakrı̄. In 1907 scholars at Dār al-!ulūm made a similar effort. See Rashād H ! amzāwı̄, L’Academie de
Langue Arabe du Caire, p. 44; and Chejne, Arabic Language (cit. n. 24), p. 104. An attempt to organize a more
effective academy was made in 1917 when a group of scholars—including Father Anastās Mārı̄ al-Karmalı̄,
!Abd Allāh al-Bustānı̄, and !Abd al-Qādir al-Maghribı̄—met to discuss the idea. It failed in the end owing to
internecine debates and a lack of funding: ibid., pp. 104, 133. Yet another effort, in 1922, met much the same
fate: ibid., p. 104.

Academy of Cairo was created by King Fu"ād I and placed under the administration of
the Ministry of Education.78 No doubt the specter of the post-1919 Turkish reforms under
Atatürk also played a role: there, after all, was another example of a state-led project that
sought, among other things, to standardize, simplify, and “modernize” the language— but
these reforms were much more radical in nature than the interwar Arabic language
academies.79 In addition to providing similar government-initiated regulatory mechanisms
for language change, the Arabic academies also attempted to standardize translations and
to create specialized—and particularly scientific—vocabularies. However, their chances
of success were hindered by the circumstances of their formation and composition. This
was particularly true of the Royal Academy of Cairo.
When al-"Ahrām, a leading Egyptian newspaper, canvassed its readers in 1932 in a poll
asking who should be elected to the new academy, the favorites were all Egyptian and
included many modernizers. Yet Fu"ād I selected only three people from the list to the
first council of members, and his decision to choose a number of foreign Orientalists
caused enormous controversy.80 Another problem was the balance of backgrounds— both
in terms of political positions and in the new members’ attitudes to language change and
reform.81 Although all the members were loyal to the royal house, they differed strongly
among themselves on the language question.
Yet the Royal Academy of Cairo, much like the earlier Damascus one, was explicitly
designed to “revive and enhance” the language more generally and to unify and standard-
ize technical terminology in the sciences in particular. (It was also concerned with the
simplification of Arabic prose and grammar, particularly for use in the new schools.) Both
academies thus created committees to gather lexical material pertaining to the sciences
and arts and “the vocabulary of modern civilization and daily life.”82 But there was little
78 See Muh ! ammad Rashād H ! amzāwı̄, Majma! al-lughah al-!Arabı̄yah bi Dimashq (Tunis: Dār al-Turkı̄,
1988); Rashād H ! amzāwı̄, L’Académie Arabe de Damas (Leiden: Brill, 1965); and Chejne, Arabic Language, p.
112. In 1938 the Royal Academy of Cairo became known as the Fu"ād I Arabic Academy of Language; after
the revolution of 1952 it was known simply as the Arabic Academy of Language, or al-Majma! al-lughah
al-!Arabı̄yah. See al-Muqtat!af, 1930, 77:249 –255; and Chejne, Arabic Language, pp. 104 –105.
79 For more on this see Richard Hattemer, “Atatürk and the Reforms in Turkey as Reflected in the Egyptian
Press,” Journal of Islamic Studies, 1999, 11:21– 42.

80 Significantly, no Orientalists were listed among the twenty-three favorites mentioned in the poll. Fu"ād I,
however, largely ignored this. His decision to select Orientalists soon led to a series of highly politicized public
debates in the press. Moreover, an article published in the Times, which questioned the ability of Arabic—
described as a “dead language”—to deal with the vocabulary of modern science and civilization, created a
similar storm of dissent. (It was left, somewhat ironically, to Fu!ād S! arrūf, the son of Ya!qūb, to counter these
charges in the pages of the notoriously pro-British newspaper established by his father and Fāris Nimr,
al-Muqat!!tam. S! arrūf argued that Arabic had long been able to accommodate the dissemination of modern
science, and he cited both al-Muqtat!af and Ismā!ı̄l Maz! har’s recent translation of the Origin of Species as
evidence.)
81 The court was careful to balance the membership amongst those of varying attitudes to language change and
reform. Fearing that the academy could work as an effective second parliament— using the platform of language
reform to overthrow the monarchy—the government brought together a carefully coordinated mix of conser-
vatives and loyalists, Azharı̄ Shaykhs and university educators, and Arab nationalists and Orientalists. These
included the pro-court and pro-British civil servants Muh! ammad Tawfı̄q Rif!at Pasha and Mans!ūr Fahmı̄ and the
traditionally trained Azharı̄ Shaykhs Ah! mad al-Iskandarı̄ and Muh! ammad H ! usayn (who had, incidentally, also
been responsible for issuing a fatwa in favor of Fu"ād I, declaring the monarchy legitimate in Islam), as well as
Muh! ammad Kurd !Ali (the original director of the academy in Damascus), Father Anastās al-Karmalı̄ (the
founder of the Baghdad language journal Lughat al-!Arab), Fāris Nimr, !Abd al-Qādir al-Maghribı̄, H. A. R.
Gibb, and Louis Massignon.
82 Regarding the interest in simplification see, e.g., the Cairo academy’s Taysı̄r al-lughah al-!Arabı̄yah (Cairo:
al-Mat!ba!ah al-Amı̄rı̄yah, 1944). The Damascus academy created various committees, including bodies to address the
arts, science, vernacular dialects, neologisms, dictionaries, and general administration; see Rashād H ! amzāwı̄,
L’Académie Arabe de Damas (cit. n. 78), pp. 13–16. The committees of the Royal Academy of Cairo, on the other

consensus on the translation strategies to be employed, and a great deal of time was thus
spent on abstract discussions about the nature of linguistic forms rather than on the
creation of pragmatic or programmatic proposals.
All the accepted strategies for creating new terms were considered at length by the
various committees. The most important of these included the figurative semantic exten-
sion of existing words (al-wad! bi al-majāz), the derivation of new words through the
extension of triliteral root forms (ishtiqāq) or the use of compounded prefixes and suffixes
(nah! t), and the assimilation of foreign words or Arabicization (ta!rı̄b). The most contro-
versial and highly debated of these strategies was clearly the last.83 But here the Royal
Academy of Cairo differed markedly from the Damascus academy, which had, early on,
largely accepted the role of ta!rı̄b in the creation of scientific, technical, and other
terminology. The Cairo academy preferred to create new terminology either through the
resuscitation of archaic terms or through the metaphoric extension of existing triliteral root
words. Only in cases where these methods failed did they endorse the importation of
foreign words in the way that earlier neologizers, such as S! arrūf and Nimr, had recom-
mended. Thus the academy created a host of new scientific and technological terms: for
example, “sayyārah” (“automobile”) and “hātif ” (“telephone”) were coined through
derivation (ishtiqāq) and “miqyās al-h! arārah” (“thermometer”) through the use of com-
pounds (nah! t). Once again, the case of Turkey may have provided a point of compari-
son—and resistance. In contrast to the radical language reforms, such as the romanization
of the Turkish script, that Atatürk instituted in the late 1920s, the Cairo academy sought
to regulate the language through recourse to older and more established methods of
linguistic modification. Fears of radical political transformation through language change
motivated Fu"ād I in this regard (as they had in his choice of academy members more
generally). But this strategy did little to contribute to the effective creation of technical
vocabulary in the natural, physical, or social sciences, and the academy’s suggestions were
widely ignored.
The Cairo academy’s aversion to transliteration elicited scorn from those who felt it was
fighting a losing battle. Salāmah Mūsá (1887–1958), an influential science popularizer, radical
materialist, and socialist, mocked the academy’s penchant for creating clumsy alternatives to
established everyday terms for new technologies. “The nation needs useful books on the
subject of the "utūmūbı̄l, tilı̄fūn, and rādyūfūn and doesn’t need to be told that these are
actually called sayyārah, misrā, and midhyā!.” Indeed, Mūsá had even championed the idea
that Arabic scientific terminology was best rendered in Latin script. “It is now impossible to
use these words loosely,” he would later write, “for mere ornamental purposes in a style that
lacks completely all precision of description … [and] the exact meanings that they acquired in
the context of the sciences. … They must serve the needs of society, in close contact with
social evolution, or become useless.”84 Although not many went as far as Mūsá, he was not
hand, were concerned with finance, the physical sciences, biology, social science, belles-lettres, incorrect terms, and
the library. See Rashād H! amzāwı̄, L’Academie de Langue Arabe du Caire (cit. n. 60), pp. 126 –131.
83 See, e.g., Sa!ı̄d al-Karmi, “al-Lughah wa al-dākhil fı̄hā” [Language and Its Foreign Words], Majallat
al-majma! al-!ilmı̄, 1921, 5– 6:129 –137. For more on these various strategies see Stetkevych, Modern Arabic
Literary Language (cit. n. 44).
84 Eliraz, “Tradition and Change” (cit. n. 69), p. 254 (quoting Mūsá); Salāmah Mūsá, Tarbiyat Salāmah Mūsá,
trans. by L. O. Schuman as The Education of Salama Musa (Leiden: Brill, 1961), p. 80; and Mūsá, “al-Khat!!t
al-Lātı̄n li-al-lughah al-!Arabı̄yah” [Latin Script for the Arabic Language], al-Majallah al-jadı̄dah, 1935,
4:79 – 80. On the subject of language reform and modernization, Mūsá also published al-Balāghah al-!as!rı̄yah
wa-al-lughah al-!Arabı̄yah [Modern Rhetoric and the Arabic Language] (Mis!r: al-Mat!ba!ah al-!As!rı̄yah, 1950)
and al-Adab li-al sha!b [Literature for the People] (Mis!r: Mu"assasat al-Khānjı̄, 1961). Mūsá was a longtime
champion of the use of the colloquial in written Arabic as well.

alone in his views. Similarly critical was Darwin’s translator, Ismā!ı̄l Maz! har, who had also
been one of the more favorable advocates of the “Revolution in Turkey” under Atatürk’s
presidency–no doubt in part owing to the drastic language reforms promoted around that time.
Maz! har also wrote an article on the subject in his journal al-!Us!ūr in 1927, which Mūsá
republished in his journal al-Majallah al-jadı̄dah in 1931.85 In his Tajdı̄d al-!Arabı̄yah [The
Revival of Arabic], he criticized those members of the academy who held an overly conser-
vative approach to language change and those who failed to acknowledge that language was
a “living entity”—and this despite the fact that Maz! har himself had served the Cairo academy
intermittently in an advisory capacity.86
On the whole, the Royal Academy of Cairo failed to enforce any significant linguistic
change: it did not produce sufficient or, according to many, appropriate terminology for
the demands of the time and sometimes even provided competing definitions for the same
scientific or technical term. Just six years after its founding, Muh! ammad H ! usayn Haykal,
then Minister of Education, expressed his concern over its failure to influence the way in
which Arabic authors constructed new terminology in Arabic; the result was that they
continued to translate in an idiosyncratic and haphazard manner. Appealing for national
unity in linguistic matters, Haykal called on Arabic writers to adopt the recommendations
of the academies’ councils. Ism!aı̄l Maz! har would later similarly call for more effi-
cient—and representative— official regulation and suggested the issuing of a dustūr, or
constitutional regulation, for the use of Arabicized terms in particular.87
By the late 1950s, little had changed: what was now called the Academy of Arabic
Language had produced dozens of dictionaries and compiled scores of lists of new
technical terms in the arts and sciences, but it had achieved little control over their proper
or consistent usage. In the end, the government’s inclusion of linguistic purists—as part
of a more broadly political strategy—led to stalemate. No one could agree on the major
questions the academy had been set up to tackle. Nor could its authority be established by
fiat. For what the academy failed to realize was that language was as much a matter of
usage and convention as it was of standardization and elite decision making.
Outflanking the academy’s efforts was the impact of mass journalism, print capitalism,
and the changing forms and norms of expertise that had accompanied the erosion of the
traditional authority of the !ulamā". The !ulamā" themselves could not now simply be
replaced by officially appointed committee men, nor could the pace and direction of
linguistic change be determined by government mandate alone.
KNOWLEDGE IN MOTION
In his discussion of the “revival of Arabic,” Ismā!ı̄l Maz! har dealt extensively with the
problem of Arabicization. The school of thought that preferred to take, as he put it, the
85 Ismā!ı̄l Maz ! har, “Falsafat al-inqilāb al-Turkı̄yah al-h! adı̄thah” [The Philosophy of the Recent Turkish
Revolution], al-!Us!ūr, 1927, 1:113–132; for the reprint see al-Majallah al-jadı̄dah, 1931, 2:1212–1228. Maz! har
mentioned language only briefly in the article, but the entire piece centered on the importance of overcoming
customary imitation (taqlı̄d ) in the effort to transform the “mentality of the East,” as was demonstrated by
Atatürk’s reforms.
86 See Ismā!ı̄l Maz ! har, Tajdid al-!Arabı̄yah (al-Qāhirah: Maktabat al-Nahd! ah al-Mis!rı̄yah, 1950), pp. 7, 17.
Regarding Maz! har’s contributions to the work of the academy see Majma! al-Lughah al-!Arabı̄yah, Mah! ād! ir
al-jalsāt [Session Minutes], 1937, 5:60, 102; 1938, 6:173; 1948, 14:219 –226, 262–274; 1949, 15:159, 188,
205–206. He was not, however, officially elected to the academy until shortly before his death in 1962: ibid.,
1962, 28:12. My thanks to Ahmed Ragab for this information.
87 Chejne, Arabic Language (cit. n. 24), p. 106; and Maz ! har, Tajdı̄d al-!Arabı̄yah, pp. 7– 8.

“short route” by simply transliterating foreign scientific terminology wholesale into

Arabic was operating under the mistaken impression that the language of science was
universal. Maz! har countered that the language of botany and zoology was “universal” only
in the Indo-Germanic languages (al-lughāt al-indūjirmānı̄yah), not in the Semitic ones.
Such transliterations would not be universal but, on the contrary, entirely foreign to
Arabic. Why not then simply create a proper scientific language in Arabic, as the language
was certainly well equipped for the task?88
As Maz! har himself indicated, translators in practice—and against the assumptions of
many twentieth-century philosophers and proponents of science— contended with the fact
that there was no easily recognized “universal language” for science. It was precisely for
this reason that it was so difficult to establish consensus or to standardize translators’
choices through regulatory means. Indeed, by the time of his death in 1962, Maz! har felt
that his own hopes for a standard Arabic science vocabulary were far from being realized.
Attempts at standardization, as we have seen, had been beset by linguistic dilemmas,
political contestation, and social and cultural anxieties.
In these circumstances, few people in the Arab world could or did operate as though
there were in fact a universal lexicon of science. Many translators, like Maz! har, were well
aware of the claim, but they were also sensitive to science’s increasingly contentious
status as a Western import in the age of colonialism. Caught in their own culture wars,
they were in no position to treat the language of modern science as anything other than
highly contested, ambiguous, and often arbitrary. Rapid sociological change—and the
ongoing shift in knowledge communities and definitions—alongside the impact of impe-
rialism and the political fragmentation that came in its aftermath, led to an intense and
deeply political debate over the language question. Efforts to assess and standardize
terminology over time—whether through such institutional centers as the Damascus
academy and the Royal Academy of Language in Cairo or through highly politicized
debates in the press—failed to satisfy the requirements of the elite or even public opinion.
This essay has attempted to show the ways in which the gradual emergence of a new
scientific lexicon in Arabic also implied broader epistemic claims about the nature of
knowledge production and its proper representatives or practitioners. The terrain was an
increasingly fragmented one, and the choice of strategies for translating scientific termi-
nology was inseparable from contemporary concerns with literary, cultural, or religious
tradition and with anxieties over foreign borrowings and impositions. Science had its
geopolitics and its audiences, and translators could scarcely ignore either. This affected
the ways in which transnational and extralocal concepts were named and explained and
constrained the ways in which new scientific concepts—such as “evolution” or “spe-
cies”—were themselves understood. For historians of science the moral is clear: a focus
on translation sheds light not only on the transnational dimensions of knowledge produc-
tion but also on the very active and critical role of language itself in shaping the ways in
which scientific ideas traveled. Here lies a major cause of the transformations and
compromises entailed as scientific knowledge travels across borders.
88 Maz! har, Tajdı̄d al-!Arabı̄yah, pp. 10 –13.


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http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/595767 .

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I N AN ARTICLE on “language and composition,” the late nineteenth-century Egyptian

Isis, 2008, 99:701–730

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cago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1939), pp. 265, 269.

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In fact, the practice of translation involves often very substantial epistemological,

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NEW KNOWLEDGE COMMUNITIES

transmission or graded transformation,” a resuscitated or archaic term), “tat!awwur” (“progression,” a derived

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Univ. Wisconsin Press, 1985).

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SCIENCE, KNOWLEDGE, AND WISDOM

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1984, 43:223–230, esp. pp. 225–226.

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THE LEXICON OF SCIENCE

and Present, 2007, 196:173–214.

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noted enthusiastically in 1883 when they inaugurated a column, entitled “Mu!arrabāt,” or

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32 Sawaie, “Rifā!ah Rāfi! al-T

341–346, 401– 402, 467– 469.

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latter as “"alif-lām-jı̄m-kasra-nūn-shaddah”—the same spelling for the Arabic “jinn,”

THE POLITICS OF NEOLOGISMS

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wa-ajwibatuhā,” al-Muqtat!af, 1885, 10:145–146.

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“al-"Amı̄rah al-Mis!rı̄yah” [The Egyptian Princess], ibid., 1899, 23:66.

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THE PEOPLE’S PROSE, THE PEOPLE’S SCIENCE

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H! amzāwı̄, L’Academie de Langue Arabe du Caire (cit. n. 60), p. 35.

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Press,” Journal of Islamic Studies, 1999, 11:21– 42.

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“short route” by simply transliterating foreign scientific terminology wholesale into

88 Maz! har, Tajdı̄d al-!Arabı̄yah, pp. 10 –13.

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