Reading Rifāʿa al-Ṭahṭāwī’s 1850s Arabic translation (published 1867) of François Fénelon’s Les Aventures de Télémaque with and against the realist impulses of nineteenth-century British and French literary comparatism, this essay posits al-Ṭahṭāwī’s translation as a transformational moment in the reception of the “European” literary tradition in the Arab-Islamic world. Arguing that the ancient Greek gods who populate Fénelon’s 1699 sequel to Homer’s Odyssey are analogous to Muslim jinn—spirits of smokeless fire understood to be real—al-Ṭahṭāwī rewrites as Islamized “truth” what Muslims long had dismissed as pagan “fiction,” thereby adroitly negotiating a crisis of comparison and mediating an epistemic sea change in modern Arabic fiction. Indeed, the “untrue” gods of the Greeks (and of French literature) turn not just real but historically referential: invoking the real-historical world of 1850s Egypt, al-Ṭahṭāwī’s translation exhorts an unjust Ottoman-Egyptian sovereign to heed lessons that Fénelon’s original once had addressed to French royalty. Catherine Gallagher has defined the fictionality specific to the modern European novel as neither pure deceit nor pure truth. How might al-Ṭahṭāwī’s rehabilitation of the mythological as the supernatural/historical “real”—and of the idolatrous as secular/sacred “truth”—invite us to rethink novelistic fictionality in trans-Mediterranean terms, across European and Arab-Islamic contexts?
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Bakhtin M. M. Holquist Michael Emerson Caryl & Holquist Michael “Epic and Novel: Toward a Methodology for the Study of the Novel” The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M[ikhail]. M. Bakhtin 1981 Austin University of Texas Press 3 40
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Chilton Leslie A. Smollett Tobias Brack O. M. Jr Introduction to The Adventures of Telemachus, the Son of Ulysses, by François de Salignac de La Mothe-Fénelon 1997 Athens University of Georgia Press xvii xxxv
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Dakhlia Jocelyne Lingua franca: Histoire d’une langue métisse en Méditerranée 2008 Arles Actes Sud
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Dakhlia Jocelyne Mudimbe-Boyi Elisabeth “Lingua Franca: A Non-Memory” Remembering Africa 2002 Portsmouth, NH Heinemann 234 44
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al-Damīrī [Muḥammad ibn Mūsā ibn ʿĪsā] Kamāl al-Dīn Kitāb Ḥayāt al-Ḥayawān al-Kubrā 773 A.H. [1372] Cairo Maṭbaʿat Muḥammad Shāhīn 2 vols 1278 a.h. [1861/1862]
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“demon, n.1” Oxford English Dictionary 1989 Accessed March 14, 2012 2nd ed. http://www.oed.com.ezp1.lib.umn.edu/view/Entry/49788
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Fénelon [François de Salignac de La Mothe-] Le Brun Jacques Les Aventures de Télémaque, [fils d’Ulysse, ou Suite du quatrième livre de l’Odyssée d’Homère] 1995 Paris Gallimard 1699
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Fulford Tim Makdisi Saree & Nussbaum Felicity “Coleridge and the Oriental Tale” The Arabian Nights in Historical Context: Between East and West 2008 Oxford Oxford University Press 213 234
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Gallagher Catherine Moretti Franco “The Rise of Fictionality” The Novel 2006 1 Princeton Princeton University Press 336 363
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Gran Peter Boroujerdi Mehrzad “Al-Tahtawi’s Trip to Paris in Light of Recent Historical Analysis: Travel Literature or a Mirror for Princes?” Mirror for the Muslim Prince: Islam and the Theory of Statecraft 2013 Syracuse, NY Syracuse University Press 190 217
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Johnson Rebecca Carol , Maxwell Richard & Trumpener Katie “The Arabian Nights, Arab-European Literary Influence, and the Lineages of the Novel” mlq 2007 68 No. 2 243 278
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Kilito Abdelfattah Hassan Waïl S. Thou Shalt Not Speak My Language 2008 Syracuse, NY Syracuse University Press
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Kīlīṭū ʿAbd al-Fattāḥ Lan Tatakallam Lughatī 2002 Beirut Dār al-Ṭalīʿa
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Lukács Georg Bostock Anna The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature 1971 Cambridge, MA MIT Press 1920
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MacDonald D. B. , Massé H. & Boratav P. N. et al. “Djinn” Encyclopaedia of Islam Accessed March 15, 2012 2nd ed. http://referenceworks.brillonline.com/entries/encyclopaedia-of-islam-2/djinn-com_0191
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Posnett Hutcheson Macaulay Comparative Literature 1886 London Kegan Paul, Trench, and Co.
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Rastegar Kamran Literary Modernity between the Middle East and Europe: Textual Transactions in Nineteenth-Century Arabic, English, and Persian Literatures 2007 London Routledge
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Reinaud [Joseph Toussaint] “De la gazette arabe et turque imprimée en Égypte” Nouveau journal asiatique 1831 8 238 249
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Reynolds Gabriel Said “Angels” Encyclopaedia of Islam Accessed March 15, 2012 3rd ed. http://referenceworks.brillonline.com/entries/encyclopaedia-of-islam-3/angels-com_23204
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Riley Patrick Riley Patrick Introduction to Telemachus, Son of Ulysses, by François de Fénelon 1994 Cambridge Cambridge University Press xiii xxxviii
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Tageldin Shaden M Disarming Words: Empire and the Seductions of Translation in Egypt 2011 Berkeley University of California Press
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Tageldin Shaden M “One Comparative Literature? ‘Birth’ of a Discipline in French-Egyptian Translation, 1810-1834” Comparative Literature Studies 2010 47 No. 4 417 445
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al-Ṭahṭāwī Rifāʿa Rāfiʿ Newman Daniel L. An Imam in Paris: Account of a Stay in France by an Egyptian Cleric (1826-1831) 2004 London Saqi
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al-Ṭahṭāwī Rifāʿa Rāfiʿ “Muqaddimat al-Mutarjim” [1867] Preface to al-Ṭahṭāwī, trans., Mawāqiʿ al-Aflāk fī Waqāʾiʿ Tilīmāk, Tarjama [sic] min al-Faransāwiyya al-ʿAllāma al-Fāḍil wa-l-Adīb al-Bāriʿ Rifāʿa Rāfiʿ al-Ṭahṭāwī 2002 2nd ed. Cairo Dār al-Kutub wa-l-Wathāʾiq al-Qawmiyya 2 29 Facsimile of the first edition, with an introduction by Ṣalāḥ Faḍl. First published 1867 by al-Maṭbaʿa al-Sūriyya (Beirut) in [al-Ṭahṭāwī], Rifāʿa Bik Badawī Rāfiʿ, trans. Mawāqiʿ al-Aflāk fī Waqāʾiʿ Tilīmāk, Tarjamahu min al-Faransāwiyya al-ʿAllāma al-Fāḍil wa-l-Adīb al-Bāriʿ Rifāʿa Bik Badawī Rāfiʿ—Nāẓir Qalam Tarjama wa Arbāb Qūmisyūn bi-Dīwān al-Madāris al-Miṣriyya
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1
Joseph T. Reinaud, “De la gazette arabe et turque imprimée en Égypte,” Nouveau journal asiatique 8 (1831): 241, 247-49; quotations from 248, 249.
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2
Ibid., 248.
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3
Hutcheson M. Posnett, Comparative Literature (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, and Co., 1886), 85; emphases mine.
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9
See Catherine Gallagher, “The Rise of Fictionality,” in The Novel, ed. Franco Moretti (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 1: 336-63; quotation from 340.
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11
Al-Ṭahṭāwī, “Muqaddimat al-Mutarjim,” 4. As Peter Gran observes, the Sudan had lost power to the Nile Delta in the wake of Mamlūk competition and French occupation. So too had Upper Egypt, where al-Ṭahṭāwī was born and first educated. Yet al-Ṭahṭāwī primitivizes the Sudan while reasserting the “civilization” of Upper Egypt. Indeed, Gran argues, his Takhlīṣ—itself a mirror for princes—invokes not just French but also Upper Egyptian republicanisms to uphold the right of peoples to overthrow oppressive rulers. See Peter Gran, “Al-Tahtawi’s Trip to Paris in Light of Recent Historical Analysis: Travel Literature or a Mirror for Princes?” in Mirror for the Muslim Prince: Islam and the Theory of Statecraft, ed. Mehrzad Boroujerdi (Syracuse, ny: Syracuse University Press, 2013), 190-217, esp. 193-97, 213-15, 217. Were we to reinterpret al-Ṭahṭāwī’s Mawāqiʿ in regionalist terms, we might say that it too affirms Upper Egyptian exemplarity via the looking-glass of France, its equal in political “civilization.”
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15
M. M. Bakhtin, “Epic and Novel: Toward a Methodology for the Study of the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M [ikhail]. M. Bakhtin, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 3-40; quotation from 33.
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17
Al-Ṭahṭāwī, “Muqaddimat al-Mutarjim,” 24. See [Muḥammad ibn Mūsā ibn ʿĪsā] Kamāl al-Dīn al-Damīrī, “al-Siʿlāt,” in Kitāb Ḥayāt al-Ḥayawān al-Kubrā, ([Cairo]: Maṭbaʿat Muḥammad Shāhīn, 773 a.h. [1372]; 1278 a.h. [1861/1862]), 2:27-30; quotations from 2:27-28.
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20
Al-Ṭahṭāwī, “Muqaddimat al-Mutarjim,” 24. See al-Damīrī, “al-Siʿlāt,” 2:28, 2:30. See also [Muḥammad ibn Mūsā ibn ʿĪsā] Kamāl al-Dīn al-Damīrī, “al-Jinn,” in Kitāb Ḥayāt al-Ḥayawān al-Kubrā, ([Cairo]: Maṭbaʿat Muḥammad Shāhīn, 773 a.h. [1372]; 1278 a.h. [1861/1862]), 1:272-300.
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23
Ibid, 25, 26.
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24
Ibid., 26-27.
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30
Ibid., 25.
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31
Ibid., 29.
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33
See Jocelyne Dakhlia, Lingua franca: Histoire d’une langue métisse en Méditerranée (Arles: Actes Sud, 2008), 27. See also Jocelyne Dakhlia, “Lingua Franca: A Non-Memory,” in Remembering Africa, ed. Elisabeth Mudimbe-Boyi (Portsmouth, nh: Heinemann, 2002), 234-44, esp. 235, 239.
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Reading Rifāʿa al-Ṭahṭāwī’s 1850s Arabic translation (published 1867) of François Fénelon’s Les Aventures de Télémaque with and against the realist impulses of nineteenth-century British and French literary comparatism, this essay posits al-Ṭahṭāwī’s translation as a transformational moment in the reception of the “European” literary tradition in the Arab-Islamic world. Arguing that the ancient Greek gods who populate Fénelon’s 1699 sequel to Homer’s Odyssey are analogous to Muslim jinn—spirits of smokeless fire understood to be real—al-Ṭahṭāwī rewrites as Islamized “truth” what Muslims long had dismissed as pagan “fiction,” thereby adroitly negotiating a crisis of comparison and mediating an epistemic sea change in modern Arabic fiction. Indeed, the “untrue” gods of the Greeks (and of French literature) turn not just real but historically referential: invoking the real-historical world of 1850s Egypt, al-Ṭahṭāwī’s translation exhorts an unjust Ottoman-Egyptian sovereign to heed lessons that Fénelon’s original once had addressed to French royalty. Catherine Gallagher has defined the fictionality specific to the modern European novel as neither pure deceit nor pure truth. How might al-Ṭahṭāwī’s rehabilitation of the mythological as the supernatural/historical “real”—and of the idolatrous as secular/sacred “truth”—invite us to rethink novelistic fictionality in trans-Mediterranean terms, across European and Arab-Islamic contexts?
| All Time | Past Year | Past 30 Days | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abstract Views | 644 | 145 | 4 |
| Full Text Views | 278 | 7 | 0 |
| PDF Views & Downloads | 102 | 20 | 0 |