Overview

This innovative study compares nineteenth-century Arabic translations of the Bible to determine how it emerged as a foundational text of Arab modernity. Bible translation gained global traction through the work of Anglophone Christian missionaries, who made an attempt at synchronising translated Bibles in world languages by laying down strict guidelines and supervising the processes of translation and dissemination. By engaging with the intellectual beginnings of two local translators, Butrus al-Bustani (1819 1883) and Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq (1804 1887), as well as their subsequent contributions to Arabic language and literature, this book questions to what extent they complied with the missionaries' strategy in practice. Based on documents from the archives of Bible societies that tell the story of two key nahda versions of the text, we come to understand how colonial pressure was secondary to the process of incorporating the Bible into the nahda project of rethinking Arabic.

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9781474467162

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In this account of Arabic Bible translations in the nineteenth century, Rana Issa tells a fascinating story of intersectarian competition and religious fervor, in a re-appraisal of the narratives about their impact beyond the immediate realm of language and literature that highlights the role of translators like al-Bustani and Shidyaq. --Kees Versteegh, Emeritus Professor of Arabic and Islam, University of Nijmegen

Author Information

Rana Issa is an Assistant Professor of Translation Studies at the American University of Beirut. Her work has been published in a number of key journals, including the Journal of Semitic Studies and Journal of Contemporary Levant, with another article in the Journal of Arabic Literature forthcoming in 2019. She had also previously published with Edinburgh UP as a contributor to Yonatan Mendel & Abeer AlNajjar's volume Language, Politics and Society in the Middle East: Essays in Honour of Yasir Suleiman (2018) and her work has been included in Ewan Stein & Elizabeth Kendall's Twenty First Century Jihad: Law, Society and Military Action (IB Tauris, 2015). This is her first monograph

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