Shaden M. Tageldin, Disarming Words Empire and the Seductions of Translation in Egypt, UCP 2011

Disarming Words

Empire and the Seductions of Translation in Egypt
Shaden M. Tageldin 

Univesity of California Press 2011

[Thanks to Mohammed Lafi for the reference]

In a book that radically challenges conventional understandings of the dynamics of cultural imperialism, Shaden M. Tageldin unravels the complex relationship between translation and seduction in the colonial context. She examines the afterlives of two occupations of Egypt—by the French in 1798 and by the British in 1882—in a rich comparative analysis of acts, fictions, and theories that translated the European into the Egyptian, the Arab, or the Muslim. Tageldin finds that the encounter with European Orientalism often invited colonized Egyptians to imagine themselves “equal” to or even “masters” of their colonizers, and thus, paradoxically, to translate themselves toward—virtually into—the European. Moving beyond the domination/resistance binary that continues to govern understandings of colonial history, Tageldin redefines cultural imperialism as a politics of translational seduction, a politics that lures the colonized to seek power through empire rather than against it, thereby repressing its inherent inequalities. She considers, among others, the interplays of Napoleon and Hasan al-'Attar; Rifa'a al-Tahtawi, Silvestre de Sacy, and Joseph Agoub; Cromer, 'Ali Mubarak, Muhammad al-Siba'i, and Thomas Carlyle; Ibrahim 'Abd al-Qadir al-Mazini, Muhammad Husayn Haykal, and Ahmad Hasan al-Zayyat; and Salama Musa, G. Elliot Smith, Naguib Mahfouz, and Lawrence Durrell. In conversation with new work on translation, comparative literature, imperialism, and nationalism, Tageldin engages postcolonial and poststructuralist theorists from Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, and Gayatri Spivak to Jean Baudrillard, Walter Benjamin, Emile Benveniste, and Jacques Derrida.

Contents 

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Note on Translation and Transliteration

Overture | Cultural Imperialism Revisited: Translation, Seduction, Power
1. The Irresistible Lure of Recognition
2. The Dismantling I: Al-'Attar's Antihistory of the French in Egypt, 1798–1799
3. Suspect Kinships: Al-Tahtawi and the Theory of French-Arabic "Equivalence," 1827–1834
4. Surrogate Seed, World-Tree: Mubarak, al-Siba'i, and the Translations of "Islam" in British Egypt, 1882–1912
5. Order, Origin, and the Elusive Sovereign: Post-1919 Nation Formation and the Imperial Urge toward Translatability
6. English Lessons: The Illicit Copulations of Egypt at Empire's End
Coda | History, Affect, and the Problem of the Universal

Notes
Index

More about the book from the publisher's website: http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520265523 .

Greek Thought, Arabic Culture, Dimitri Gutas, Routledge 1998

Greek Thought, Arabic Culture

The Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement in Baghdad and Early 'Abbasaid Society (2nd-4th/5th-10th c.) (Arabic Thought and Culture),  Dimitri Gutas, Routledge 1998

From the middle of the eighth century to the tenth century, almost all non-literary and non-historical secular Greek books, including such diverse topics as astrology, alchemy, physics, botany and medicine, that were not available throughout the eastern Byzantine Empire and the Near East, were translated into Arabic.
Greek Thought, Arabic Culture explores the major social, political and ideological factors that occasioned the unprecedented translation movement from Greek into Arabic in Baghdad, the newly founded capital of the Arab dynasty of the 'Abbasids', during the first two centuries of their rule. Dimitri Gutas draws upon the preceding historical and philological scholarship in Greco-Arabic studies and the study of medieval translations of secular Greek works into Arabic and analyses the social and historical reasons for this phenomenon.
Dimitri Gutas provides a stimulating, erudite and well-documented survey of this key movement in the transmission of ancient Greek culture to the Middle Ages.

Table of contents

Title Page                                                                    iii

Contents                                                                      ix

Preface                                                                                    xiii

Note on Dates, Names, and Transliteration                xvii

Introduction                                                                1

Part I - Translation and Empire                                   9

1 - The Background of the Translation Movement     11

2 - Al-ManṢŪr                                                            28

3 - Al-MahdĪ and His Sons                                        61

4 - Al-Ma’mŪn                                                           75

Part II - Translation and Society                                 105

5 - Translation in the Service of Applied and Theoretical Knowledge107

6 - Patrons, Translators, Translations                          121

7 - Translation and History                                         151

Epilogue187

Appendix: Greek Works Translated into Arabic        193

Bibliography and Abbreviations                                 197

Chronological Bibliography of Studies on the Significance of the Translation Movement for Islamic Civilization                                                        212

General Index                                                              216

Index of Manuscripts                                                  230

The Arabic Islamic Consummatum in Translation and Cultural Dialoge: From Baghdad to Toledo by Ahmed Etman, 2013 (posthumously)

It seems to me that the late Ahmed Etman has left us a very powerful message. You have to read only the title of the book written by him and published posthumously. The book is entitled " The Arabic Islamic Consummatum in Translation and Cultural Dialoge: From Baghdad to Toledo" and published by the Egyptian General Writers` Association 2013.  I'm eager to know what did Ahmed Etman state about the translation movement between Greek, Latin and Arabic.

I don't have a copy of it now to give the table of contents, but I will seek to have it of course.
[Thanks to Belal Sobhy of the reference]