The Translator

ISSN: 1355-6509 (Print) 1757-0409 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rtrn20

Ziad Elmarsafy, The Enlightenment Qur’an: the

politics of translation and the construction of
Islam

Tarek Shamma

To cite this article: Tarek Shamma (2016) Ziad Elmarsafy, The Enlightenment Qur’an: the
politics of translation and the construction of Islam, The Translator, 22:1, 98-102, DOI:
10.1080/13556509.2015.1028144

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13556509.2015.1028144

Published online: 11 May 2015.

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 98 Book reviews

which ran through each stage of this study. This is a book that merits the serious attention of
anyone interested in Arab sociocultural history and politics as well as theatre and literary
translation.

Abdel Wahab Khalifa

Manchester Metropolitan University, UK
a.khalifa@mmu.ac.uk
© 2015, Abdel Wahab Khalifa
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13556509.2015.1046039

The Enlightenment Qur’an: the politics of translation and the construction of Islam, by
Ziad Elmarsafy, Oxford, Oneworld Publications, 2009, 288 pp., £19.99 (paperback), ISBN
978-1851686520

The topic of this book is of such significance and currency that one wonders why it has
received so little attention. To be sure, there is no dearth of studies on the translation of the
Qur’an. Yet, these usually revolve around the linguistic and stylistic aspects of various
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translations – the all too familiar debates on I’jaz (understood as ‘the inimitability of the
Qur’an’) and the (im)possibility of its reproduction in another language, the loss and
preservation of meaning, and translators’ ideological interference or distortions (see for
example Barnes 2011, 47–48; Abdul-Raof 2010; Musatapha 2009). Apart from this
almost exclusive concern with how the message of the Qur’an might be communicated
most accurately and reverently, few studies have tackled the impact of its translations in
non-Muslim environments. Elmarsafy’s study of the Qur’an in the age of the
Enlightenment is one of them (see also Garcia (2012), another good example). It inves-
tigates the often overlooked ways in which the holy book of Islam was not only an active
component of the religious and intellectual debates taking place in various parts of Europe
during the eighteenth century, but also a formative influence on some key Enlightenment
figures. In so doing, the book significantly broadens the scope of Qur’anic translation
studies and opens up several new avenues for research in intellectual history and inter-
cultural relations.
After charting the early history of the Qur’an’s translation in Europe (beginning with
the ‘Toledan Collection’ in 1142), for the rest of the first chapter, Elmarsafy provides an
overview of the major translations in several European languages, chiefly Latin, up to the
late seventeenth century. The following chapters then trace a trajectory of the Qur’an in
Enlightenment Europe (specifically in England, France and Germany) through a selection
of case studies. The second and third chapters are dedicated to two translations: the Latin
of Ludovico Marracci (1698) and the English of George Sale (1734). Marracci’s transla-
tion was one of the most widely known and circulated in the eighteenth century, while
Sale’s not only became the standard English version upon its publication, but was also
highly influential in France and Germany, either directly or through second-hand transla-
tions. The influence of these particular translations on major thinkers of the time is
examined in subsequent chapters: Voltaire in chapter 4, Rousseau in chapter 5 and
Goethe in chapter 7. Chapter 6 discusses Napoleon’s assimilation (and manipulation) of
Qur’anic concepts through the 1782–3 French translation by Claude Savary. This case
study approach means that the book is less a history of the Qur’an in the Enlightenment,
but more, as the author puts it, ‘a series of snapshots of the dynamic interaction between
Enlightenment Europe and the Muslim world’ (p. xii). Perhaps one should only judge a
 The Translator 99

book by its professed scope and aims, but in view of the central importance given to Sale’s
translation, the absence of an extended discussion of any major English thinker is rather
surprising. Humberto Garcia’s study on Islam and the English Enlightenment, although
not focused on translations of the Qur’an per se, shows the rich potential of this line of
research: note in particular Garcia’s chapter on the ‘The Qur’an and the Common Law
Tradition’, which highlights the significant impact of Sale’s translation on contemporary
English intellectuals.
Still, Elmarsafy’s case studies are illuminating and even eye-opening in the ways
they reveal influences of the Qur’an that, judging by most research on the topic, would
seem to be unlikely. Perhaps it is this rather unexpected aspect of the Qur’an’s reception
in Europe that partly accounts for the hitherto limited investigation into this area. Due to
the epoch-making influence of Edward Said’s Orientalism (and more so the numerous
studies that his work has generated – some original and groundbreaking, others admit-
tedly polemical, one-sided and demagogical – the reception of Arabic literature and
thought in Europe has often been conceptualised in the negative terms of colonization,
misrepresentation and distortion. Especially in representations of Islam, the possibilities
of genuine, disinterested understanding and mutual enrichment have often been either
ignored or consigned to the exceptional cases of some broadminded European thinkers
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who, for one reason or another, had a more sympathetic approach to Islam, but were too
few and marginalised to make a real difference to dominant discourses. Without com-
pletely discounting these political contexts of reception, Elmarsafy paints a far more
complex picture of the long journey of the Qur’an in European history. The
Enlightenment, perhaps the most fruitful and influential period of this journey, was
the time when the book had become reasonably well known, the most outrageous
misconceptions about it dispelled, and political pressures on intellectuals mostly
relaxed, at least temporarily, as Elmarsafy notes, rather in passing (p. 179), with the
end of the Ottoman threat to Europe. In fact, Elmarsafy argues that, even in the early
periods of its reception (following its first translation in the twelfth century), the
translation and reading of the Qur’an was not merely a matter of manipulating a passive
text; nor was the main issue of contention necessarily the veracity of its message or even
its potential value as a source of information about Muslim peoples (pp. 17ff.). On the
contrary, the Qur’an as a formative influence rather than a passive text as is often argued
in anti-Orientalist studies – see Elmarsafy’s critique of Said’s approach (pp. 16–17) – is a
constant theme in Elmarsafy’s case studies. Even when the Qur’anic text was somehow
manipulated, this was not always at the service of imperialist agendas. This can be seen,
for example, in André Du Ryer’s 1647 translation, which employed ‘the elegant French
that would be deemed acceptable for a seventeenth-century public without being overly
concerned with an accurate rendition of the content’ (p. 8). While the preface to the
translation was ‘openly derogatory’ in tone, it was a far cry from the hitherto common
practice of ‘voluminous compendia aimed at refuting the Qur’an’ (p. 8). In fact,
Elmarsafy argues that Du Ryer’s disparaging tone in the six-page preface was merely
a means to ‘camouflage his sympathy with the Muslims and wide circle of Muslim
friends’ (p. 8). Otherwise, his efforts to adapt the text to contemporary tastes helped
bridge the cultural gap between the Qur’an and its French audience. In fact, Du Ryer,
Elmarsafy says, took the reader ‘away from the mode of translation born of conflict and
crisis toward a more genuine, if still troubled, intercultural connection, boasting of
having made Muhammad speak French’ (p.8). Quite often, in fact, as Elmarsafy demon-
strates, the Qur’an was incorporated into internal religious conflicts throughout Europe
(pp. 28–29), where the enemy was not Islam, but other Christian denominations, and one
 100 Book reviews

effective way of attacking a rival theological group was to highlight its supposed
similarities to Islam.
While Elmarsafy’s insights perhaps reveal the limitations of Said’s approach, they do not
necessarily undermine his fundamental arguments; the domestication of Islam into a host of
familiarised negative images is one of Said’s main points (and one should remember, as
Elmarsafy shows (see for example pp. 13ff.), that the image of Islam in inter-Christian
theological disputes was decidedly negative, a byword for falsification and violence). Yet
Elmarsafy reminds us that this was not always the case in other debates: indeed, the uses to
which the Qur’an was put are too numerous and varied to fit into one homogenous, totalising
narrative. What is more, his account provides a much needed historical perspective (see for
example Kopf 1980; Mackenzie 1994; Varisco 2007, especially pp. 118–34), who specifi-
cally criticise Said on this point). While the early stages of reception were often marked by
unmitigated hostility, with Islam viewed by medieval Europe as a false religion and its
Prophet a fraud, by the age of the Enlightenment and with the rising influence of humanist
thought (and the cessation of the Ottoman threat), some European thinkers, such as those
covered in this book, were ready to engage with the Qur’an on its own terms. While
antagonistic treatments certainly continued (Marracci’s translation being a prime example),
there were also others.
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The most informative and convincing parts of the book are those in which Elmarsafy
undertakes close textual analyses of Qur’anic translations and how they contributed in
different ways to various intellectual projects, especially theories of religion, history,
culture, politics and legislation. Voltaire, perhaps more than any other Enlightenment
thinker, exemplifies the developing perceptions of the Qur’an. Having written a play that,
although extremely hostile to Muhammad, showed less of an interest in Islam itself than in
using it to attack organised religion as such, later in his career (as he learned more about
Islam, especially through Sale’s translation) his views were considerably moderated (pp.
81–85). By analysing Voltaire’s marginal notes in his own copy of Sale’s English transla-
tion, as well as his private correspondence (pp. 84–86), Elmarsafy shows not only that the
French philosopher came to regard Muhammad the legislator with admiration, but also
that ‘his development of a new historiography, more concerned with being truly universal
and less dependent on a literal reading of the Bible and the reader’s edification, owes a
great deal to his discovery of Islam’ (p. 95). In an equally well-informed reading,
Elmarsafy argues that Goethe’s conception of world literature was partly inspired by his
close reading of the Qur’an through an array of sources, including direct German transla-
tions, the English of Sale and second-hand German versions of it, in addition to Latin and
French translations (pp. 158–159).
In the other cases, however, Elmarsafy’s conclusions are not always so convincing.
The history he traces is highly intricate, and so the distinction between what can be
attributed to the Qur’an itself (through the mediating medium of translation), or more
broadly to Islamic influences as a whole, is sometimes blurred. Thus, Rousseau’s view of
the prophet of Islam, an important element in the formulation of his conception of the
legislator, is linked not to any direct Qur’anic influence, but to ideas that were so
‘sufficiently widespread in the eighteenth-century republic of letters that he would have
almost certainly come across them in his vast reading and constant peregrinations’ (p.
121). Moreover, having admitted the lack of evidence that Rousseau ever read the Qur’an
(p. 119), Elmarsafy still maintains, rather vaguely, that the French thinker’s ‘turn to
Arabic’ was ‘facilitated by the French translation of George Sale’s “Preliminary
Discourse” (1751)’ (p. 134), even as he mentions in a footnote that the only reference to
Sale in the Rousseau corpus is an indirect one (p. 219). Elmarsafy does not provide more
 The Translator 101

details about this French translation; nor does he show in what ways Rousseau used Sale’s
arguments (not to mention the Qur’an itself). His analysis throughout relies on parallels
between Rousseau’s ideas and Qur’anic concepts as expounded in secondary sources (pp.
136–139). No less speculative is Elmarsafy’s account of the role of the Qur’an in
formulating Napoleon’s Orientalist ambitions. Napoleon’s wide readings in Islamic
sources made him, in Elmarsafy’s words, a figure that ‘embodies the relationship between
power and Orientalist knowledge’ (p. 142). Yet there is no evidence in this short chapter
that Napoleon ever read Savary’s French translation, which Elmarsafy argues influenced
his ‘views and policies toward the Orient’ (p. 145). Instead, we are told that ‘Napoleon, the
demagogue and manipulator of people and ideas, displays more than a few parallels with
Savary’s portrait of Muhammad’ (p. 148). In a general comparative history of ideas, this
approach is of course quite legitimate. However, in a study of the ‘politics of translation’
of a certain text, one has to expect a close analysis, not only of how its translations
contributed to intellectual development, but also of how these mediated the original text
for its new readers.
On the same grounds, one cannot but wish the author had been more conversant with
recent developments in translation studies. His forays into translation theory are limited to
George Steiner’s fourfold model of translation (p. 47) and a quotation from After Babel (p.
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28), brief references to Antoine Berman (p. 175, p. 204), and occasional nods to Benjamin’s
‘The Task of the Translator’ (see for example pp. 27, 174). His analysis in several places
could have benefited considerably from studies in, among other fields, critical discourse
analysis, postcolonial translation studies and intercultural translation in general, even as
points of departure. For example, the discussion of the role of translation techniques in
enhancing or minimizing the impression of cultural difference (pp. 27–28) would have been
enriched by, and could certainly have contributed to, the intense debate about this issue in
translation studies, especially in its most famous manifestation of ‘domesticating’ versus
‘foreignising’ strategies.
In spite of these flaws, The Enlightenment Qur’an is undoubtedly an original, thought-
provoking and timely contribution to scholarly inquiry in several fields. In Elmarsafy’s
account of the Qur’an’s contribution to the intellectual history of the Enlightenment, the
sacred text emerges as an excellent example of what Edward Said calls a ‘worldly text’, a
‘being in the world’. As Said reminds us, texts have ‘ways of existing that even in the most
rarefied form are always enmeshed in circumstance, time, place, and society’ (1983, 35).
Naturally for believers, the Qur’an has existed throughout the history of Islam on a sacred,
‘rarefied’ plane (thereby stimulating studies on translatability and the (im)possibility of
faithfulness). Yet the text also continues to be a living reality, an active participant in the
most ‘worldly’ areas of intellectual activity, not only in cultures where Islam exerts a
major influence, but, as Elmarsafy demonstrates, in other cultures as well. Scholars and
translators (and not only those working in the obvious areas of Arabic, European history
and religious studies) will find the book to be a source of instructive examples and
informative case studies exploring the vital (though often undervalued) role of translation
in the formation of intellectual history and intercultural relations.

References
Abdul-Raof, H. 2010. Qur’ān Translation: Discourse, Texture and Exegesis. London: Routledge.
Barnes, R. 2011. “Translating the Sacred.” In The Oxford Handbook of Translation Studies, edited by
K. Malmkjær and K. Windle, 37–54. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
 102 Book reviews

Garcia, H. 2012. Islam and the English Enlightenment, 1670–1840. Baltimore: John Hopkins
University Press.
Kopf, D. 1980. “Hermeneutics versus History.” The Journal of Asian Studies 39 (3): 495–506.
doi:10.2307/2054677.
Mackenzie, J. M. 1994. “Edward Said and the Historians.” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 18 (1): 9–25.
doi:10.1080/08905499408583378.
Musatapha, H. 2009. “Qur’ān (Koran).” In Routledge Encyclopaedia of Translation Studies, 2nd ed.,
edited by M. Baker and G. Saldanha, 225–229. London: Routledge.
Said, E. 1983. The World, the Text, and the Critic. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Varisco, D. M. 2007. Reading Orientalism: Said and the Unsaid. Seattle: University of Washington
Press.

Tarek Shamma
Hamad bin Khalifa University, Doha, Qatar
tshamma@qf.org.qa
© 2015, Tarek Shamma
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13556509.2015.1028144
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Immigrant narratives: orientalism and cultural translation in Arab American and

Arab British literature, by Waïl Hassan, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press,
2011/2014, 279 pp., £41.99 (hardback), ISBN 978-0-19-979206-1, £19.99 (paperback),
ISBN 978-0-19-935497-9

[1967] embodied the dislocation that subsumed all other losses, the disappeared worlds of
my youth and upbringing, the unpolitical years of my education, the assumption of
disengaged teaching and scholarship …
Edward Said (1999, p. 293)

Waïl Hassan begins his book, Immigrant Narratives: Orientalism and Cultural Translation
in Arab American and Arab British Literature, by paying tribute to the inspiring intellectual
legacy of Edward Said, one of the most remarkable of Arab American figures. Said’s words
convey the sentiment of loss expressed by many of the writers evoked in Hassan’s book,
who found themselves assuming historical postures. Thus, Hassan – and perhaps other
scholars of Arabic literature and postcolonial studies of this generation – can be situated
within this wide cultural and historical configuration of 1967, evoked above by Said, which
remains open and present today for they intervene and engage critically in their scholarship
in the face of historical loss.
Harnessing the power of Said’s critique of orientalism, but exercising a more nuanced
reading that avoids the initial pitfalls of orientalism, the book astutely joins that momentous
theoretical contribution of Said to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s (1986) concept of
‛minor literatureʼ and also to translation theory, engaging especially with Lawrence Venuti’s
(1998) approaches to ‘ethics of difference’ in translation. Hassan patiently and meticulously
analyses what has been considered marginal by other scholarship – autobiographies,
memoires, life writing and a diversity of other forms in Arab American and Arab British
immigrant literature – in order to examine major currents of thought and writing in line, or in
dissension, with orientalism and empire. From their contingent positions, these literary
works are preoccupied with translation. All these minor texts constitute for Hassan transla-
tional narratives, showing the process of translation at work within them as well as revealing
the complexity of a body of writing at the intersection of different literary traditions,
conventions and languages. It is a minor literature for its ‘deterritorializing’ force, collective