Thomas Jefferson in Arabic Posted on 04/08/2011 by Juan
I am excited to announce that the Global Americana Institute .. http://globam.org/ .. has, in partnership with Dar al-Saqi of Beirut brought out a volume of selected writings of Thomas Jefferson in Arabic. It was elegantly translated by Professors Mounira Soliman and Walid Hamamsy of Cairo University and is entitled in Arabic the equivalent of Revolutionary Democracy: How America became the Republic of Liberty.
It has a powerful, brief introduction by prominent Arab intellectual Hazem Saghieh, an editor of al-Hayat newspaper, .. http://www.alwaref.org/en/figure-of-the-month/213-figure-of-the-month-hazem-saghieh-in-defense-of-peace . which expresses admiration for Jefferson’s political thought while not attempting to paper over his personal foibles. Saghieh notes that post-World War II Arab thought has been strangely unengaged with liberal democratic ideas, especially in their American incarnation, but that that is a shame since figures such as Jefferson have much to offer. Of course, elite Arab families know English and travel to the United States, and don’t need this translation. But below that five percent at the top of society with regard to wealth and education, there is now a vast literate Arab middle class numbering in the hundreds of millions, who could not deal with Jefferson’s antique English but could read this translation. At least some of them will be interested in doing so.
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I am hopeful that the book will find an eager reception in Egypt, Tunisia and other countries yearning for democracy in the Arab world, and in a way, it could not have come out at a better time. Jefferson could be good for them to think with, a colleague from across the centuries and the Atlantic.
We are enormously grateful to kind donors who made this project possible, including Andrew O’Shaughnessy, Saunders Director of the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies, .. http://oieahc.wm.edu/uncommon/118/icjs.cfm .. the Center itself, and the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, as well as SNL Financial LC with offices around the globe including Islamabad, Pakistan and Ahmedabad, India, as well as many individual donors who gave through Paypal or credit card.
The book is already being reviewed, and received a favorable notice in the leftist newspaper al-Safir. .. http://www.assafir.com/Article.aspx?EditionId=1810&ChannelId=42561&ArticleId=3295&Author= .. The reviewer said, “It is beautiful for Lebanese and Arabs to be able to read passages from the texts composed by one of the founders of the United States of America and one of the authors of the Declaration of Independence. It is beautiful for Lebanese and Arabs to be able to read content that will provoke critical discussion, composed by Thomas Jefferson through various stages of his life and career, because texts such as these … are open to the concerns of politics, economy and public culture . . .”It also complimented the translators for their contribution to creating grounds for such inter-communication of Enlightenment ideas in contemporary Arabic.
It has taken much longer to accomplish this major project than I would have liked. But it took time to find willing and able translators, for them to work through difficult eighteenth-century English in an engaging, contemporary Arabic style, and then to find a publisher with good production values and good distribution. We had great good fortune, since there is none better than Dar al-Saqi in these regards. Now that we have such a great partner, we can go forward at a better clip– though in this undertaking, quality is more important than quantity. By the way, Al-Saqi also has a London office that publishes great books about the Middle East .. http://www.saqibooks.com/ .. in English.
I was inspired to pursue this project by the September 11 attacks and their aftermath, moments of a ‘clash of civilizations,’ or at least a clash of some narrow forces within each civilization. I thought we needed some bridges. It pained me to read the gross mischaracterizations of the United States and its values that were common in the Arabic press and blogosphere. I had long been aware, and annoyed by, the relative paucity of Americana in Arabic bookstores. I carried out exhaustive bibliographical searches and while there are lots of obscure journal and newspaper articles of previous decades, what you can get your hands on in an actual bookstore or at a book fair today is quite limited. The US State Department has a translation program in Amman, Jordan and in Cairo, Egypt, which does excellent work, but there is room for more such endeavors and the list of what is translated is so short that there isn’t much danger of overlap.
Please consider donating to the Global Americana Institute, which is a tax-exempt, 501(c)3 charity, at its web site, which has a credit card form .. http://globam.org/ .. and an address for sending checks. Donations will allow us to translate more works (including a biography of Martin Luther King), as well as to help with distribution of the volumes and mounting workshops for professors who might teach them. Arabic-knowing university professors and students at Western universities should please urge libraries to order it.
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Postscript:
Journalists sometimes ask me if there isn’t something Orientalist or imperialist about translating Americana into Arabic. It is a fair question, but it seems to me not a very useful one. First of all, I started studying Arabic when I was 19, and I have spent my life with the great Arabophone authors, from al-Ghazali to Naguib Mahfouz, from Abu Hayyan al-Tawhidi to Nawal Saadawi. I myself translated three books from Arabic into English by Lebanese poet and novelist Kahlil Gibran. I am grateful for what they have given me and how they have enriched me, and I don’t consider myself colonized by them. Intellectual interchange is not a zero-sum game, as medieval Muslim intellectuals delighted in pointing out. The Qur’an itself says, 49:13 (al-Hujurat), “We created you from male and female and made you peoples and tribes that you might know one another.”And the Prophet Muhammad is said to have commanded, “Seek knowledge, even unto China.” In the glory days of classical Islam, there was a translation movement seeking to put Greek philosophy and Sanskrit astronomy into Arabic, not a sullen fundamentalist fear of intellectual interchange.
Second, translation of the great works of Western literature has been central to the Arab renaissance and modern Arab culture. I wrote my MA thesis on Rifa`ah al-Tahtawi, who translated loads from 19th-century French. Early Egyptian nationalist Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid translated John Stuart Mill. Pioneering Egyptian novelist Taha Hussein translated Shakespeare. Arabophone literature interacted mainly with the colonial metropoles of France and Britain, and the distant United States was seldom an object of interest for them. With the rise of Arab nationalism and Muslim fundamentalism from the 1950s forward, Washington was often seen as being on the wrong side of history by Arab authors, and that sentiment discouraged translation, especially of political thought.
But the United States has been a major force in the world for many decades, and it is frankly bizarre that it is so little represented in Arabic translation. I don’t fool myself that such books will be best-sellers, but I do hope that interested Arabophone intellectuals will benefit from them and interact with them, and gain a fuller appreciation of the depth and texture of the United States, beyond just political maneuvering and Hollywood.
The Arab Spring began with peaceful protests in Tunis, Cairo, Alexandria, and elsewhere in the region, with masses of demonstrators giving their elites a choice of getting rid of the country’s dictator or of attempting to put down the demonstrations. In Tunisia and Egypt, the military refused for the most part to fire on peaceful noncombatants, and so the dictator had to go. But in Libya, Syria, Yemen, and Bahrain, the regimes showed themselves willing to use brutal methods. Libya’s Qaddafi has killed and wounded thousands. Syrian troops have probably killed about 1000 persons. Yemen must be nearing 200. Bahrain’s security forces killed less than 30.
The struggles continued on Wednesday and Thursday. In Yemen, the capital of Sanaa continued its fall into a civil war between security forces loyal to President Ali Abdullah Saleh .. http://edition.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/meast/06/01/yemen.unrest/ .. and members of the Hashed tribe loyal to opposition leader Sadiq al-Ahmar. Explosions and gunfire rocked the city, as other urban areas, especially Taizz, where government forces had fired on protesters, remained restive.
Yemen is important to the West because of its commanding position at the mouth of the Red Sea (10 percent of world trade goes through the Suez Canal) and because its government had been an ally in the fight against al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which has 300 or so fighters in the southern Ma’rib Province of Yemen. Yemen’s security also affects that of neighboring Saudi Arabia, which produces 11 percent of daily world petroleum output. The protest movement against Saleh has a Muslim tinge in some instances, but for the most part is regional, tribal or age-based (as elsewhere, the youth movement is important).
President Bashar al-Asad had offered an amnesty to protest leaders on Tuesday on condition they cease roiling the country, but the offer was rejected by the opposition.
Syria is important to the US as a major country abutting the Eastern Mediterranean, neighboring NATO ally Turkey, as well as non-NATO allies Jordan and Israel. It also shares a border with Lebanon and with Iraq. It is central to the Palestinian-Israeli struggle and had been part of Turkey’s hopes for a big expansion of regional trade in the Middle East. The Damascus regime is allied with Iran and so is on the wrong side of the geopolitical divide in the region from an American, Israeli and Saudi point of view. The one-party, authoritarian Baath Party has ruled with an iron fist for decades.
In Libya, oil minister Shukri Ghanem was confirmed to have defected from the Qaddafi regime in Tripoli .. http://in.reuters.com/article/2011/06/02/idINIndia-57434020110602 .. days after several senior military officers had done so. Fighting in a western suburb near Misrata calmed down, as Free Libya forces retained control of that major Western city. Fighting continued in nearby Zlitan, which lies between Misrata and the capital, and in the Western Mountain region, where Free Libya forces said they had taken a provincial city where the regional electricity generating plant was located. A UN-authorized NATO and Arab League air contingent extended its bombing campaign, hitting the capital of Tripoli again on Wednesday, as the regime continued to defy a Security Council order to cease attacking its population. Meanwhile, a UN commission found .. http://ibnlive.in.com/news/libya-un-accuses-both-sides-of-war-crimes/156168-2.html .. that the Libyan regime has committed war crimes and has attacked civilian non-combatants. It also found evidence of war crimes on the rebel side, though not of attacks on non-combatants.
Qaddafi forces are suspected in a car-bombing of a hotel .. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ieb_sjC_FM8 .. full of foreigners in Benghazi, which, however, did not kill anyone:
As the state of emergency ended in Bahrain, a small demonstration was held in the Shiite village of Diraz near the capital, which was dispersed by the king’s troops, using tear gas. .. http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2011/06/02/3233946.htm?section=justin .. It is not clear why protesters should not be allowed to demonstrate peacefully in Diraz if there is no state of emergency. The small island kingdom of Bahrain, with a citizen population of roughly 600,000, produces only a small amount of petroleum, but is the HQ of the US Fifth Fleet. Its citizen population is roughly 60 percent Shiite, though it would be more if the Sunni monarchy had not handed out Bahraini citizenship to tens of thousands of foreign Sunnis. The ruling Al Khalifa has a ‘thing’ about Shiites and sees the protest movement, which had included small Sunni parties wanting more civil liberties, as a mere Iranian conspiracy (not so).
2 Responses to “Top Struggles in the Arab Spring Today”
Alice Sprickman .. 06/02/2011 at 4:42 am
‘Qaddafi forces are suspected in a car-bombing of a hotel full of foreigners in Benghazi, which, however, did not kill anyone:
It is amazing to me that the success, or lack of, is focused on the number of people killed. It is an important number, of course, but the individuals who are injured are the important measure of the drain on resources of all kinds–food, housing, medical, rehabilitative–on the community. It needs to be better understood.
Eurofrank .. 06/02/2011 at 5:59 am
Dear Professor Cole
I am glad to see that you have seen the terrifying aspect of the disturbances in Syria.
There do not seem to be any firewalls that can stop the contagion spreading.
Your excellent recent piece on the untenable situation in Israel with the powder keg issue of Jerusalem makes the advent of some sort of civil war in Syria, just too close for comfort. The excellent Stratfor recently commented that despite what Netanyahu says the 1948 Armistice borders are far more defensible than those of today.
There are too many regional actors with conflicting agendas in the region for us to safely allow the situation to deteriorate much further.
I have not yet seen any sensible description of the Levant region outcome in the trianglular battle between Turkey, Iran and Israel for hegemony in the region.
Sucking Turkey into the instability would be a worst case outcome.
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