Concept Note

Translations from European languages were an important instrument of modernization for roughly four decades beginning in the 1830s. Besides being documents of intellectual acumen and linguistic proficiency, they may reflect, and in fact react to, the unequal power relations characteristic of the colonial setup. Tahtawi’s first modern Arabic literary translation, nearly forgotten today, his translation of the French constitutional law, and the translations of the huge corpus of the five French law books, which he supervised, give evidence of the translators’ strategies of cultural self-assertion and, potentially much more important, their endeavor to convey practically and politically relevant knowledge beyond cultural boundaries.+

Biography of the Speaker

Prof. Dr Stefan Leder was chair of Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Halle, then director of the Orient-Institut Beirut. The current project on Arabic translation during the colonial period correlates to his research on the genealogy of Orientalism. Further research areas concern premodern Arabic historiography, Islamic ethics and political literature, and conceptual history.
 

This public lecture aims to shed light on the following issues:

•    Discuss the translation of European languages as an instrument of modernization
•    Explaining Tantawi’s translation of French constitutional law and translations of a huge corpus of five French law books
•     Illustrating translators’ strategies of cultural self-assertion