Reading Darwin in Arabic, 1860-1950
440 pages
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22 halftones
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6 x 9
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© 2013
In Reading Darwin in Arabic, Marwa Elshakry questions current ideas about Islam, science, and secularism by exploring the ways in which Darwin was read in Arabic from the late 1860s to the mid-twentieth century. Borrowing from translation and reading studies and weaving together the history of science with intellectual history, she explores Darwin’s global appeal from the perspective of several generations of Arabic readers and shows how Darwin’s writings helped alter the social and epistemological landscape of the Arab learned classes.
Providing a close textual, political, and institutional analysis of the tremendous interest in Darwin’s ideas and other works on evolution, Elshakry shows how, in an age of massive regional and international political upheaval, these readings were suffused with the anxieties of empire and civilizational decline. The politics of evolution infiltrated Arabic discussions of pedagogy, progress, and the very sense of history. They also led to a literary and conceptual transformation of notions of science and religion themselves. Darwin thus became a vehicle for discussing scriptural exegesis, the conditions of belief, and cosmological views more broadly. The book also acquaints readers with Muslim and Christian intellectuals, bureaucrats, and theologians, and concludes by exploring Darwin’s waning influence on public and intellectual life in the Arab world after World War I.
Reading Darwin in Arabic is an engaging and powerfully argued reconceptualization of the intellectual and political history of the Middle East.
James Moore, coauthor of Darwin and Darwin’s Sacred Curse
“A tour de force, this book moves on a spectacular trajectory from Darwin’s original texts to their translation, interpretation, and contestation in zones that remain terra incognita to most scholars today. Elshakry shows for the first time how science-and-religion issues that still agitate Americans were first brought to Ottoman Syria and Egypt by Americans themselves—and, tellingly, she points up multiple ironies in the creative and often unexpected ways in which evolutionary ideas were appropriated by Muslims and Christians alike. To an age obsessed by ‘the clash of civilizations,’ Reading Darwin in Arabic will be revelatory.”
Timothy Mitchell, author of Colonising Egypt
“A novel and important contribution to our understanding of the globalization of science in the nineteenth century. Marwa Elshakry’s study will appeal not only to scholars of the modern intellectual and political history of the Middle East but also to an audience in the history of science, especially those working on imperial and colonial histories of science.”
James A. Secord, University of Cambridge
“This pathbreaking book opens up a new world of understanding about the encounters of science in an era of imperial rivalries and nationalist ambitions. Following networks of travel, print, and translation across the Arabic-speaking world, Marwa Elshakry not only brings to life a vibrant intellectual culture too little known in the West but also illuminates contemporary global debates about tradition, faith, and evolutionary science.”
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