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| Elshakry's first book |
Marwa Elshakry’s “Knowledge in Motion: The Cultural Politics of Modern
Science Translations in Arabic” (2008) explores one of the chief
defining characteristics of the
nahdah: the translation of ideas
from not only one language to another, but from one culture to another.
Elshakry relies on a variety of sources, particularly Levantine
Christian Nahdawis Faris Nimr’s and Yaqub Sarruf’s famous
al-Muqtataf
magazine, founded in 1876, known for its translations of scientific
information coming from Europe. Elshakry explores the politics of
neologisms; the ways in which ideas could be perceived as religiously or
culturally unacceptable and therefore dangerous; and the pragmatic
difficulties of rendering alien concepts, and whole alien ways of
categorizing knowledge, into a new, foreign field. She argues against “a
tendency to see the ‘receiving’ culture as purely passive—its choice of
responses limited to either faithful receipt of the original or
regrettable incomprehension” explaining that what is needed instead is
“an analysis of the linguistic and sociocultural strategies by which
concepts, terms, and even theoretical constructs are made legible across
cultural borders and rendered stable over time.”
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