Marwa Elshakry's 'Knowledge in Motion'

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.”[1]

Elshakry explains the complexities inherent in the coinage of new terms. Sarruf and Nimr sought to:

‘select correct and familiar words and simple phrases whenever possible.’ Yet this commitment to an easily understood prose in the service of the popularization of knowledge also set constraints on their use of neologisms and transliterations, which is why they sometimes moved between the reassignment of older terms and the construction of new ones. In fact, different strategies of translation allowed them to mediate between differing socio-epistemological connotations and semantic values.[2]

Through her article, Elshakry makes the case that translation was never a simple matter of one-to-one correspondence, but was always embroiled in contested terrains over proper authority, religious and cultural tradition, concern about “foreign borrowings and impositions” and political intrigue.[3]

Elshakry’s article is related to her doctoral dissertation topic, also centered on the politics of science translation during the nahdah period, entitled “Darwin’s Legacy in the Arab East: Science, Religion and Politics, 1870-1914” (Princeton, 2003). She starts her analysis with the controversy in which Nimr and Farris were soon mired after initially translating Darwinian theory in al-Muqtataf, angering their Protestant patrons. This led, after they moved from Beirut to Cairo in 1885 to be closer to the burgeoning intellectual scene there, to their determination to keep science and faith separate. Yet, shortly after their arrival, they were again the subject of scandal in the Egyptian press, this time related to an uproar over social Darwinism and the ideas of Herbert Spencer. From there Elshakry expands her analysis to the legacy of Darwinism and the ideas of natural theology in Greater Syria, and ends her dissertation with a final chapter on the failure of Muhammad ‘Abduh to bring his reformist theological ideas to al-Azhar.

Significantly, Elshakry points to the fractured strains of competing thought prevalent in the days of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and cautions against the deceptive ease with which contemporary historians conflate ideals of nationalism devoid of context under a “convenient umbrella.”[4] She notes that historians’ debates have “tended to distort the political and social realities of the time,” and “nationalist accounts… often tend to overlook the remarkable geographical breadth and range of intellectual networks in the Ottoman Empire.”[5] Muhammad ‘Abduh’s failure to persuade the Azharites of reformist ideals was far more a result of their distrust of his relationship with the British, for example, than the Azharites’ difficulties with his theological positions.[6] The forward-looking nature of history, she cautions, must not cause us to overlook the complexities of former times.


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[1] 703.
[2] 713.
[3] 730.
[4] 341.
[5] Ibid.
[6] 282.