This book looks at the variety of ways Darwin was read in Arabic from the late 1860s to the mid-twentieth century, providing a close textual, political and institutional analysis of responses to his and other contemporary British, American, French and German popular and professional works on evolution, from Herbert Spencer to Ludwig Büchner. Borrowing from translation and reading studies, and weaving together the history of science and intellectual history, it emphasizes the creative tensions involved in the negotiation of meaning across linguistic, historical and conceptual frontiers. Attempt ... More

This book looks at the variety of ways Darwin was read in Arabic from the late 1860s to the mid-twentieth century, providing a close textual, political and institutional analysis of responses to his and other contemporary British, American, French and German popular and professional works on evolution, from Herbert Spencer to Ludwig Büchner. Borrowing from translation and reading studies, and weaving together the history of science and intellectual history, it emphasizes the creative tensions involved in the negotiation of meaning across linguistic, historical and conceptual frontiers. Attempting to understand Darwin’s global appeal from the perspective of several generations of Arab intellectuals it explores the impact of evolutionary thought on ideas of religion, science and the state. Anxieties of empire and civilizational progress were never far below the surface in the resultant debates: hence Reading Darwin in Arabic also examines how the politics of evolution infiltrated discussions of pedagogy, progress and the very sense of an Arab past and future. The sweeping literary and conceptual transformation of the notion of “science” that this entailed also reshaped conceptions of “religion,” and led not to the overthrow but to the revivification of theological thought in Arabic, both Muslim and Christian. The book thus offers a new way of thinking about Darwin and modern evolutionary theory in a global context while simultaneously contributing to a rethinking of the origins of the so called modern Arabic “renaissance” (the age of the Nahda).