The Prophet Today: The Novel in Distress

Abstract

The conclusion historicizes these translations in the story of the Arabic novel before the 1950s, after which the novel becomes canonised. Colonial translation promised facts and truths based on the European master-text, and some Arab reformists confirmed the superiority of philosophy to religion, and hence science to Islam, but the translations complicate such neat cultural translation. The novel is born somewhere in between the original and translation, obfuscating intentionally the original source of which becomes secondary to the process of its adaptation and transmission. The reformist aspirations of the authors remain unrealised much like a perfect emulation of the prophet. Finally, it interrogates the dominant critical approach to these modernist intellectuals as secularising liberals who intentionally separated religion from literature by adopting the reductive Western humanisation of the prophet. The translations reveal how they trespass the separation between literary and religious interpretation bringing the stakes of narrative representation to bear on European ideals of subjectivity and universal reason. In this transgressive space, precisely the incubator of “modern” Egyptian literature, translation becomes neither domesticating nor foreignising but a space where various representational claims are simultaneously adapted and contested.