“In a Clear Arabic Tongue”: Arabic and the Making of a Science-Language Regime

Abstract

The history of Arabic as a language of scientific learning is punctuated by two “translation movements.” The first took place in the ninth century, when many scientific and philosophical Greek, Persian, and Indian works were translated into Arabic under the patronage of members of the Abbasid dynasty (750–1258 in Baghdad) and their clients and courtiers. The second was sparked by the establishment of European-style schools in the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century and witnessed the translation of modern European scientific texts into Arabic. In both cases, translation was a complex and iterative process where scholars, translators, and patrons grappled with questions about the history of the language, its relation to other languages, and its attendant opportunities and limitations. This essay looks at these two moments of translation, asking how such processes took place, what questions emerged, and how they related to other intellectual, political, and social concerns at the time. It argues that translation efforts did not emerge from or lead to an exclusively Arabophone setting but, rather, developed in a linguistic regime that involved constant connections with other languages and relied on the gradual and iterative construction of an Arabic scientific archive that defined the role and the history of Arabic as a scientific language.