Rethinking the Arab-Islamic Tradition. On the New Translation of Naṣr Ḥāmid Abū Zayd’s "Critique of Religious Discourse" (Naqd al-Ḫiṭāb ad-Dīnī)

Abstract

The article highlights the significance of the first full English translation of Naqd al-Hitāb ad-Dīnī (Critique of Religious Discourse), one of the most characteristic and important works of the acclaimed Egyptian intellectual Nāsr Hāmid Abū Zayd (1943–2010). The work was firstly published in 1992 by Sīnā li-an-Našr in Cairo, coinciding with the beginning of the so-called Case of Abū Zayd (1992–1995), the campaign of Egyptian fundamentalists against the scholar. Abū Zayd’s critique of the dominant discourses and worldviews in the Arab world, created both by the Islamic fundamentalists and so-called Islamic left, has gained huge acclaim in the international academia but so far there has not been a full translation of the work into English (also taking into account the important role of the full German edition published by Chérifa Magdi and Navid Kermani in 1996). In 2018 Jonathan Wright’s translation was published by Yale University Press in the series “World Thought in Translation”. The edition was enriched by Carool Kersten’s scholarly introduction. The following article discusses the translation dilemma regarding Naqd… (e.g. problems with finding equivalents for Arabic semiotic and hermeneutical terminology utilised by the Egyptian scholar), giving examples of the choices made by the translator. Adding to it, the more general issues of the impact of Abū Zayd’s work on the contemporary rereading of Arab-Islamic turāt are analysed.