Secularizing Islam: Carlyle, al-Sibāʿī, and the Translations of “Religion” in British Egypt

Abstract

Secularism is said to support cultural imperialism by propagating the colonizer's religion in nonreligious guise or by touting a nonreligious worldview that attracts native intellectuals already disenchanted with local tradition. I take a different view. Reading Muḥammad al-Sibāʿī's Arabic translation of Thomas Carlyle's On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841), published in Egypt in 1911, I argue that secularism attracts the colonized less by presenting itself as an alternative order—religious or not—than by validating an existing religious episteme, but doing so in translation, refracting native religion through an empowered yet seemingly empowering colonial eye. Secularity infiltrates British Egypt as Islam's likeness, not antithesis. Carlyle's alluring Islamophilia moves al-Sibāʿī to prescribe English literature to Egypt against French “unbelief,” eliding the Briton's subordination of the Prophet Muḥammadto Shakespeare. Willing the native Islamic “religious” into translatability with the Western colonial “secular,” al-Sibāʿī reconstructs modern Islam as belief in the human.