Translating al-Andalus: Medieval Muslim Spain and Urdu Modernity

Abstract

Abstract This is a translation of two prefaces to Urdu translations of Arabic- and English-language histories, published in 1921 and 1922, respectively, around the topos of medieval Muslim Spain. Both translations were prepared by Maulavī Ḳhalīl ur-Raḥmān, who is also the writer of the first preface. The second preface is an introduction by Muḥammad ʿInāyatullāh written partly to acknowledge the immense labor undertaken by Ḳhalīl ur-Raḥmān, and partly to introduce the larger project of translating Islamic histories into Urdu. The first translation is of Aḥmad ibn Muḥammad al-Maqqarī at-Tilmisānī’s (d. 1632) Andalusian history, written in 1617 in Arabic and titled Nafḥ ut̤-T̤īb (The Breath of Perfume). The Urdu translation was published from Aligarh in November 1921. The second is a translation of S. P. Scott’s (1846–1929) English-language history written in 1904, The History of the Moorish Empire in Europe, which was published in Lahore in 1922 under the Urdu title Aḳhbār ul-Undulus. Through these prefaces, Ḳhalīl ur-Raḥmān’s translations reveal a vibrant world of translational activities centered around the Department of Composition and Translation in Osmania University, Hyderabad Deccan. Both prefaces demonstrate the centrality of the practice of translation in the project of (re)claiming the history of Muslim medieval Spain specifically, and Islamic history broadly. Both prefaces take up the context of translating medieval Spain into Urdu as an opportunity to meditate on global Islamic histories and the role of translation in reviving connections lost because of colonial violence. At the same time, Ḳhalīl ur-Raḥmān’s translations of these voluminous works of Andalusian history are not a one-off event, but signal a much larger, concerted effort to bring (back) al-Andalus into Urdu. At the same time, even as the two prefaces together seek to bring historical knowledge into Urdu, they themselves constitute significant intellectual productions in their own right, comprising intensive research around the idea of Islamic history writing in Urdu. Both Ḳhalīl ur-Raḥmān and Muḥammad ʿInāyatullāh engage with multiple strands of scholarship, ranging from past Islamic scholars writing in Arabic, nineteenth-century Orientalist accounts, as well as works by Urdu- and English-language scholars contemporaneous to them. Straddling these multiple worlds, these texts together provide a meditation on the role of translation and history writing in the elaboration of a Muslim intellectual production in colonial modernity.