Mr-Darwin-Goes-to-the-Middle-East-Review-of-Reading-Darwin-in-Arabic-1860-1950-Marwa-Elshakry-University-of-Chicago-Press-2014-_2014_Endeavour.pdf

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Book Review
Endeavour
Vol. 38 No. 3–4
Full text provided by
www.sciencedirect.com
ScienceDirect
Mr. Darwin Goes to the Middle East: Review of Reading Darwin in Arabic, 1860–1950, Marwa Elshakry, University of Chicago Press, 2014.
Soha Bayoumi
Harvard University, Department of the History of Science, United States
With the limited scholarship focusing on science transla-
tion between the Global North and the Global South,
Marwa Elshakry’s
Reading Darwin in Arabic
is a much
welcome contribution to the existing literature on the
globalization, translation and popularization of science,
especially in colonial and postcolonial contexts.
Reading
Darwin
is an invaluable resource for historians of science
and intellectual historians of the Middle East. It is also a
crucial contribution to science-and-religion studies.
Relying on magazine and newspaper articles, memoirs,
meeting minutes, correspondence and personal archives,
among other sources, Elshakry offers a detailed depiction
of Darwin’s Arabic readership at the turn of the twentieth
century, also known as the
Nahda
period, and demon-
strates her deep knowledge of the Arab political and intel-
lectual landscape. Through an incisive reading of the
debates surrounding the translation of evolutionary theo-
ries in the Arab Middle East, Elshakry shows how Dar-
winian texts were read
along with
other texts, ranging
from the Qur’an and its
tafsir
(interpretation), to scientific,
philosophical and jurisprudential works that were either
originally written in Arabic or previously translated into
Arabic. We see how the reception of Darwin led to reviving
old traditions of evolution and gradualism in Islamic
thought and spurred attempts to combine the old with
the new. Elshakry illustrates how Darwin and his theory
were received by an intellectual and political landscape in
flux. Intellectually, debates surrounding Darwin and evo-
lutionary theory seemed to take place between the tradi-
tionalists and the modernists. Politically, Darwin’s
writings were understood by contending factions as lend-
ing support to either maintaining or overthrowing the
political status quo.
Reading Darwin
thus offers us a
complicated grid of political, ideological and religious
affiliations that contributed to multiple and layered read-
ings of Darwin in Arabic: nationalist and internationalist;
Ottomanist, Pan-Islamist and Pan-Arabist; anti-colonial-
ist and collaborationist; secular and religious; liberal and
socialist; revolutionary and reformist.
In addition to its analysis of the political landscape in
which Darwin was translated and read at the turn of the
century and of how intellectual and scientific life reflected
the politics of empire, the book provides a detailed account
of the translation itself and the linguistic, ideological and
intellectual facets of science translation during the
Nahda
period.
The book’s contribution to science-and-religion studies
is most obvious in its discussion of the work of Christian
missionaries in the Levant, especially Protestant mission-
aries who, in their attempt to counter the influence of
Catholic missionaries, and salvage the ‘irreligious’ or ‘infi-
del’ Arab ‘natives’ from their ‘mental and spiritual torpor,’
enlisted science as a tool to demonstrate the superiority of
their faith over Islam, Catholicism and the eastern
churches. We see here how scientific debates were
enmeshed in religious ones, and how the religious rivals
brandished science as a weapon in their war to win ‘native’
minds and souls. Elshakry’s penetrating analysis of the
symbiotic relationship between science and religion in that
context reveals friction as well, caused by religious
attempts to harness science and to assert the primacy of
religion over science. She examines the exclusion of those
who did not share those goals, but who believed instead in
the greater importance of spreading ‘useful knowledge’ and
‘scientific truth,’ people like Ya’qub Sarruf and Faris Nimr
who found
al-Muqtataf
(The Digest), the most famous
science-popularizing periodical in the Arab world at the
time.
Reading Darwin in Arabic
also engages the endeavours
to reconcile Islam and science, and the politics of such
endeavours. One of the numerous valuable points made by
the book is its methodical deconstruction of the notion of
‘Islamic modernism,’ a concept that has led to oversimpli-
fied views on the relationship between science and religion
in the Arab Middle East. In its place, the book expounds on
the different meanings attributed to science (‘ilm) and the
range of opinions on the civilizing role of religion.
Each chapter of the book focuses on one or two intellec-
tual figures to further illustrate its arguments. This char-
acter-centred approach, although extremely useful, seems
to drown the narrative at some points in biographical
details and a complex web of personal and political rival-
ries which, although interesting, add little to the narrative
itself and distract from its main arguments. Despite some
minor inconsistencies in translation and transliteration,
the book nevertheless provides a captivating and lucid
account of Darwin’s Arabic readership. Most importantly,
it contributes to the emergence of what the author calls a
‘polyglot’ Darwin (5), a perspective that enriches our per-
ception of the meanings and connotations attached to
Darwin by including the audiences he reached through
the vehicle of translation.
Corresponding author:
Bayoumi, S. (sbayoumi@fas.harvard.edu)
Available online 26 August 2014.
www.sciencedirect.com
0160-9327/
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.endeavour.2014.07.004

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