The Modern Arabic BibleTranslation, Dissemination and Literary Impact

• Intervenes in theoretical debates on translation and world literature by historicising the role of the Bible as the inaugurating object for thinking translation, since Eugene Nida’s foundational impact on the field
• Revises historical narratives of language development that have proliferated since the nineteenth century, and that have credited the nahda Bible with modernising Arabic
• Narrates a previously untold story of the modern translations of the Arabic Bible within the larger, dynamic contexts of the nahda and its entanglements with globalisation
• Connects the most popular works of al-Bustānī and al-Shidyāq, two foundational figures of the nahda, with their early careers as Bible translators
• Explores competing narratives about Arabic’s linguistic origins and literary aspirations and how the translations of the Bible intervened in their formation

This innovative study compares nineteenth-century Arabic translations of the Bible to determine how it emerged as a foundational text of Arab modernity. Bible translation gained global traction through the work of Anglophone Christian missionaries, who made an attempt at synchronising translated Bibles in world languages by laying down strict guidelines and supervising the processes of translation and dissemination. By engaging with the intellectual beginnings of two local translators, Butrus al-Bustani (1819 – 1883) and Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq (1804 –1887), as well as their subsequent contributions to Arabic language and literature, this book questions to what extent they complied with the missionaries’ strategy in practice. Based on documents from the archives of Bible societies that tell the story of two key nahda versions of the text, we come to understand how colonial pressure was secondary to the process of incorporating the Bible into the nahda project of rethinking Arabic.