The Modern Arabic Bible: Translation, Dissemination and Literary Impact

Rana Issa

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.

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The Modern Arabic Bible

Translation, Dissemination and Literary Impact

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Contents

Frontmatter
pp i-iv

Contents
pp v-v

List of Figures
pp vi-vi

Series Editor’s Foreword
pp vii-ix

Acknowledgements
pp x-xiii

Note on Transliteration and Abbreviations
pp xiv-xiv

Dedication
pp xv-xvi

Introduction
pp 1-40

1 - The Missionary Bible
pp 41-80

2 - Bible Competition
pp 81-108

3 - Standardising Arabic
pp 109-148

4 - Butrus al-Bustani as Translator
pp 149-187

5 - Ahmad Faris Al-Shidyaq’s Bible as Literature
pp 188-213

Conclusion: In the Beginning was Translation
pp 214-218

Bibliography
pp 219-236

Index
pp 237-248

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The Modern Arabic Bible

Translation, Dissemination and Literary Impact

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