The arrival of American missionaries in Beirut was a world apart from the pre-nineteenth century history of Bible translation. The American commoditisation of the Bible contested the authority of other religious communities and dragged them into the fray of competition. The Catholics were especially vexed with the Americans and identified them as the most dangerous contenders for Christian leadership. American zeal awakened the history of the Reformation and old seventeenth-century Catholic tricks like Bible burning, excommunication, and official complaints to the Ottoman and Western authorities were tried in this new context to little effect. To complicate matters for the Catholics, the Americans distributed a version based on the bilingual Arabic-Latin Catholic Bible from 1671, Biblia Sacra Arabica. American salesmanship and ardour, as well as their serious interest in educating the locals and converting them to their reading practices, qualified their competitive advantage.

Competition between the Catholics and the Protestants was not the product of the nineteenth century. But at this time, competition became a market force, wedded to a commodity, when in the past it had been embodied in religio-political rivalry over turf and over who has access to the production as well as to the reading of the Bible.

Competition between the Jesuits and Protestants in the nineteenth century took advantage of the emergent colonial political economy that favoured imported commodities over local labour. The spirit of free trade was spreading, and in the Ottoman Empire, it was inaugurated by the Balta Liman Agreement of 1838, with the emerging British colonialists. This agreement, like the Tanzimat edicts signed in the same year, facilitated the movement of American missionaries in the Levant, as members of the British millet, and thus protected by an agreement that allowed them to trade in the Empire. Describing the impact of this agreement on British and Ottoman political relations, Necla Geyikdağı writes that the agreement ‘conferred upon British merchants not only the status of “most favoured nation” but also that of ‘most favoured domestic merchants’. Through this agreement, the British were referred to as a millet, a term that legally recognised the group by the state, and was thus discreetly included alongside other millets (sects or nations), that resided within the Ottoman domains. The American missionaries, who counted as part of the British millet gained tremendously from the Balta Liman agreement.

Recounting the scene of the Last Supper, St John writes in 13:4, that upon finishing the meal, Jesus ‘riseth from supper, and laid aside his garments; and took a towel and girded himself’. When Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq sat down to translate those words into Arabic, he chuckled to himself, took note, and later commented on the verse in a polemical manuscript entitled Mumahakat al-taʼwil fi Munaqadat al-Injil (Squabbles and Disputations over Gospel Interpretations, 1851). He was still in the employment of the British SPCK, working with the Chair of Oriental Studies at Cambridge Rev. Samuel Lee (1783–1852) on translating the Bible, when he began to circulate this manuscript amongst a trusted group of friends. In it, al-Shidyaq ridicules the narrative produced in the Bible. He writes

This was the first book al-Shidyaq circulated that was not on commission from the missionaries. Keeping it in manuscript and never printing it, al-Shidyaq controlled its circulation. Nevertheless, with this small book, al-Shidyaq sets the framework through which he would define his literary vocation.

Literature as he contended was irreverent; not even the Bible was too divine for its whimsical exploits. His is what Emily Apter would have characterised as a ‘dispossessive stance’ that cast the Bible ‘as an unownable estate, a literature over which no one exerts propriety prerogative and which lends itself to a critical turn that puts the problem of property possession front and center’. Dispossessing the Bible through carnal acts of reading, al-Shidyaq recuperates the literary as a critical possibility that questions the precepts of capitalist relations of production in the scholarly and authorial professions. Through working towards a new conception of adab, al-Shidyaq wrestled with the modalities of alienated labour as a Bible translator. Through metaphors of literary consumption, he reconciled his labour with the whims and desires of the authorial self and evolved a notion of adab that emanates in concrete and intimate ways from the body and its activities.

Edinburgh Studies in Modern Arabic Literature is a unique series that aims to fill a glaring gap in scholarship in the field of modern Arabic literature. Its dedication to Arabic literature in the modern period (that is, from the nineteenth century onwards) is what makes it unique among series undertaken by academic publishers in the English-speaking world. Individual books on modern Arabic literature in general or aspects of it have been and continue to be published sporadically. Series on Islamic studies and Arab/ Islamic thought and civilisation are not in short supply either in the academic world, but these are far removed from the study of Arabic literature qua literature, that is, imaginative, creative literature as we understand the term when, for instance, we speak of English literature or French literature. Even series labelled ‘Arabic/Middle Eastern Literature’ make no period distinction, extending their purview from the sixth century to the present, and often including non-Arabic literatures of the region. This series aims to redress the situation by focusing on the Arabic literature and criticism of today, stretching its interest to the earliest beginnings of Arab modernity in the nineteenth century. The need for such a dedicated series, and generally for the redoubling of scholarly endeavour in researching and introducing modern Arabic literature to the Western reader, has never been stronger. Among activities and events heightening public, let alone academic, interest in all things Arab, and not least Arabic literature, are the significant growth in the last decades of the translation of contemporary Arab authors from all genres, especially fiction, into English; the higher profile of Arabic literature internationally since the award of the Nobel Prize in Literature to Naguib Mahfouz in 1988; the growing number of Arab authors living in the Western diaspora and writing both in English and Arabic; the adoption of such authors and others by mainstream, high-circulation publishers, as opposed to the academic publishers of the past; and the establishment of prestigious prizes, such as the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, popularly referred to in the Arab world as the Arabic Booker, run by the Man Booker Foundation, which brings huge publicity to the shortlist and winner every year, as well as translation contracts into English and other languages.

A Global Perspective on the Commoditisation of the Arabic Bible

The nineteenth century marked the commoditisation of the Bible around the world. Protestant missionaries circulated the Bible and negotiated its value in various locations and across disparate cultures and religions through an unprecedented process of exchange. Choosing to travel the world to translate the Bible, they defined ‘the first object of a Protestant mission … to give the word of God to a people in their own tongue, wherein they were born, and in which the family converses at home’. This object was dependent on turning the Bible into a cheap commodity, within financial reach of most local consumers. Its economic status was steered towards a ‘situation in which its exchangeability (past, present, or future) for some other thing [became] its socially relevant feature’. American and British missionaries proselytised, translated and disseminated Bibles in a multitude of vernaculars. When these regions did not possess Bibles written in their languages (or even written languages as such), such as in New Zealand, parts of Latin America or Africa, the missionaries worked well in advance to supply those communities, sometimes with a written language and then with Bibles in local tongues. In earlier centuries, the Bible had been available in the vernaculars of European and Levantine societies. In the nineteenth century, the Bible was translated into more than ninety languages, becoming the most translated book in the world, running into several million print editions. Translating to convert, the missionaries equated the act of reading with conversion, and laboured to proliferate literacy amongst the locals. The exponential growth of Bible dissemination and publishing ‘helped seed different forms of nationalism’. In the Levant, as elsewhere, these nationalisms were fomented with feelings of sectarian exceptionalism that characterise the labour of conversion.

Languages such as Arabic, which already had a tradition of vernacular Bible translation, exhibit the historically contingent dynamics of this commoditisation. It thus becomes possible to explore precisely what changed in the nineteenth century through a diachronic comparison with versions of the Bible from earlier epochs. This chapter charts the changes in the relations of exchange that the Bible mediates (as well as occludes) when commoditisation becomes its most salient feature.

When the Bible began to proliferate in vernacular translations around the world of ancient antiquity, it was not language that the churches cared for, but the capacity of the church and its adherents to interpret the Bible within accepted creeds. Nevertheless, biblical translation has been at the root of many of the schisms that would befall the ancient, as well as the modern churches, and that ultimately caused the creation of various sects within Christianity. Until the nineteenth century, the place of translation in the history of Christian churches has been an internal matter, of relevance only to the Christian nation. With the advent of nineteenth-century colonial rule, this history gained importance, particularly because European colonialism provided opportunities for Protestant and Catholic missionaries to spread newly-translated vernacular Bibles around the world. These Bibles, as I have shown through studying the Arabic case, rose to prominence as key modern texts that were part of a sweeping moment of language synchronisation around the world, constructing kinship ties with languages that previously had little to do with one another.

With the American ability to produce cheap Bible editions, translations became available on the book market and had an impact beyond the ready audience of local Christians who were the immediate target buyers for these objects. This impact has led to a dominant narrative that the Bible modernised Arabic language and literature and caused its revitalisation and its nahda. I have argued in this book for the necessity of more nuance, if we are to better understand what the concept of ‘modernity’ entailed when applied to Arabic and to Bibles. I have instead claimed that the standardisation that Arabic underwent in the modern Arabic Bibles departed in style and glossary from the tradition of Biblia Arabica that includes hundreds of translations of the Bible into Arabic. This departure led to a concomitant change in the conceptualisation of grammar and lexicon, how we conceive of these as sciences that can be taught to children and adults. I also argued that these are sciences that exert much political force in enabling certain master narratives to permeate the structure of language and how it is taught.

This is an account by Jonas King to the periodical The Missionary Herald about the conversion of As‘ad al-Shidyaq. As‘ad, brother of Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq, was the first Arab convert and martyr to Protestantism. In this scene we encounter him performing an istikhara: a practice of scriptural reading that seeks to intuit the future.

The death of Eli Smith in 1857 disentangled Butrus al-Bustani from his engagements with the Syria mission, and his career as a Bible translator came to an end. Two years before Smith’s death, this friend and mentor had left him a long letter explaining why his candidacy for the position of minister of the evangelical church in Beirut had been rejected. As Smith writes, al-Bustani had acquired a ‘secular rather than spiritual’ reputation, as a ‘man of great intelligence’, whose skills and contribution to the secular betterment of the people can be seen in his dedication to ‘secular business whichever be of the literary kind that would leave for the pastorate a divided mind and heart which would certainly stand in the way of success’. Fearing that al-Bustani may become too distracted by his literary pursuits from the work of the ministry, Smith might have triggered al-Bustani’s release from the burden of spiritual responsibilities that he was carrying throughout his employment with the missionaries. Under no legal obligation to honour his contract upon the death of one of the signatory parties, al-Bustani left the Bible unfinished, in the care of Cornelius Van Dyck, his friend and colleague, who would carry out the task of the full translation of the continuous text mostly alone, aided only by the Muslim sheikh Yusuf al-Asir, as copy-editor. Al-Bustani went on to build a literary legacy that he envisioned as part of modernising Arab society and a propellor for its progress. This legacy included newspapers, lexicons and literary translations. In all these endeavours, translation was the primary tool that was deployed for the production of texts.

This chapter presents al-Bustani as a translator. By starting it with the point of release from biblical labour, I reveal how the interruption in al-Bustani’s trajectory was overcome through turning to the Bible and to translation as the root and method that anchored his secular endeavours. Al-Bustani’s later work, I argue, embodies one of the great paradoxes of modernity, in how he decided to base his secular thinking on religious thought. The secular inversion, as I show, represses the extent to which the modernity he advocated for was based on religious assumptions.

Introduction

The title of this chapter is inspired by Ge Liangyan'swonderful study of the development of Chinesevernacular fiction. Ge's book tackles variousquestions of vernacularization and the rise of a newliterary vernacular in late imperial China throughthe lens of what he calls ‘the Shuihu complex’ and its eventualcrystallization in Shuihuzhuan 水滸傳. But whereas Ge's title alludesto generic and societal margins – the marginalizedposition of xiaoshuo小說 narrative in traditional China and the liminalsocial status of the protagonists in The Water Margin – my focushere is literally on the margins of the page,whether printed or (more especially) manuscript. Andmy focus is on late-Chosŏn Korea (1392-1897) and itsencounter with precisely the sort of literaryvernacular Sinitic that Ge studies in his book.

The title of the conference at which this chapter wasfirst presented was ‘Accessing “Baihua” in Korea and Vietnam, with aFocus on the Reception of the Xixiangji’, but please note the scarequotes around the problematic term ‘baihua’ 白話. As so manyresearchers have been quick to point out, the termsbaihua and wenyan 文言, as well as theiralleged antagonism in earlier times, aretwentieth-century inventions and legacies of the MayFourth movement. Harbsmeier reminds us that ‘theterm baihua is asmodern as the term wenyan.

By one count, as many as two hundred different works oflate imperial Chinese fiction found readers inChosŏn Korea (1392-1910). Among them, only fourtitles – Shuihuzhuan水滸傳 (The WaterMargin), Xixiangji 西廂 記 (TheRomance of the Western Wing), Xiyouji 西遊記 (The Journey to the West),and Sanguozhiyanyi三國志演義 (The Romance of the ThreeKingdoms), the first three of whichoverlapping with the ‘four masterworks of the Mingnovel’ – gave rise to reading aids known as ‘sosŏl ŏrokhae’ 小說語 錄解(‘glossaries of colloquialisms found in [Chinese]vernacular fiction’). Previous researchers haveargued that fiction glossaries helped Chosŏn readersto grasp the meaning of words that are difficult tounderstand (nanhaeŏ難解語). Their argument is that fiction glossariesemerged in response to the spread of Chinesevernacular fiction (paekhwasosŏl 白話小 說; ‘fictional works written ina plain style’) in Chosŏn, where the educatedpopulation acquired literacy in Literary Sinitic(hanmun 漢文) withoutany knowledge of spoken Chinese (hanŏ 漢語) and thereforelacked knowledge of plain Chinese (paekhwa 白話). Firstintroduced in the 1930s, this standard explanationcontinues to hold sway even though it offers only apartial picture of the cultural significance offiction glossaries and the late Chosŏn literarylandscape that fostered them.

Introduction

In 1714-1715, the renowned Japanese Confucian scholarOgyū Sorai 荻生徂 徠 (1666-1728) published Yakubun sentei 譯文筌蹄 (A Tool for Translation,editor's note 1711), an aid for Sinitic studies. Inthe ‘Prefatory Remarks in Ten Principles’ (Daigen jussoku 題言十則) to thiswork, Sorai offered his views on ‘Chinese language’(Chūka gengo中華言語):

What did Sorai mean by ‘Chūkagengo’? Both the term gen and the term go suggest a spokencomponent. The character gen 言 (Ch. yan) stresses spoken words and go 語 (Ch. yu) means words to state orto conversate. The supposed written traces of thevanished spoken words are also called gen or go. By using gengo rather than bun 文 (Ch. wen; pattern, writing, composition),Sorai was emphasizing speech rather thanwriting.

In the early period of the Russo-Sino-Japanesetriangular relationship, language transformation wasone of the pivotal effects to emerge from theintroduction of Russian literature into East Asia.As Karen Thornber points out, ‘The many versions ofbaihua (the newwritten vernacular) that proliferated in China inthe 1920s were hybrids not only of classicalChinese, the premodern vernacular, and contemporarycolloquial speech but also of Japanese and westernsyntactical structures.’ Most scholarly discussionof language reform in China has focused on thenegotiation between China and Western Europeanlanguages; however, new insights can arise when weturn to the often-overlooked role of the Russianlanguage in East Asian language reform.

The translation of Russian texts was one of theearliest and most crucial ways that Japanese andChinese writers engaged with the Western world. Theintroduction of Russian literature into East Asiatested the ability of Japanese and Chinesetranslators to work at the limits of their ownlanguages’ intelligibility. Many aspects of theRussian language could not readily be translatedinto Japanese or Chinese; meanwhile, those languageshad developed an integrated system ofself-presentation, honed over thousands of years ofpractice, which made it less amenable to abruptcultural change. On the other hand, though, theattempts to reconcile them led to literaryinnovation in both Japanese and Chinese.