Reading Darwin in Arabic, 1860-1950

448 Pages·2014·1.76 MB·English

by  Marwa Elshakry

Reading Darwin in Arabic,
1860–1950

Reading Darwin in Arabic,
1860–1950
MARWA ELSHAKRY
The University of Chicago Press
Chicago and London
Publication of this book has been aided by a grant from the Bevington Fund.
Marwa Elshakry is associate professor in the Department of History at
Columbia University, where she specializes in the history of science,
technology, and medicine in the modem Middle East.
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2013 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. Published 2013.
Printed in the United States of America
22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 1 2 3 4 5
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-00130-2 (cloth)
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-00144-9 (e-book)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Elshakry, Marwa, 1973–
Reading Darwin in Arabic, 1860-1950 / Marwa ElShakry.
pages. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-226-00130-2 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-226-00144-9
(e-book) 1. Evolution—Religious aspects—Islam. 2. Darwin, Charles,
1809–1882. 3. Islam and science. I. Title.
BP190.5.E86E47 2013
297.2′65—dc23
2013009170
This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992
(Permanence of Paper).
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments / vii
INTRODUCTION / 1
ONE / The Gospel of Science / 25
TWO / Evolution and the Eastern Question / 73
THREE / Materialism and Its Critics / 99
FOUR / Theologies of Nature / 131
FIVE / Darwin and the Mufti / 161
SIX / Evolutionary Socialism / 219
SEVEN / Darwin in Translation / 261
Afterword / 307
Notes / 319
Bibliography / 391
Index / 419

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Much of the time that went into this book was spent reading texts through
layers of translation: Darwin in Arabic, or Haeckel, originally in German
but rendered into Arabic from a French translation. One American mis-
sionary translating the Bible into Arabic in the mid-nineteenth century
complained of having piled words “six or seven deep and high, above and
below nearly every important word in the line,” which he then carefully
vetted with a native speaker. All translations are multiple, and so I, too,
like some of the characters in this book, often had to weigh literal fi delity
against meaning when translating. If, as I quickly learned, writing is a col-
lective effort, reading in and writing about translation is doubly so. Over
many years, everyone from language tutors to my mother was conscripted
to gloss over translations, read texts with me, and check on embedded
meanings. It was they who often helped make sense of particular idioms,
expressions, verses, or references that would have otherwise escaped me. Of
course, all oversights and errors remain mine.
I have also relied on the ideas and scholarship of many people. I would
like to thank in particular Peter Buck, Graham Burnett, Angela Creager,
Omnia El Shakry, Khaled Fahmy, Carol Gluck, Thomas Gluck, Matthew
Jones, Mark Mazower, James Moore, Steven Shapin, Pamela Smith, Daniel
Stoltz, Bob Tignor, and many other conference participants, students, and
colleagues who read drafts of chapters. Conversations with Tamara Griggs,
Samira Haj, Shruti Kapila, Rashid Khalidi, Suzanne Marchand, Elizabeth
Merchant, Gyan Prakash, Samah Selim, Pamela Smith, and numerous oth-
ers also helped me. Echoes of the late Gerald Geison can be found through-
out the text, and I shall always regret that I was not able to show it to him
in its fi nal iteration.
A special thanks goes to my favorite book dealer, Muhammad ʿAli, for
viii / Acknowledgments
tracking down many rare and scarce items in Cairo. My thanks, too, to li-
brarians and archivists at the Egyptian National Library (particularly the
periodicals room), the American University of Beirut, and the Zahiriya
Mosque at Damascus, as well as at the archives and special collections at
Amherst, Yale, Harvard, and Princeton. I would also like to gratefully ac-
knowledge Ahmed Ragab and Ays¸e Ozil for their help with researching and
collecting materials for this project. Ays¸e located fi les and manuscripts in
the Ottoman Archives for chapter 4, while Ahmed referenced a number of
newspaper and journal articles toward the end of this project’s revisions.
Ahmed also helped me read through stacks of handwritten Arabic materi-
als from the khedival collection at Durham University for chapter 5.
For their generous funding and support I thank the Carnegie Corpo-
ration, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies, the British Academy,
Harvard University, and Columbia University. The Social Science Research
Council, the American Research Center in Egypt, and Princeton University
were critical in the early phase of my research. The editors at the University
of Chicago Press and especially my long-suffering copy editor, Pamela Bru-
ton, have been wonderfully supportive. My thanks too to Marc Saint-Upery
for reviewing the transliterations, and to June Sawyers for the index.
Finally, I was fortunate to have family on both sides of the Atlantic who
always managed to strike the right balance between forbearing curiosity
and discreet encouragement. My parents’ and sisters’ patience and good
humor were critical; in many ways, they have lived with this book as long
as I have. Omnia in particular offered inspiration from the start. Lastly, I
owe my greatest debt to Mark. He had to take on a dizzying number of
roles during much of the research and writing of the book—interlocutor,
critic, confi dante, and much, much more. Meanwhile, at least two of our
creative collaborations have also provided the best distraction to it. My
debt to him, to Selma, and to Jed is beyond words.
INTRODUCTION
“This journey in the East, especially in Egypt and Greece, marked a new
epoch in my thinking,” wrote the American diplomat and educator An-
drew Dickson White after his travels there in 1888–89. “I became more
and more impressed with the continuity of historical causes, and realized
more and more how easily and naturally have grown the myths and leg-
ends which have delayed the unbiased observation of human events and
the scientifi c investigation of natural laws.”1 White had recently stepped
down from serving as the fi rst president of Cornell University and was a
fi gure of some renown: his serialized study of the “warfare of science with
theology in Christendom” had (along with fellow American John Draper’s
1874 History of the Confl ict between Religion and Science) sealed the view for
many that Darwin’s theory of evolution constituted the “fi nal victory of sci-
ence” in its clash with “myths and legends.”2 Amid excursions to the usual
sights (fi g. I.1) and while visiting with English, Ottoman, and Egyptian of-
fi cials, White made the acquaintance of “an especially interesting man of
a different sort”3—one who turned out to know quite a lot about White
already.4
This “interesting man” was a recent émigré from Ottoman Syria called
Faris Nimr. White was “amazed to fi nd in his library a large collection of
English and French books, scientifi c and literary—among them the ‘New
York Scientifi c Monthly’ containing my own articles, which he had done
me the honor to read” (fi g. I.2).5 Indeed Nimr’s extensive subscription list
included the (New York–based) Popular Science Monthly, as well as many
other English and American science magazines and numerous book titles
in English and French.
Nimr and White turned out to share a surprising amount. Both men
were avid bibliophiles, for instance. The fi fty-six-year-old widower was