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We have noted before that the Islamic tendency to consign all non-Muslim achievement to the realm of jahiliyya -- the society of unbelievers, which is worthless trash -- has led to a certain closed-door tendency both historically and today. When, in defiance of this tendency, the door was opened a bit to non-Muslim knowledge and experience, the Islamic world flourished. When the door was closed again, or dhimmi communities utterly stripped of intellectual and financial resources, Islamic culture and society likewise suffered. In modern times, fewer books have been translated into Arabic than into almost any other major human language; here is an initiative to change all that.
Which brings me to my question: which books do you think ought to be slated next for translation? Let's help out the good folks in Abu Dhabi and make a list here.
By James Adams in the Globe and Mail (thanks to the Constantinopolitan Irredentist):
It's been 375 years since Galileo published his earth-shaking Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, 336 since John Milton wrote Paradise Regained and nearly 40 since James D. Watson had an apparent international bestseller with The Double Helix, about the discovery of the structure of DNA. Amazingly, however, none of these books, and thousands of classics like them, has ever been translated into Arabic, the first tongue of more than 300 hundred million persons worldwide. Indeed, according to a 2003 United Nations report into human development in the Arab world, more books are translated into Spanish each year – 10,000 – than have been translated into Arabic in the previous 10 centuries.Now this situation is being rectified by the sheikhdom of Abu Dhabi, one of the seven Muslim United Arab Emirates, which last month officially revealed its plans to translate 100 epochal foreign-language texts into Arabic by the end of next year.
The translations, from 16 languages including Latin, Japanese and ancient Greek, are being undertaken by Kalima, a non-profit corporation established earlier this year by Egyptian entrepreneur and former McKinsey & Co. management consultant Karim Nagy. Kalima – Arabic for “word” – is being funded almost entirely by the Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage, that city-state's equivalent to the Department of Canadian Heritage.
Six books are scheduled to be published early next year, their eclecticism reflecting what Nagy deems “the real gaps in the Arab library.” They are Umberto Eco's The Sign, a history of semiotics; The Halo Effect and the Eight Other Business Delusions that Deceive Managers by Philip Rosenzweig; The Future of Human Nature, an examination of genetic engineering by the noted neo-Marxist philosopher and sociologist Jurgen Habermas; Stephen Hawking's A Briefer History of Time;, Kafka on the Shore, a novel by Haruki Murakami; and Charlemagne, Muhammad and the Arab Roots of Capitalism by Gene W. Heck. So far four publishers, most based in Beirut, have signed on as partners for the program, including Centre Culturel Arabe and Arab Scientific Publishers.
Posted by Robert at December 13, 2007 9:03 AM
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Let's start with the
Old and then the New Testament, then
Melville,
Shakespeare,
and then the writings (when he's not ranting about US foreign policy and BDS) of Hugh, and of course then some books by Robert Spencer.
(no pandering here).
Posted by: dgene![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.jihadwatch.org/nav-commenters.gif)
at December 13, 2007 9:18 AM
1. All the Ibn Warraq, Spencer, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and anything else along those lines that you can smuggle in.
2. Personal preference: Douglas Adams (though transliterating "Slartibartfast" and other names will initially hold up publication).
3. For whatever titles are included, make sure the translations are trustworthy. Just to make sure the market isn't flooded with copies of I'm Ok, You're Not Ok, Infidel; The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Apes and Pigs, and so on.
Posted by: MarisolJW at December 13, 2007 9:34 AM
Plato The Laws
Anything by Spencer or Ibn Warraq or Shoebat
Good grief...try anything from the Classics section, prior to 1900. I've read everything from Beowulf to George Orwell, so I can't decide. Just pick one...anything should be enlightening enough at this point.
Posted by: Miss_Anthrope at December 13, 2007 9:37 AM
from above:
". . .non-profit corporation established earlier this year by Egyptian entrepreneur and former McKinsey & Co. management consultant Karim Nagy."
Nagy . . . a magyar surname. One suspects that Karim is a first or second generation believer, which would help explain the desire to explore jahiliyya on a non-profit basis.
Posted by: justamomof4 at December 13, 2007 9:39 AM
Why I am Not a Muslim. I. Warraq
Posted by: USorThem at December 13, 2007 9:41 AM
Going for the obvious: The Satanic Verses, by Salman Rushdie.
Then maybe Manly Wade Wellman's last novel, about a heroic woman warrior who resisted the Muslim onslaught, Cahena.
Posted by: Karl Pov at December 13, 2007 9:41 AM
More about #3 in my comment above: What's happened to translations of classics in Turkey should provide a cautionary tale:
http://www.jihadwatch.org/dhimmiwatch/archives/012907.php
Posted by: MarisolJW at December 13, 2007 9:49 AM
"Now They Call me Infidel," Nonie Darwish.
All Spencer books, of course. (Hey - required reading, lol!)
Kafka, "The Trial"
Posted by: darcy at December 13, 2007 9:54 AM
Any word on if the books will be edited? Or will they be allowed in their full glory?
Posted by: John_Doe at December 13, 2007 9:55 AM
I think an open-minded Arab might recognize some glaring parallels between Islamic thought and the horror worlds of Orwell's "1984" and Kafka's "The Trial."
Posted by: JohnAdams at December 13, 2007 10:03 AM
Arab and other moslem populations tend to have the lowest literacy rates in the world. It is not a coincidence that in following the example of islam's "perfect" human, Mohammed, literacy has little importance. Indeed, mohammed was illiterate. Also, those of us who have read the koran know it is an incomprehensible chant not meant to be read but rather to be recited. It is meant to be recited and is not to be understood. I estimate that 95% of all practicing moslems half no ability to read the koran.
One of the positive benefits of a literacy drive among moslems may be that then moslems may read their koran and thereby see that it contains certain obvious errors, inconsistencies and immoralities that contradict and perhaps nullifies its authority.
Posted by: David England at December 13, 2007 10:08 AM
Classics, huh?
Plato's Republic
Augustine's Confession
Divine Comedy
Paradise Lost
Pilgrims Progress
Summa Theologica
Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos
Rights of Man
Democracy in America
Uncle Tom's Cabin
Declaration of Independence
Brothers Karamazov
1984
at December 13, 2007 10:11 AM
Abu Dhabi? The Authority for Culture and Heritage? The Arab Roots of Capitalism?
Forgive me for being skeptical, but I think I see where this is going--namely, the following perversions: all truth stems ultimately from the Koran, everything good ever created in the world sprang up from the perfection of Islam, all Western accomplishments are actually built on an Islamic foundation, the Muslims are backward today because the evil Western colonialists repressed them, etc. etc.
Who is doing the translating, and who is doing the verification of the translations? What "modifications" are being inflicted, if any, to the original texts? For instance, will God be translated as "Allah"? Will all the female characters, in whatever roles, be re-costumed to protect Islamic sensitivities? Will historical events be altered to fit the Islamic narrative of their inherent superiority and unjust victimhood?
If this translation of great Western works into Arabic is done at all (and I am not sure it should, because of the Islamic penchant for turning all that is good and useful into destructive weapons in service to jihad), it should be done and supervised by informed Westerners (that is, people with integrity--the pre-Edward Said "orientalist" Westerners) as part of a serious counter-jihad campaign.
at December 13, 2007 10:22 AM
Of course Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, demonstrating the difference between a moral code derived from religious teaching (it's Huck's duty to return the slave Jim to the widow woman he ran away from) and one derived from the gut ("All right then, I'll go to hell").
Posted by: Karl Pov at December 13, 2007 10:26 AM
What a strange hodge-podge those first half-dozen titles are, and how unsatisfactory if they represent what is to come:
For example, Umberto Eco on semiotics, for an Arab audience that, even if it is a small and select audience, has nothing at all available by way of mental preparation, no Thomas Sebeok, no C.S.Pierce, nor a few dozen others, nothing to show the history or the development of the subject. It would be like suddenly offering John Rawls in Arabic, or the latest answer to Rawls, for an audience that has never read, never heard of, Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau.
"The Halo Effect and the Eight Other Business Delusions that Deceive Managers" sounds depressingly as if it is one more of those Business Book Club things, the kind of thing that might be sold at a bookstore, if that bookstore is the campus bookstore of Babson or Harvard or Wharton or some other such place, or bought by would-be tycoons, the kind of people who like such words as "dynamic" and "organizational."
Is such a book one of the first that needs to be translated into Arabic, for people who have all the money in the world, obtained in the easiest way possible, and who are not about to start working if they don't have to? Should one not tranlate books that are not intended to make them money, but to save their souls, or at least to offer them the possibility of beginning to think, beginning to question?
And what (the) Heck's book, "Charlemagne, Muhammad and the Arab Roots of Capitalism" is doing on the list is anyone's guess, except that it is obviously designed to make "capitalism" palatable by appealing to self-esteem of Arab readers, as if they need to be pandered to, told (inaccurately) that capitalsim originates in the practices of the Arabs, if they are to accept the idea, or at least to buy the book. But this simply reinforces what such a translation project should up-end: the Islamic supremacism within which is Arab supremacism, and which needs not to be reinforced but weakened and undone.
[The title, of course, is a play on Henri Pirenne's "Charlemagne and Muhammad," a book written about 1920, in which the Belgian historian argued that the conquest of formerly Christian North Africa by the Muslims, and that conquest sealing off Europe from its former trade with Africa and Asia, helped to push northward the center of economic (and political) gravity in Europe. (The "Pirenne thesis" has in turn been disputed by later historians, notably by Robert Lopez]
As for Murakami, if something Japanese is wanted, by start with a brand-new author when Japan is, like almost all of the rest of the world, hardly known even to educated Arabs? What about Blyth on Haiku, just to start with? Or still better, Murasaki Shikibu, to make sure a woman writer is prominently given her due, and some sense of history, rather than up-to-date manga-and- pachinko-parlor Japanese in their encounter with the equally up-to-date West?
There is no evidence of thought or plan or system behind this list.
Posted by: Hugh
at December 13, 2007 10:39 AM
The Nazis already had all these Western classics translated into German, as did the Soviets into Russian. Did translations of the finest Western literature tame those savages, or ameliorate their rampage through history? Hell, the societies in which Nazism and Communism grew were the authors of some of the greatest works!
People who cling to the notion that this hollow gesture by an Arab barbarian has any meaning are fooling themselves.
When I was a child there was a cartoon character named "Glum" on a show I barely rember any details about. He had basically one line to deliver, and it seems appropriate here:
"It'll never work."
I can already hear the infantile claims by all the Muslims about the "insult to Islam". I can already see the violent tantrum/riots by "the Arab street"' (that discerning focus group...)
Among the moderate Muslims, I can already hear their endless insane claims that "Shakespeare was a Muslim", and that Muslims invented poetry, ink, pens, quills, words, the printing press, and gravity. Western classics are wasted on such people, as is Westen capital, Western medicine and technology, and Western generosity. They will figure out some hideous grotesque way to ruin these translations, to Islamize them so as not to 'offend'. They will threaten or kill the publisher, they will burn the books. They will use the books as just another pretext to wage jihad, as the Muslims do with anything that upends their cancerous creed. Those classics of Western lit will somehow help to spread their nightmare of Islam. Somehow we'll be bled. Somehow we'll be blamed for it all.
Posted by: jsla at December 13, 2007 10:49 AM
But here's a different half-dozen:
Henry Osborn Taylor, Freedom of the Mind In History
Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian
Ibn Warraq, Why I Am Not A Muslim
Rousseau, The Social Contract
Mill, On Liberty
Barzun, From Dawn To Decadence
at December 13, 2007 11:00 AM
The Truth about Muhammad: Founder of the World's Most Intolerant Religion - Robert Spencer
Posted by: DaveMate at December 13, 2007 11:17 AM
Since they are so illiterate, I suggest we start with "Fun with Dick and Jane".
What does it matter anyway? Once the wonderful books suggested above are translated and read, the muslims will likely claim Mohammed wrote - or at least inspired - them all, anyhow.
Posted by: ImNoDhimmi at December 13, 2007 11:20 AM
"Religion of Peace" by Robert Spencer -- this book should be required reading by all Christians, and by all civilized people everywhere.
The US Constitution
The Heritage Guide to the Constitution, by Edwin Meese III
How about the jihadwatch and dhimmiwatch websites, or selected portions of them?
Posted by: PersonOfTheBook at December 13, 2007 11:52 AM
My list:
"Thermodynamic Properties of Steam" by Keenan and Keys
Light Reading -
"Lady Chatterly's Lover"
"Tom Jones"
"On Her Majesty's Secret Service"
"The Joy of Sex"
"The Maltese Falcon"
Any translation must have this disclaimer:
"This translation is actually an interpretation which has been translated, and hence cannot be equated with the originl in its English form.
Posted by: Pelayo at December 13, 2007 12:00 PM
"Horton Hears a Who" is a good book.
at December 13, 2007 12:20 PM
My choices:
at December 13, 2007 12:30 PM
Infidel Pride, My use of the common disclaimer concerning Quran translations was an attempt at sarcasm. It was obviously rather lame.
Posted by: Pelayo at December 13, 2007 12:42 PM
Danger!
How long before the Western classics, conveniently reinterpreted and sanitized for Arabic/Muslim supremacist thoughtcontrol, become the "true" versions of the text. They obfuscate everything else.
After all, it's their world. We're just making it livable.
Posted by: JohnAdams at December 13, 2007 12:44 PM
Furthermore how long before English or French or Greek speaking people no longer understand the nuance of the texts once translated into Arabic?
Posted by: JohnAdams at December 13, 2007 12:50 PM
A little European classical music wouldn't hurt the Arab world either. With all the ugliness dumped into their spirits from birth, something of the grace, beauty and majesty of a Beethoven or Mozart might have a liberating effect on the darkened minds Islam locked them into.
Posted by: rational at December 13, 2007 1:07 PM
...how long will it take for the first shop to stock and sell these books to be firebombed and its owner/operator dragged out into the street and exectuted?.....Imagine the horror on the mad Jihadists manning the Islamic checkpoints when they discover a copy of Moby Dick or Tale of Two Cities in the front seat....or one of the books by R.S. under the seat.....or a copy of Salman Rushies "Satanic Verses".....These mad Jihadists are not interested a good book whether fiction or non fiction......the only book they revere is the evil text "Qur'an", for it gives them all the inspiration they need to justify violence, rape, pillage, extortion, domination, and the collection of jiyzah....
Ban Muslim Immigration
Posted by: exsgtbrown at December 13, 2007 1:26 PM
...Arabic, the first tongue of more than 300 hundred million persons worldwide....
I'm afraid that's a bit of an overestimate. 300 hundred million is 30,000,000 -- about 5 times the population of the planet.
Someone having trouble with the Hindu-Arabic (actually Hindu-Assyrian) number system?
at December 13, 2007 2:08 PM
How about the complete Christopher Hitchens collection?
At minimum, Robert Spencer's last 3 books.
Posted by: Archimedes2 at December 13, 2007 2:13 PM
"Fahrenheit 451" ... "Clockwork Orange" .. "1984" ... etc etc
Posted by: drk at December 13, 2007 2:25 PM
Animal Farm
Lord of the Flies
Atlas Shrugged
To really get the talk hopping in the tea shops, anything by Ann Coulter, Bill O'Reilly, and Pat Buchanan
And the one book surely to put them asleep: War and Peace.
Lots and lots of children's picture books.
at December 13, 2007 2:29 PM
Archimedes, To an American three hundred million is 300,000,000. I think the Brits and the Americans have a different usage for million and billion. But I think it is just our lingo, not the actual NUMBER. Did you make a typo when you wrote that 30,000,000 (thirty million) is 5 times the population of planet earth? I'm not much of a math person, but that only seems like about six St. Louises to me.
Posted by: former liberal WF at December 13, 2007 2:38 PM
Yes, WF it was a typo. I meant 30,000,000,000. A hundred million is 100,000,000 and so "three hundred hundred million" should be 300 x 100,000,000,000, or 30,000,000,000. It makes no difference whether American or British -- the difference comes when one uses the word "Billion", which is 1,000,000,000 in NA and 1,000,000,000,000 in GB.
I guess if I can make a typo then so can the author of this article. Takes the fun out of my comment.
Posted by: Archimedes2 at December 13, 2007 2:54 PM
I'm not sure the value of translating things they'll just ban anyway, but it's worth a try. For example, The True Furqan was originally penned in Arabic, but immediately banned in practically every country in Dar al-Islam. Fortunately it has been translated into English for our edification.
This book was supposed to be (1) an exact duplication of the literary style of the Qur'an, but refuting the teachings of the Qur'an, Mohammed's lifestyle and Islamic history.
But at the same time it is advertised as (2) containing "Prose and poetry of the highest caliber in classical Arabic". I'm not sure that (1) and (2) are consistent. I believe they have achieved goal (1), because apparently muslims who are read to out of the book often and asked what they had heard often respond that it was a familiar passage from the Qur'an. Also, the English translation has the same choppy, gutteral feel as the Qur'an, so from all I can tell they've nailed the style. Doesn't do justice to the subject matter of Sura 1, however, which is a rough paraphrase of I Cor. 13.
Whether they've achieved (2) I'll have to leave to those whose native language is Arabic.
Posted by: Archimedes2 at December 13, 2007 3:29 PM
The operative phrase here is pearls before swine.
Posted by: Seymour Paine at December 13, 2007 4:44 PM
"After all, it's their world. We're just making it livable."
Posted by: JohnAdams at December 13, 2007 12:44 PM
This is a gem! Mind if I take part in spreading this clever phrase?
Posted by: npabga at December 13, 2007 4:46 PM
Why not something fun? Start with easy stuff like Dr Seuss's Green Eggs and Ham or GO DOG GO, and then move into more advanced classics like Old Yeller and Pippi LongStockings, then into something more adult, such as Erma Bombeck's The Ties That Bind and Gag? Or If Life is a Bowl of Cherries, What Am I Doing In The Pits? And then finish off with a good Stephen King novel? Oh wait, King hasn't written anything scarier than the Koran. Although Pet Cemetery or Carrie (with pigs blood) might be fun.
Posted by: walterc at December 13, 2007 5:22 PM
Oh, let's confuse the hell out of them:
Tristram Shandy by Lawrence Sterne
Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais
A Modest Proposal by Johnathan Swift
That should keep them going for a while.
Posted by: USBeast at December 13, 2007 6:42 PM
Here are my suggestions for translation
1. The Bill of Rights of the US Constitution
2. Radical Eye for the Infidel Guy By Kevin J. Ryan
3. Godless by Ann Coulter
4. The Happy Hooker by Xaviera Hollander
5. Because they Hate: A Survivor of Islamic Terror
Warns America by Brigette Gabriel
at December 13, 2007 6:53 PM
It doesn't matter how much literature, philosophy or science one reads if one truly believes that one's fellow man is inferior to him because of religion, race, class or sexual orientation.
For, if one believes that Christians should not be allowed to openly practice Christianity in a Muslim country, or that Blacks are inferior to Arabs, or that homosexuals should be executed in order to cleanse one's culture, how many books one possesses in one's library is a moot point.
And, if one believes that men should exert total control over the lives of their wives and female relatives, no matter how abusive or degrading the man chooses to treat those in his care, one can safely assume that one's spiritual instruction has produced a state of disenlightenment.
But, if one merely wishes to get up to speed on pop culture, or psychobabble or bizspeak in order to maximize the influence of one's wealth through Sharia-compliant bonds paving the way for Sharia banking leading to Sharia law and Islamic despotism, then it would behoove one to understand one's inferiors. Not the inferiors one's religion already entitles one to abuse, enslave and annihilate, but the inferiors one is taught to yearn to abuse, enslave and annihilate as fulfillment of one's great purpose in the great fulfillment of seeking prey behind rocks and trees to please one's god.
Besides, thirsting and seeking after knowledge through great expense and labor so impresses the intellectuals in foreign democracies that one's great wealth and zeal are applied to great things,and that one is a cut above, on par with the cream of society and certainly not cut from that common cloth, like Lincoln or Jesus.
Posted by: BurkasforHitlery at December 14, 2007 1:16 AM
Four suggestions for books to translate:
"Paingod" -speculative fiction by Harlan Ellison.
"Enough Rope" -poetry by Dorothy Parker.
"The Origin of Consciousnesss in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" -psychological insights by Julian Jaynes.
and:
"The Evangelical Cockroach" -short stories by Jack Woodford.
That should keep them busy for 1350 years.
Posted by: profitsbeard at December 14, 2007 2:43 AM
dgene suggested 'the old and new testament'.
But the Bible has already been very carefully and accurately translated, into various forms of Arabic, from Classical Arabic, to at least some of the 'street Arabic' spoken in different parts of the Islamised, Arabised world, from North Africa to Mesopotamia. Moreover, some at least of these are available online...or read, over the radio.
It is being read, and heard, I assure you. Visit the websites of, for example, the Bible Society in: Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon and - yes - Iraq, and the Gulf.
The story goes that at least one discontented and curious Saudi Arabian Muslim, poking about online looking for something of interest, looked beyond porn and managed to find, shall we say, the REAL Book of Peace and Love. He's very happy, even though his life has become much more dangerous. And he isn't a Muslim any more.
Who knows how many others there may be? Who knows who is
downloading what, or taping what, from off the radio?
Sharia law forbids Jews and Christians from exhibiting, or reciting, their sacred books anywhere that a Muslim might conceivably read or hear them. Why? - the Bible does have a certain track record for, every now and again, deprogramming Muslims. 'Mark Gabriel'. Mohammed Hegazi. Walid Shoebat. And counting.
Once, illiteracy kept most Muslim women, and most Muslims, safe from potential contamination. But 'talking Bibles', podcasts, radio...you don't have to be able to read, any more.
On a much less serious note - I'd just love to watch a competent Arabist attempting to translate anything by Terry Pratchett! - e.g. "Guards, Guards", or "The Fifth Elephant", or "Carpe Jugulum", or "Lords and Ladies". Pratchett, I may add, regards, as the supreme crime, 'people treating other people as things'. He ABHORS murder, and supremacism of every kind.
Posted by: dumbledoresarmy at December 14, 2007 3:24 AM
Charlemagne, Muhammad and the Arab Roots of Capitalism by Gene W. Heck.
At first, I thought this title was a joke. I guess not.
Reading this makes me think of Rick's dealings with the fat man in Casablanca and my own experiences buying rugs from Turks.
Yeah, that's capitalism. Sure.
Maybe the same capitalism that was practiced by my mortgage company.
Posted by: Aunt Bea at December 14, 2007 6:52 AM
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