The Modern Arabic Bible traces the history of Bible translation into Arabic in the nineteenth century and its emergence as a foundational text of Arab modernity. Positioning the Bible within the context of the Arab nahda and the accompanying colonial context, this book compares Arabic Bible translations, and analyses how production processes had consequences on formative debates about Arabic language and literature in the nineteenth century. By focusing on Aḥmad Fāris al-Shidyāq and Buṭrus al-Bustānī as the local collaborators with Anglophone Protestant missionaries that supervised the translation and dissemination of the Arabic Bible, this book shows that while the missionaries intended to synchronize with global Bible translation guidelines wherever they worked, the local translators succeeded in articulating their own visions of Arabic language and literature in the process of translation. These visions are crucial for Arabic literary history since the nineteenth century.
Rana Issa is a scholar and cultural activist. She works at the intersection public humanities, activist engagements, and scholarly curiosity. She is Artistic director of
masahat.no as well as a full-time writer and translator. She is currently writing a bilingual (Norwegian, Arabic) queer memoir on motherhood, with support from the Norwegian Union for Non-Fiction Writers and Translators, The Free Word Foundation, and AFAC. Her play Incontinence was staged by Rabih Morue and Lina Majdalani in their cryptic Heresies that premiered in Theatre Vidy in Lausanne in Jan 2023.
Ingeborg Fossestøl is a PhD candidate in history at the University of Oslo. Her research focuses on late Ottoman intellectual history, notably on the emergence of reading public(s), multilingualism in Istanbul print culture, and the late Ottoman periodic press. She has also translated authors like Burhan Sönmez, Orhan Pamuk, and Aslı Erdoǧan from Turkish to Norwegian.
Interview with Rana Issa from Jadaliyya
The event is free and open to all - coffee, tea, pastries.