Triangular Translation: Interpreting Nahdawi Literary Production on China

Home , Egyptian Arabic, Egyptian literature, Theodore Roosevelt desk

Peiyu Yang

A thesis submitted to McGill University in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Institute of Islamic Studies McGill University May 2019

Dedicated to my parents and Fei

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT...... 4

RÉSUMÉ...... 5

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS...... 6

NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION...... 10

INTRODUCTION...... 11

CHAPTER 1 Ghadat al-Sin: Translational Practice in a 19th-Century Arabic Novel About China...... 45

CHAPTER 2 From Monster to Queen Victoria: Arabic Biography and the Empress Dowager of China...... 91

CHAPTER 3 Translating the Chinese Constitutional Revolution in Arabic Literary Journals...... 132

CHAPTER 4 Za’ir al-Sin: Translating a Chinese Anti-colonial Struggle for a Nahdawi Context...... 167

CONCLUSION ...... 210

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 219

ABSTRACT

This dissertation examines late 19th- and early 20th-century Arabic literary texts on China to challenge the Eurocentric scholarly assumption that writers in the Nahda period drew their models of modernity solely from Europe. Surviving only in fragmented and unexplored archives, a large body of Nahdawi literature set in China offers a new stage for understanding the political and social discourses that constituted Arab modernity projects. While existing understandings of the Nahda have emphasized the emergence of sovereign nation-states modelled on European countries, the aspirations that emerge from Nahdawi novels, journalism, biographies, and theatre focused on China define modernity as a process of establishing transnational, south-south relations. Nahdawis wrote about China not by reading Chinese works directly, but by translating European Orientalist sources on China into Arabic. This circuit of textual exchange requires a new analytic for unpacking the multi-lingual layers of mediation involved in Arabic interest in China. This dissertation develops the concept of “triangular translation” as an analytic to explore these contours. By contrast to the standard paradigm that views translation as a bi-directional transaction between two languages, Nahdawi literary texts dealing with China retain a trace of at least three linguistic layers: the original Chinese, Orientalist renderings in European languages, and translation into Arabic. Triangular translation as a model allows for the exploration of the possibilities that these deep textual elements opened up for staging questions in Arabic about constitutional reform and gender equality through the language of ethnographic engagement with Chinese culture. Shifting the mastery of the western gaze away from the Arab world, triangular translation shows a way to analyze how Arab culture redeploys that gaze in relation to the rest of the world, for specific political and cultural purposes tied to the establishment of a transnational regional identity.

RÉSUMÉ

Cette thèse analyse des textes littéraires arabes de la fin du XIXe - début du XXe siècle portant sur la Chine afin de défier le présupposé académique eurocentrique considérant que les auteurs de la Nahda empruntèrent leur modèle de la modernité uniquement à l'Europe. Survivant seulement sous la forme d'archives fragmentaires et inexplorées, un important corpus de littérature Nahdawi prenant place en Chine offre une nouvelle perspective à la compréhension des discours politiques et sociaux qui constituèrent les projets de modernité arabes. Alors que les conceptions existantes de la Nahda ont mis l'accent sur l'émergence d'états-nations souverains modelés sur les pays européens, les aspirations qui émergent des romans, articles journalistiques, biographies et des pièces de théâtre Nahdawi se focalisant sur la Chine définissent la modernité comme un processus d'établissement de relations transnationales, de coopération Sud-Sud. Les Nahdawis écrivirent sur la Chine, non en lisant directement des œuvres écrites en chinois, mais en traduisant en arabe des sources orientalistes européennes portant sur la Chine. Ce circuit d'échanges textuels requiert une nouvelle analytique afin d'éplucher les couches multilingues de médiation impliquées par l'intérêt arabe envers la Chine. Cette thèse développe le concept de "traduction triangulaire" en guise d'analytique visant à explorer ces contours. En contraste avec le paradigme standard percevant la traduction comme une transaction bidirectionnelle entre deux communautés linguistiques, les textes littéraires Nahdawi traitant de la Chine portent la trace d'au moins trois couches linguistiques: celle originale en chinois, son rendu orientaliste en langues européennes et sa traduction en arabe. La traduction triangulaire, en tant que modèle, permet l'exploration des possibilités que ces éléments textuels profonds ouvrent à la mise en perspective des questionnements arabes sur la réforme constitutionnelle et l'égalité des sexes par le truchement du langage de l'engagement ethnographique vis-à-vis de la culture chinoise. En contrebalançant de diverses manières la prépondérance du regard occidental sur le monde arabe, la traduction triangulaire montre comment la culture arabe redéploye ce regard vis-à-vis du reste du monde, à des fins politiques et culturelles spécifiques en lien avec l'établissement d'une identité régionale transnationale.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Pursuing a PhD program is a long journey and mine could not have been completed without the guidance, encouragement and support that I received from my instructors, family and friends. I would like to express my sincere gratitude to them in the following words. I would also like to thank the Institute of Islamic Studies and the faculty of Arts at McGill University for providing me financial support.

I am extremely grateful to my supervisor Prof Michelle Hartman, who is simply the best supervisor that I can envision in this world. Over the last six years, she has always been standing by my side, supporting me and guiding me as an intellectual and as a human being. I started the program with many initial difficulties and was far behind my colleagues. She trusted my potentials and encouraged me to explore them for myself, challenging and inspiring me, and offering an extraordinary understanding of the difficulties facing international and first-generation students. Through her patience and brilliance, she set a model for me. My ongoing efforts to live up to that model have transformed me from struggling with my program and experiencing anxiety in public speaking to a more solid student, teacher, and person. To me, she is not only a supervisor, but also a role model, a friend, and my second mother.

The Institute of Islamic Studies’ faculty is incredible in having many such wonderful teachers whose generous guidance has shaped this project. Professors Rula and Malek Abisaab have not only encouraged me at every step of the way, but have devoted a great deal of time and energy to digging through primary texts with me and sharpening my translations. I could not have written this dissertation, particularly Chapter One, without the help of Professor Pasha M. Khan, whose brilliance and kindness have increased my confidence in this project and myself. Ever since my comps, Professor Laila Parsons, along with Professor Robert Wisnovsky, fueled this dissertation with practical wisdom and friendly encouragement that made it possible for me to undertake the research. Professor Setrag Manoukian, Professor Khalid Medani and Professor Prashant Keshavmurthy offered timely encouragement and moral support that made me feel very fortunate to be studying at McGill. Zeitun Manjothi and Adina Sigartau expertly ensured that things ran smoothly each day and made everything possible. The forensic skills of Anaïs Salamon, who helped me track down key texts, transformed this project from an impossible idea into a reality.

TAing for Hala Jawlakh, Shokry Gohar, and David Nancekivell offered me a valuable introduction to teaching and improved my Arabic tenfold! They have each, in their own way, been a trusted adviser and role model to me for starting out in the profession and balancing the tasks of teaching and research. I am very grateful for their friendship and guidance. I have been incredibly fortunate in having a group of colleagues at McGill whose close friendship and intellectual community has been irreplaceable. Pauline Froissart has been a best friend to me in the most difficult times and in the best of times. The lovely card she wrote me at a crucial point helped me get through a hard time in both my life and the PhD program. Omar Qaqish, Fiona Williams, Wadha Al-Zuair, Ralph 7

Haddad, and Heather Porter Abu Deiab (a.k.a., Team Michelle) have been the best colleagues anyone could ask for and I will always cherish their friendship. Omar’s coaching and guidance helped me through the most stressful stages of the program and early professionalization. Study- buddy partners Grailing Anthonisen and Heather made working hard more enjoyable than I knew it could be, and I’m grateful to Grailing in particular for always finding the best spots in the whole library! Katy Kalemkerian, my colleague and role model, inspired me to try to follow her dissertation timeline--although how she did it with a toddler as well I’ll never know! Dima Ayoub has played a huge role in my studies, not only because her writing has served as a model for my own, but also due to her extraordinary kindness in connecting me to relevant scholars in my field. I feel very lucky to have had the friendship, encouragement, and support of Jessica Stilwell, Sabeena Shaikh, Shirin Radjavi, Zahra Sabri, David Wong, Naser Dumairieh, Osama Eshera and Mahwish Tazeem. Brian Wight’s formidable expertise in Arabic and generosity with his time helped me work through the densest of nineteenth-century texts. His advice continues to guide my scholarly practices.

In China, Professor Lu Peiyong, Xue Qingguo, Lian Chaoqun, Li Haipeng, Ding Long, Duan Jiuzhou, and Zhang Jin helped me immeasurably with the foundational archival component of this project, offering me support and encouragement tracking down materials that most people didn’t think existed. Along with Professor Li Zhenzhong, who gave me a box of treasured Ahram papers, they truly made this project possible in the first place. At the very moment when I was ready to give up on this project before it began, Professor Lian Zhaoqun sustained my belief in it and myself, and has been with me every step of the way not only in offering generous feedback, but also in his uncanny ability to predict the direction my analysis would take me. Professor Xue Qingguo provided an academic model to me as a translator, scholar, and educator.

My route to pursue a PhD in Arabic literature and culture would have been not only an unlikely option but also impossible without the early inspiration and mentorship of Professor Lu Peiyong, Raji Rummuny, and Anton Shammas. Professor Lu Peiyong sparked my obsession with Arabic literature, and I still appreciate the chocolate he would give his students! My supervisor at the University of Michigan, Professor Raji Rummuny, has been like a grandfather to me, and models the best practices of hard work and expertise. Professor Anton Shammas taught the class that made me decide to pursue a PhD. His brilliance continues to inspire my interest in Nahda studies, and he has generously offered feedback on my materials throughout my graduate career.

My dissertation has benefited more than I can say from the rigorous and detailed feedback of Michael Hill, Spencer Scoville, Wen Shuang, Samah Selim, Ren Ke. I am particularly grateful to Professor Hill for sharing his work in progress with me, for early encouragement, for detailed feedback throughout the process, and for the terrific dumplings. A memorable conversation with Spencer during the 2019 ACLA greatly helped me refine the argument I wanted to make. John Chen generously shared his immense knowledge with me, helping me find sources that became central to my thinking. Professor Li Guo has been a constant support and a model for the kind of 8 teacher and scholar I wish to be. I’ll always be particularly grateful to him for flying to San Antonio at the last minute to support a group of young Chinese scholars at our first major conference.

Working on a dissertation in my second language has been aided and made possible by friends, colleagues, and editors who have read my work in progress and helped me articulate the argument I wanted to make. David Womble, Jessica Stilwell, Julie Berger, and my “dissertation coach” Gaby Djerrahian have helped me make a tight timeline for finishing the dissertation possible. I am particularly grateful to David for spending so much time, on such a flexible basis, working with me on my dissertation and job application materials to make an impossible mission turn out to be possible. I am greatly thankful to Jessica who is not only a great friend of mine, but also a great editor and a sharp reader of my argument. She has helped me edit my writing ever since my comps and has made a big difference to every writing project I have undertaken. My stellar Arabic tutors and colleagues in Islamic studies—Brian, Omar, Martin Karam, Yusuf Ashmawy and Human Akkad--have helped me work through the challenges of studying so many different language communities all at once. Erin Cober bridged the gap between academic and professional life for me, in helping edit my application materials in addition to everything else.

My family and close friends have given me the support, inspiration, and love that made the dissertation possible and that continues to enrich my life. I cannot thank Zhang Xiaoyan enough for taking care of me when I was at Ann Arbor, and Wen Fang who took care of me throughout my Phd studies. Grace Qian’s spirit and optimism can de-stress me even at the worst of times. Sybil Chen’s friendship has been a source of incredible comfort--and wonderful food--in Montreal and, happily, now New York! I have benefited from and enjoyed the solidarity and comradeship of Zhang Hongwei and Li Xiaoyue as we have all been working towards the same goal. I was so fortunate from the start to have undergraduate classmates like Ma Dongxue and Duan Jiuzhou, who helped send me off from Beijing to Montreal when I started the PhD and, moreover, who offer enduring friendship.

My family supplies so much cheer to my life. My aunts, uncles, cousins and nieces are wonderful cheerleaders. I cherish the memory of my uncle, Li Shuxiang, and will always remember the last words that he said to me. My mother-in-law Han Yulin all but saved my life and my dissertation by keeping me fed with delicious food while I rushed to finish citations and formatting. My parents are the best parents I could imagine. Their open-mindedness and support not only allowed me to become who and what I most want to be, but also models for me the best practices of what it means to be a caring human being. My father, Yang Shilong, has supported me in every way, especially when I needed it the most. My mother, Yu Yinfeng, is my model as a feminist, a mother, and a wife. Her selflessness and devotion to the family and to me is unmatched. Her accompanying me to Montreal, and all that she sacrificed to do so, is the perfect metaphor for the way I carry her love and voice with me wherever I go. In the most difficult stages of graduate school and life in an unfamiliar place, her wise words and unconditional support are the reason I was able to persevere.

My husband Wang Fei redefined my life in ways I could not have anticipated. His extraordinary care has made the challenges of long-distance vanish. The sheer amount of time he has spent driving just to spend time with me in the library, to accompany me in my daily life whenever possible, and to encourage my potential and ambition has amazed me. His work ethic inspires me and his belief in me has sustained this project. He has been more understanding than I could have asked of how little time I have had to spend with him while completing this dissertation, and, now that it is complete, I cannot wait to spend the rest of my life with him.

NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION

This dissertation utilizes a simplified version of the transliteration system of the International

Journal of Middle East Studies (IJMES), which includes no diacritical marks. All names and quotations have been transliterated according to this system, except in cases where a commonly used English phrase exists. Translations of the primary sources are those of the author, unless otherwise noted.

INTRODUCTION

“But did Nahdawi authors ever write about China in Arabic?” Some version of this question is what I have encountered, and continue to encounter, when introducing my dissertation topic to people, whether in China or in North America. The incredulity they expressed at the thought of a literary and political involvement between Arabs in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and China at first made me wonder if I had chosen an appropriate dissertation topic. When I began to systematically research the prominent Egyptian journal al-Hilal published between 1892 and

1940, the familiar yet exoticized face of an Asian lady caught my eye. It turned out to be a representation of the Chinese Empress Dowager Ci Xi. As I further explored the archive, I was pleased to find a rich set of texts on China published not only in al-Hilal, but also in contemporary journals such as al-Muqtataf and al-Riwaya. In particular, the serialized and largely accurate report on the Chinese Constitutional Revolution and the photos of Sun Yat-Sen and Yuan Shikai, a group picture of the elected Chinese parliament members, indicated that there was a robust enthusiasm among Nahdawi intellectuals for the Chinese constitutional revolution.

After discovering this body of material, I found others and built the project according to the texts I have identified as participating in Chinese-Arab textual exchanges in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The archival trace of Arabic interest in China in this historical moment is largely overlooked by current scholarship, to the extent that we do not see evidence in scholarship that people believed there was a genuine Nahdawi interested in China. My aim with this dissertation is to reveal the forgotten phenomenon of Nahdawi literary production on and about

China from 1880 to the 1930s and to analyze it as a recovery project, in order to highlight the 12 importance of south-south literary relations. My analysis of this body of literature centers on its representations of women and the ideological function that stories of female empowerment served for Nahdawi translators as they positioned their society transnationally. As translators negotiated the stereotypes built into European Orientalist discourse, the portrayal of women became especially significant in light of the prevalent Orientalist attitude that European civilization was superior to the rest of the world in terms of its treatment of women. According to this idea, the status of women provided the yardstick for how modern a culture was; as a result, female empowerment became a prominent feature of the literature and social theory produced by Nahdawi writers invested in advancing nationalist agendas. Nahdawi writing on China was especially important in this respect, as the exotic setting allowed nationalist writers and translators to stage narratives of controversial forms of female agency in defamiliarized terms where it avoided the scrutiny and censure of conservative cultural commentators.

The scholarly conviction that Nahdawis either looked to or rebelled against Western models of modernity reflects the persistence of Eurocentrism in the field of Nahda studies.1 As I proceeded in my research I realized that my fear of not sustaining a project exploring Arabic literary explorations and relationships with China and Chinese literary texts was partly due to the valuing and centering of Europe in scholarly understandings of the Arab Nahda. One of the goals of this dissertation therefore is to shift the scholarly focus in Nahda studies away from “the west” and to

1 For an overview of major paradigms in Nahda studies, see Dyala Hamzah, “Introduction: The Making of the Arab Intellectual: Empire, Public Sphere and the Colonial Coordinates of Selfhood” in The Making of the Arab Intellectual (1880-1960): Empire, Public Sphere and the Colonial Coordinates of Selfhood, ed. Dyala Hamzah (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012). 13 understand the richness and complexities of literary work of that period through engagements with other parts of the world—in this case China.

Arab attitudes towards China were fundamentally ambivalent, as demonstrated by a writer in al-Hilal who, using Chinese politics as a cautionary tale through which to understand

Egypt’s own struggle to establish a constitution, observed that, unlike Egypt, “China cannot be a

ال تكن الصين جمهورية ما لم ) republic/republican if its people do not have the spirit of a republic.”2

A self-conception of Arab culture emerges within Arabic-language (يكون الصيني جمهوري الروح understandings of China, mediated through the language of Europe’s long history of Orientalism, which invokes the eighteenth-century French philosopher Montesquieu’s analysis of the “spirit” of eastern nations that held them back from western liberalism.3 The anonymous Arab author here encourages the reader to look to parts of the world that were becoming modern for the first time in order to understand how Egypt should shape its own modernization. Strikingly, this understanding of China simply repurposes the language of French Orientalism, stitching the emergent modernity of the Arab world into the longer timeline of European control of the east.

These two seemingly opposite attitudes reflect the contradiction of Nahdawis turning to the east to understand modernity better, yet doing so seemingly through the lens of European racism that confines eastern people to a primitive status.

My dissertation diagnoses cultural materials such as the exoticized image of the Chinese

2 Anonymous, “Al-Sin bayna al-Jumhuriya wa al-Malakiya [China between the Republic and the Monarchy],” al-Hilal, vol. 24 (1915-1916): 356. 3 Simon Kow, China in Early Enlightenment Political Thought (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017), 135. 14 empress and the contradictory references to China in al-Hilal as symptoms of a complex system of intra-eastern relations. In order to explore some of the contours of these relationships, I develop a concept I call “triangular translation.” Studying translations of China into Arabic as triangular translations makes visible the forms of mediation and the circuits of textual transactions through which representations of Arab and East Asian regions appeared in Arabic. This concept highlights how such representations were filtered through western languages and contexts, only to be re- appropriated and deployed by Arab intellectuals. The acts of translation involved in triangular translation often involved loose Arabic transliterations of European texts without regard for intellectual property. By redeploying the Orientalist overtones and ethnographic methods of those texts, Nahdawi translators recovered for themselves a kind of agency that complicates the scholarly binaries of domination and resistance. It also challenges the aesthetic dismissal of

Nahdawi translation, and allows us to recover a different kind of agency. Arabic texts that imagine China in this era thus work through the European imaginary to represent China, transforming Orientalist tactics of domination into modes of engaging China in forms of solidarity, rivalry, and cultural curiosity. This engagement with China served as the platform on which Nahdawi novelists, journalists, and political commentators could either undermine or rely upon the rhetorical authority of European Orientalism.

The underlying argument I make in this dissertation posits that Arab interest in China during the Nahda period was mediated through European Orientalist understandings of East Asia and expressed in order to work through the political and cultural controversies facing Arab intellectuals and the larger region at the time. The relations that formed between the so-called “eastern regions,” 15

(including China and the Arab world) as they were mediated through translations into and from

European languages, allow us to position the Nahda’s literary output globally in a way that locates modernity within the rise of such intra-eastern relations. This shift allows us to move away from static and fraught models of east-west relations.4 By exploring selected Nahdawi literary texts that deal with China, my dissertation brings a south-south comparative approach into contemporary

Nahda studies. This approach challenges the dominant Eurocentric assumption that Nahdawis looked exclusively toward the West for models of modernity, as well as the critical paradigm that limits Arabic literary studies to the Middle East.5 Moreover, in this dissertation I argue for a more nuanced understanding of how Arabic intellectuals appropriated western Orientalism for their own political ends.

A Note on Terminology and Genre

4 Scholarship following up on Edward Said’s field-defining analysis of western representation of the east has understood eastern cultures largely in relation to other parts of the world, without attending to the formation of south-south relations. See Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 2003). 5 I position this dissertation in conversation with several key studies of Nahdawi translation and South-South relations. Michael Hill’s forthcoming monograph addresses the role of translation in establishing relations of cultural influence between China and Egypt; where Hill explores the direct influence of these regions on one another, I have found it necessary to factor in Europe’s role as a mediator in the triangular circuit of textual exchange between China and the Arab world. Spencer Scoville's work on the overlooked relationship between Nahdawi culture and Russian culture has inspired and aided my efforts to uncover a similar cosmopolitan consciousness that formed between China and the Arab world. Additionally, Selim Samah’s “People’s Entertainment” and Shaden Tageldin’s Disarming Words have redefined the field of Nahda translation studies in recent years. Their emphasis on the way Orientalist power dynamics shaped the practices of Arab translators pushed me, by contrast, to think about the act of translation as a site of potential resistance and subversion. 16

Before moving on to a brief history of the Nahda period and an overview of scholarship in the field of Nahda studies, I will discuss the terminology I use for some important concepts in the dissertation. A major challenge in mounting this argument lies in the lack of precise terminology available for naming literary relations of the kind I am focused on here. The most common phrase

I use is the less-than-ideal “south-south relations.” However, I adjust the terms I choose for the different contexts of each chapter, moving between classifications such as south-south, global south, east-east, and intra-eastern. This indeterminacy of critical language is unavoidable, as it ultimately arises from the nature of the Nahda itself, in which a key aspect of Egyptian self- understanding was the question of whether Egypt was eastern or western, part of that region or an exception.6

6 Much of this scholarly treatment of the east results from Edward Said’s foundational Orientalism, which emphasized that western representations of “the east” were just that: representations that were constructed to justify and authorize imperial domination. As a result, scholarship has tended to engage “the east” largely as a western construct, produced in the relations of hegemony between Europe and the colonial world. Naoki Sakai points out that Area studies is confined to a model of “the West and the Rest” where the areas outside of Europe and North America will be only studied through their relation to the West, see “The West and the Tropics of Area Studies.” Rebecca Walkowitz argues for the necessity of paying attention to east-west relations, but this still risks reifying the east and further neglecting the nuances of south-south relations, see Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature (Literature Now). Srinivas Aravamudan traces the influence of one specific school of eastern spiritualism on the western world, which is typical of much scholarship in that it focuses in on one aspect of "the east" and does not deal with the forms of intra-eastern relationality that produced its key concepts, see Guru English: South Asian Religion in a Cosmopolitan Language. Wail Hassan points out that current scholarship on modern Arabic literature has been “confined to the north-south paradigm” while the south-south comparison still needs to be explored, see his “Arabic and the Paradigms of Comparison”. The terminology of the Global South has begun to be used to address the need for south-south comparison, but as it is a concept formulated in a post-cold war context and as an alternative to replace the “Third World,” I have found it difficult to apply to the late 19th- and early 20th- century Nahda context. Theories of the Global South generally address the post-1945 era, making them 17

In relation to the genre of the texts I explore in the chapters that follow, I use a multigeneric approach to the literature of the Nahda. By looking at texts across genres, I am able to use the triangular translation model to explore and probe the contours of Chinese-Arabic literary relations in a wide range of texts: fiction, drama, journal essays, and newspaper articles. My study develops a framework to understand the linguistic power relations involved in the way Nahdawis wrote about China, a non-European Other, by negotiating European sources on China. Each of my chapters analyzes issues as diverse as the literary representation of Islamic theological debates, military conflicts, constitutional reforms, and sexuality and gender in terms of their political significance for the development of such intra-eastern and south-south relations. I locate the rise of a transnational eastern culture in the almost entirely unexamined phenomenon of Arab intellectuals who began writing prolifically about China in this era. This exploration requires a multi-lingual mode of analysis that can track concepts across archives that belong to different language communities. My concept of triangular translation, therefore, works well in a multigeneric study to help expose an increasingly prevalent movement of ideas and influence from east to west to east, and seeks to make some of the workings of this circuit widely available to

less useful as explanations of colonial dynamics in the Victorian and pre-WWII world. Recent Global South theorists such as Ann Mahler and Alfred López generally approach south-south translation as directional translations that bypasses colonial and imperial centers. However, this assumption neglects the large body of literature that is mediated by source texts from dominant languages, Their works include: López, "Introduction: The (Post)global South." The Global South 1, no. 1 (2007): 1-11; Lopez. "Introduction: Comparative Literature and the Return of the Global Repressed." The Global South 1, no. 1 (2007): 1-15; Mahler. "The Global South in the Belly of the Beast: Viewing African American Civil Rights through a Tricontinental Lens." Latin American Research Review 50, no. 1 (2015): 95-116. 18 literary critics exploring the literature of Nahda and beyond.

Critical Nahda Studies

The Nahda, variously translated as the Arabic literary revival, renaissance, or awakening, refers to a period of Arabic cultural production from the late eighteenth century to the early twentieth century.7 My study concerns the writers of the Nahda, sometimes referred to as

Nahdawis, meaning the intellectuals who participated in the writing, research, activism, and

7 Some of the foundational works in Nahda studies include: Adel Beshara, The Origins of Syrian Nationhood: Histories, Pioneers and Identity (London: Routledge, 2011); Beth Baron, Egypt As a Woman: Nationalism, Gender, and Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Elizabeth Holt, “Narrative and the Reading Public in 1870s Beirut,” Journal of Arabic Literature 40, no. 1 (2009); Elliott Colla, Conflicted Antiquities: Egyptology, Egyptomania, Egyptian Modernity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008); Fruma Zachs, The Making of a Syrian Identity: Intellectuals and Merchants in Nineteenth Century Beirut, (Leiden: Brill, 2005); Jens Hanssen, Fin de Siecle Beirut (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Kamran Rastegar, Literary Modernity Between the Middle East and Europe: Textual Transactions in Nineteenth-Century Arabic, English, and Persian literatures (London: Routledge, 2007); Keith David Watenpaugh, Being Modern in the Middle East: Revolution, Nationalism, colonialism, and the Arab Middle Class (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006); Marilyn Booth, May Her Likes be Multiplied: Biography and Gender Politics in Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Michael Ezekiel Gasper, The Power of Representation: Publics, Peasants, and Islam in Egypt (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009); Mine Ener, Managing Egypt’s Poor and the Politics of Benevolence, 1800-1952 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003); Omnia S. El Shakry, The Great Social laboratory: Subjects of Knowledge in Colonial and Postcolonial Egypt (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007); Sabry Hafez, The Genesis of Arabic Narrative Discourse: a Study in the Sociology of Modern Arabic Literature (London: Saqi Books, 1993); Selim, The Novel and the Rural Imaginary in Egypt, 1880-1985 (New York: Routledge, 2004); Tageldin, Disarming Words; Stephen Sheehi, Foundations of Modern Arab Identity (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004); Wilson Chacko Jacob, Working out Egypt: Effendi Masculinity and Subject Formation in Colonial Modernity, 1870-1940 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011); Ziad Fahmy, Ordinary Egyptians: Creating the Modern Nation Through Popular Culture (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2011). 19 translation that comprised the expansive cultural output of that time. This dissertation situates itself within the recent critical movement that has identified, critiqued, and sought to expand our sense of who the Nahdawis were, and of what constituted a Nahdawi writer. This is the emergent field of “New Nahda Studies.” Abdulrazzak Patel’s The Arab Nahda offers, for example, a useful account of how the Nahda was “authored” by Arab Christians in addition to Muslims;8 the

Egypt-centric tradition in Nahda studies has also been expanded to recuperate the contribution of writers from Lebanon and Syria;9 by female writers as well as male;10 and by emigrant Arab writers based in the United States.11

My dissertation aims to make an important contribution to the scholarly efforts in New

Nahda Studies by thinking more about the kinds of intellectual projects that united individuals of many different regions and identity categories into the Nahda movement. In particular, I view the role of translation as a key ingredient to the literary output of the Nahda period and thus stress the proliferation of writers and artists who combined original work with translation projects.12

8 Abdulrazzak Patel, The Arab Nahdah: The Making of the Intellectual and Humanist Movement, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013). 9 See Sheehi, Foundations of Modern Arab Identity; Lital Levy, Poetic Trespass: Writing Between Hebrew and Arabic in Israel/Palestine (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014); Elizabeth Holt, Fictitious Capital: Silk, Cotton, and the Rise of the Arabic Novel (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017). 10 Hoda El Sadda, Gender, Nation and the Arabic Novel: Egypt 1892-2007 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press 2012); Booth, May Her Likes Be Multiplied: Biography and Gender Politics in Egypt. 11 Elizabeth Claire Saylor, “A Bridge Too Soon: the Life and Works of ‘Afifa Karam, the First Arab American Woman Novelist,” (PhD Diss, UC Berkeley, 2015). 12 In this I follow the works of, for example, Selim, “Translations and Adaptations from the European Novel, 1835–1925, ” in The Oxford Handbook of Arab Novelistic Traditions ed. Waïl Hassan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017); Selim, “The People’s Entertainments: 20

China’s presence in Arabic literary output was to some degree hidden in plain sight, particularly in the case of the popular tales of Alf Layla wa Layla, which in the nineteenth century became one of the most recognizable symbols of Arabic culture worldwide. 13 Scholarship, however, has not fully considered what it means that Arabic interest in China and east Asia manifested itself in texts that have been responsible for producing pervasive ideas about the Arabic world and its literature.

While not engaging Alf Layla wa Layla directly, this dissertation shows how that interest in

China developed in the late nineteenth century, following the ascendancy of this story cycle to iconic status worldwide, into a proliferation of Nahdawi projects directed at China.14 In many ways the Nahdawi coteries and literary milieux that my study engages can be understood as a counter- reaction to the kind of literature typified by this immensely popular text. It was during the period under consideration here that an aspiration to establish a “high” Egyptian culture emerged, which

Translation, Popular Fiction, and the Nahdah in Egypt”; Tageldin, Disarming Words: Empire and the Seductions of Translation in Egypt. 13 Rastegar, Literary Modernity Between the Middle East and Europe: Textual Transactions in Nineteenth-century Arabic, English, and Persian literatures. 14 Wen-Chin Ouyang, “The Arabian Nights in English and Chinese Translations: Differing Patterns of Cultural Encounter,” in Les Mille et Une Nuits et le Récit Oriental en Espagne et en Occident, edited by Aboubakr Chraïbi and Carmen Ramírez (Paris: L'Harmattan, 2009), 371- 391; “Intertextuality and Transformation: Collective Memory in Arabic and Chinese Narratives of History (in Arabic),” Alif, A Journal of Comparative Poetics, vol. 34 (2014): 109-135; “Male Friendship and Brotherhood in Arabic and Chinese Cultures,” Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics 36 (2015): 145-72; “A Hairy State of Mind: Creativity in the Arabic Literary Imaginary,” Al-Masaq: Journal of the Medieval Mediterranean 30, no. 1(2018): 71-89; “Orientalism and World Literature: A Re-reading of Cosmopolitanism in Ṭāhā Ḥusayn’s Literary World,” Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics 36 (2018): 145-172; and “The Qur’an and Identity in Contemporary Chinese Fiction,” Journal of Qur’anic Studies 16: 3 (2014): 63-84. 21 relegated older fantastic works like Alf Layla wa Layla to a “low” status in some literary circles. I do not, however, consider the Nahda as a synonym for “high” culture—indeed, many of the texts

I study, such as what I am calling the “Ghadat novels,” discussed in Chapter One below, are manifestly written for “low” mass appeal. Rather, the Nahda project differentiated itself from works like Alf Layla wa Layla in that its literary output was almost always political and related to the nationalist movement. By contrast, Alf Layla wa Layla generates an image of China that consists more or less exclusively of surface-level stereotypes and gestures to exoticism associated with east Asia.15 Such stories wrapped in Chinese garb could easily be transplanted to another setting without materially affecting the characters or events. By viewing Arabic interest in China as a major engine of Nahda political and social reform, I am, conversely, interested in texts where

China emerges in ways that are more rigorously researched, defined, and deployed.

Scholarship on the Nahda: Beyond Eurocentrism

I came to this project, and to Arabic studies more generally, as an outsider. My identity as a native Chinese speaker allowed me to recognize something about the role of the outsider in the

15 Ouyang has written about the Chinese interest in Arab culture reflected in Chinese translations of Alf Layla wa Layla, illustrating the importance of translation as a site of cultural encounter. See Ouyang, “The Arabian Nights in English and Chinese Translations: Differing Patterns of Cultural Encounter.” Even so, the Arabian Nights is helpful to the study in showing how the Western appropriation of these stories views the Chinese and Arabic characters with a kind of interchangeability. Arafat A. Razzaque’s article “Who Was the ‘Real’ Aladdin? From Chinese to Arab in 300 Years” (Ajam Media Collective, August 10, 2017) argues that there is a long Orientalist tradition of portraying Aladdin as Chinese in visual artworks and in theatre. It is the Disney film and a Hollywood tradition that made Aladdin as an Arab. Aladdin’s evolution from being Chinese to an Arab shows how powerful the Orientalist mediator is in revising and reversing the source text, and erasing the cultural memory of the original. 22

Arab Nahda that has not sufficiently informed our accounts of its literature and its politics. In my early struggles to familiarize myself with the language and literature of a culture to which I was an outsider, I was consistently surprised to recognize the central presence of foreign perspectives built into the very language of Nahda literature. I realized that a distinctive feature of Arabic literature is that it is, in many ways, always already translated and cosmopolitan.16 It is working to view itself through the eyes and idioms of other cultures. As Ouyang has argued, even though

Nahdawi literature has a strong nationalist orientation, its multilingualism articulates the ideology of the nation-state from the perspective of many different linguistic and national traditions, re- thinking nationhood in transnational terms.17 My conviction that scholarship in the field today still retains a Eurocentric model, and my drive to correct that, stemmed from the near absence of scholarship acknowledging, let alone investigating, Arabic interest in China.

Nahda Studies scholarship’s near exclusive focus on the European influence on Arab models of modernity undermines the cosmopolitanism and intellectual curiosity that has earned this period of Arabic culture the term “liberal age.”18 Above, I chronicle how even though I wanted to study the representation of China in the literature of the Nahda, I was convinced by the scholarly consensus that Arab intellectuals were interested only in European models of modernity, and how the strange but familiar face of the Chinese empress Ci Xi in a 1900 issue of Al-Hilal helped me

16 See, for example, Selim, “The Peoples Entertainments: Translation, Popular Fiction, and the Nahdah in Egypt.” and Spencer Scoville, “Translating Orientalism into the Arabic ‘Nahda’,” Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, no. 38 (2018). 17 Wen-chin Ouyang, “Orientalism and World Literature: A Re-reading of Cosmopolitanism in Ṭāhā Ḥusayn’s Literary World,” Journal of Arabic Literature 49, no.1-2 (2018): 125-152. 18 Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1798-1939. 23 to challenge my own Eurocentric assumptions. If this dissertation project is partly a self-correction of my own Eurocentrism, I hope it adds to the scholarly literature which values south-south studies.

Most scholarship construes the Nahda as a “unified and homogenous project” that was aligned with the discourse of nationalism. 19 According to the earliest and largely Eurocentric studies of the Nahda written in the mid-twentieth century, the narrative of the Nahda is the story of how Arab intellectuals responded to the superiority of European cultures, either by importing

European models of cultural development or by seeking out ways of claiming a European heritage for Arab culture.20 In recent decades, scholars across virtually every sub-field of Arabic studies have been working against this Eurocentric model, which, in the field of literary studies, has meant re-examining literary works that have been understudied or excluded from the canon in order to highlight the diversity of ideas, voices, and literary production during the Nahda period.21 This is

19 A good example of this is Tarek El-Ariss, “Let There be Nahdah!,” Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 2, no. 2 (2015) and Trials of Arab Modernity: Literary Affects and the New Political (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013). 20 Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1798-1939; Badawi, Modern Arabic Literature; Pierre Cachia, Arabic Literature: An Overview (New York: Routledge, 2002). 21 These marginalized texts include the works of non-elite and/or female writers. See El Sadda, Gender, Nation and the Arabic Novel: Egypt 1892-2007, 27; Levy, Poetic Trespass: Writing Between Hebrew and Arabic in Israel/Palestine; Sheehi, Foundations of Modern Arab Identity; Holt, Fictitious Capital: Silk, Cotton, and the Rise of the Arabic Novel; Ghenwa Hayek, “Experimental Female Fictions; Or, The Brief Wondrous Life of the Nahda Sensation Story, ” Middle Eastern Literatures 16, no. 3 (2013). 24 what the field of “New Nahda Studies,” highlighted above, makes central to its project.22 The older scholarly assumptions that Nahda discourse presupposes “the European origin of Arab modernity” in these years serves as a common object of revision among more recent literary scholars and historians.23

To overturn the Eurocentric assumption that modernity is imported from the West, historians use various themes, including intellectual history, gender and domesticity, modern education and

22 For more on “New Nahda Studies,” see Stephen Sheehi, “Towards a Critical Theory of al- Nahdah : Epistemology, Ideology and Capital,” Journal of Arabic Literature 43, no. 2-3 (2012); Shaden M. Tageldin, “Proxidistant Reading: Toward a Critical Pedagogy of the Nahdah in U.S. Comparative Literary Studies,” Journal of Arabic Literature 43, no. 2-3 (2012); Tarek El-Ariss, The Arab Renaissance: a Bilingual Anthology of the Nahda (New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 2018). 23 Hamzah, “Introduction: The Making of the Arab Intellectual: Empire, Public Sphere and the Colonial Coordinates of Selfhood,” 9. 25 sectarianism, to emphasize how local populations created their own notions of modernity.24 While recovering the Nahdawis’ local agency in constructing their own modernity project, however, scholarship on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Middle Eastern history has never fully explored the way Middle Eastern and East Asia regions developed into modernity transnationally in relation

24 Some works already mentioned that do this include Fahmy, Ordinary Egyptians: Creating the Modern Nation Through Popular Culture; Patel, The Arab Nahdah: The Making of the Intellectual and Humanist Movement. Others include the following Ussama Samir Makdisi, The Culture of Sectarianism: Community, History, and Violence in Nineteenth-century Ottoman Lebanon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Akram Fouad Khater, Inventing Home: Emigration, Gender, and the Middle Class in Lebanon, 1870-1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Ellen Fleischmann, The Nation and its “New” Women: The Palestinian Women’s Movement, 1920-1948 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Eve Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism: Egypt, Great Britain, and the Mastery of the Sudan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Lisa Pollard, Nurturing the Nation: the Family Politics of Modernizing, Colonizing and Liberating Egypt 1805-1923 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Yoav Di-Capua, Gatekeepers of the Arab Past: Historians and History Writing in Twentieth-Century Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009); Ilham Khuri-Makdisi, The Eastern Mediterranean and the Making of Global Radicalism, 1860-1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010); Michelle U. Campos, Ottoman Brothers: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Early Twentieth-Century Palestine (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011); Jacob, Working out Egypt: Effendi Masculinity and Subject Formation in Colonial Modernity, 1870-1940; Abigail Jacobson, From Empire to Empire: Jerusalem Between Ottoman and British Rule (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2011); Beth Baron, The Orphan Scandal: Christian Missionaries and the Rise of the Muslim Brotherhood (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014). 26 to and in concert with one another.25 Consequently, historians have overlooked the presence of

Arabic interest in China, and the idea that a component of modernity involves establishing intra- eastern relations and forming a translational identity has not been explored until recently.26

Few studies connect the Arab Nahda with other non-Western “renaissances” that occupied the same historical moment. Those that do so tend to approach instances of Arabic interest in other eastern regions as self-contained historical documents that did not permeate and affect Nahda culture more generally. Shuang Wen is one such scholar who traces Arab intellectuals’ understanding of China by examining a series of articles on the first Sino-Japanese War published in the Arabic journal al-Muqtataf.27 C.A. Bayly also contributes to the south-south comparative

25 Recent scholars such as CA. Bayly, Wen Shuang, John Chen, and Hill are the main contributors to challenge this. See: Hill, “Translating Iconoclasm: Sino-Muslim Azharites and South-South Translations”; Michael Hill, “Reading Distance: Port Louis, Cairo, Beijing” (unpublished manuscript, February 15 2019); Shuang Wen, “Mediated Imaginations: Chinese- Arab Connections in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries” (PhD diss., Georgetown University, 2015); C. A Bayly. “Indian and Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age,” in Arabic Thought Beyond the Liberal Age: Towards an Intellectual History of the Nahda, edited by Jens Hanssen and Max Weiss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), John Chen, “Islamic Modernism in China: Chinese Muslim Elites, Guomindang Nation-Building, and the Limits of the Global Umma, 1900-1960” (PhD diss, Columbia University, 2018); Chen, “Re- Orientation: The Chinese Azharites between Umma and Third World, 1938–55,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 34, no. 1 (2014); John Chen, “‘Just Like Old Friends’: The Significance of Southeast Asia to Modern Chinese Islam,” Sojourn: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia 31, no. 3 (2016); John Chen, “Islam’s Loneliest Cosmopolitan: Badr Al-Din Hai Weiliang, the Lucknow–Cairo Connection, and the Circumscription of Islamic Transnationalism,” ReOrient 3, no. 2 (2018). 26 Hill has analyzed the Chinese translation of Arabic literary works in the 1930s and 1940s in his forthcoming article: “Translating Iconoclasm: Sino-Muslim Azharites and South-South Translations.” 27 Wen, “Mediated Imaginations: Chinese-Arab Connections in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries.” 27 approach by comparing Indian and Arab intellectual histories in the early twentieth century.28 John

Chen explores the Sino-Arab connection by mapping out how Chinese Muslims incorporated the idea of Islamic Modernism in the Chinese nation-building process during 1900-1960.29 All of these works focus more on historical approaches, methods, and texts than on the literary production of these eras. My dissertation builds upon these works, as well as the comparative scholarship of

Michael Hill, who has studied Chinese Muslim scholars’ understandings and literary translation of the Arabic world, and Wen-chin Ouyang, whose study of Arab-China cultural exchange develops the way a transatlantic consciousness emerged from Arabic literary texts in the contexts of the

Arab and Chinese Renaissances.30

While translation played a central role in developing literary, social and political discourses during the Nahda period, scholarship on Arabic literature is only recently beginning to draw attention to its translation activities, as translated texts were previously dismissed by scholars as

28 Bayly. “Indian and Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age.” 29 Chen, “Islamic Modernism in China: Chinese Muslim Elites, Guomindang Nation-Building, and the Limits of the Global Umma, 1900-1960”; “Re-Orientation: The Chinese Azharites between Umma and Third World, 1938–55”; “‘Just Like Old Friends’: The Significance of Southeast Asia to Modern Chinese Islam”; and "Islam's Loneliest Cosmopolitan: Badr Al-Din Hai Weiliang, the Lucknow–Cairo Connection, and the Circumscription of Islamic Transnationalism.” 30 Hill, “Translating Iconoclasm: Sino-Muslim Azharites and South-South Translations” and “Reading Distance: Port Louis, Cairo, Beijing.” Wen-Chin Ouyang, “The Arabian Nights in English and Chinese Translations: Differing Patterns of Cultural Encounter”; “Intertextuality and Transformation: Collective Memory in Arabic and Chinese Narratives of History (in Arabic)”; “Male Friendship and Brotherhood in Arabic and Chinese Cultures”; and “The Qur’an and Identity in Contemporary Chinese Fiction.” 28 imitative.31 Scholars such as Samah Selim, Spencer Scoville, Marwa S. Elshakry, and Mohammed

Sawaie address this scholarly gap, recognizing the value of early translations, and attempting to theorize these so-called “uncreative” and “bad” translation practices. 32 Selim focuses on the marginalized genre of popular fiction, reinterpreting practices of adaptation, plagiarism, forgery, and re-translation of translated works as generative acts of creativity.33 Scoville provides a close reading of Khalil Baydas’ translations of Russian literary works both to show that Nahdawi translators “were engaged in a complex process of cultural production” and to recover the Arabic literary historiography of Arabic-Russian literary exchanges during the Nahda period.34 Shaden

Tageldin’s Disarming Words approaches translation instead from a theoretical perspective, offering close readings of texts produced by important Nahdawi translators and engaging with the question of how translation is connected to cultural imperialism. 35 In Tageldin’s account, the prevalent Nahdawi practice of translating European texts resulted in the attenuation of Egyptian cultural resistance, and instead led to the desire for participation and exchange within European dialogues.

31 Selim, “The People’s Entertainments: Translation, Popular Fiction, and the Nahdah in Egypt,” 39; Spencer Scoville, “The Agency of the Translator: Khalil Baydas’ Literary Translations” (Ph.D University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 2013), 227. 32 Selim, “The People’s Entertainments: Translation, Popular Fiction, and the Nahdah in Egypt,” 51; El-Ariss, The Arab Renaissance: A Blingual Anthology of the Nahda. 33 Selim, “The People’s Entertainments: Translation, Popular Fiction, and the Nahdah in Egypt,” 50. 34 Scoville, “The Agency of the Translator: Khalil Baydas’ Literary Translations,” 235. 35 Tageldin, Disarming Words: Empire and the Seductions of Tanslation in Egypt, 21. 29

This body of thought has positioned translation as one of the most crucial features of modern

Arab literature. My work builds on this insight of this scholarship and takes it further by placing the act of translation within a triangular framework. This study views translation less as a relationship of seduction or coercion between two parties --as Tageldin, Selim, and Scoville argue--and more as an opportunity for Nahdawi translators to leverage existing power relations for their own purposes, whether in regard to discourses around gender or political debate. Translation, and the creative license it made available to the translator, allowed

Nahdawi writers to ventriloquize European voices in ways that excised or changed the meaning of Orientalist stereotypes, bending the European voices of colonial and ethnographic authority to their own ends.

These studies can be read productively with those of scholars like Kamran Rastegar and Lital

Levy who situate the Nahda in a regional comparative framework. Both Rastegar and Levy point out that scholarship on the Nahda places Arab literary modernity predominantly in a south-north comparative framework, which emphasizes the influence of Western modernity on Arabic literature, an approach that risks reproducing in translation studies the older thesis of European influence on Arab modernity that long dominated historical analysis. Rastegar, in particular, examines exchanges between Arabic, Persian, and English literatures in the nineteenth century, while Levy conceives of the Arab Nahda as “one of many non-Western projects of cultural and 30 political modernity,” comparing the Nahda to the Jewish Haskala. 36 Both attempt usefully to propose a cross-cultural reading of the themes and rhetorical practices of the Nahda. Their work, however, never moves beyond the geographic boundaries of the Middle East, correlating the Nahda to other cultural movements worldwide solely through historical coincidence and parallel structure.

Translation studies situated within Arabic literary contexts have thus not effectively opened

Nahdawi scholarship up to transnational approaches. Translation theory nonetheless does provide useful tools to unpack the complexities of Nahdawi literary practices and re-examine the creative agency of Nahdawi translators. Maria Tymoczko and Edwin Gentzler, for example, focus on power relations between languages and cultures in the translation process, arguing that translation

“participate[s] in the powerful acts that create knowledge and shape culture.” 37 Their work encourages postcolonial translators to recognize the power dynamics inherent in translation practices, yet does so in a way that presupposes a two-party model of hegemony. This model has made invisible the more complex nature of how these cultures actually encountered one another, which occurred through a more triangular south-south relationship that was mediated through the presence of European textual culture.

Adding to useful translation studies approaches, Gayatri Spivak’s influential meditation on

“The Politics of Translation” critiques what she sees as a simplified understanding of the global

36 Rastegar, Literary Modernity between the Middle East and Europe: Textual Transactions in Nineteenth-century Arabic, English, and Persian Literatures; Lital Levy, “The Nahda and the Haskala: A Comparative Reading of ‘Revival’ and ‘Reform’, ” Middle Eastern Literatures 16, no. 3 (2013): 301. 37 Maria Tymoczko and Edwin Gentzler, Translation and Power (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002). 31 south among western scholars who view it as a united entity without acknowledging regional heterogeneity.38 Spivak emphasizes that the development of solidarity between western feminists and women in the global south has rendered the act of translation invisible, merely a way of restoring a supposed organic alignment between western feminists and women in the third world.

In re-emphasizing the act of the translation and the way it spuriously implies internal homogeneity onto a translated culture, Spivak risks over-emphasizing the significance of national boundary in literary output. By asserting the differences internal to a region that produce texts in different ways, she steers scholars away from the networks of transnational influence and exchange within what she calls the third world that internally structure any given text.

Spivak’s rebuke of scholarly producers of translation is persuasively rendered in Lawrence

Venuti’s work, which speaks more directly to translators rather than readers of texts in translation, and advocates thinking about translation as a strategy of foreignization. He criticizes the longstanding idea that translation should “domesticate” a foreign culture by seeking fluent translation and semantic equivalence, and instead emphasizes translation as a place where readers can develop “fundamentally ethical attitudes towards a foreign text and culture” that challenge readers by making them recognize the foreignness of a cultural Other.39 Tarek Shamma counters

Venuti’s practical advice to translators by examining translation in historical context, using Alf

Layla wa Layla to show how the recognition of cultural foreignness more often than not contributes

38 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. “The Politics of Translation” in The Translation Studies Reader, ed. Lawrence Venuti (London: Routledge, 2000), 397-416. 39 Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (London: Routledge, 2008), 266-68. 32 to negative attitudes towards other cultures. British colonial interests, indeed, were advanced by the portrayal of eastern exoticism as “bizarre” and “inferior.”40 Between the two of them, then,

Venuti and Shamma make domestication and foreignization potential modes of, simultaneously, resistance and oppression.41

A recent argument that synthesizes these two potential valences of translation is Ouyang’s work on the direct translation of the Alf Layla wa Layla tales from Arabic into Chinese. She argues that domesticating translation strategies such as the substitution of Buddhist terminology for

Muslim references in the original text constitutes an “orientalism by proxy.”42 Her groundbreaking approach allows us to see how Western Orientalism shaped the way Chinese culture views the

Middle East. By making Chinese intellectuals engaging with Arabic culture a “proxy” for the voice of the European Orientalist, Ouyang argues that this mediating presence of Orientalism ultimately weakened the power of its colonial function by allowing eastern authors to re-appropriate it. This

40 Tarek Shamma, Translation and the Manipulation of Difference: Arabic Literature in Nineteenth-century England (Manchester: St. Jerome Pub, 2009), 5. 41 For arguments against the either foreignization or domestication model as appropriate for Arabic literature, see Dima Ayoub, “The (Un)translatability of Translational Literature: Ahdaf Soueif’s The Map of Love between English and Arabic, ” Translation Studies 11 (2018); Michelle Hartman, Native Tongue, Stranger Talk: the Arabic and French Literary Landscapes of Lebanon (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2014) ; “Translating a Literary Tradition: Arabic Literature” in Teaching Translation: Programs, Courses, Pedagogies, ed. Lawrence Venuti (London: Routledge, 2016): 117-125; “Gender, Genre and the (Missing) Gazelle: Arab Women Writers and the Politics of Translation,” Feminist Studies, 38, no. 1 (2012): 17-49; and “An Arab Woman Writer as a Cross-Over Artist: Reconsidering the Ambivalent Legacy of Al-Khansa’,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 30, no.1 (2011): 15-36; as well as Shamma, Translation and the Manipulation of Difference: Arabic Literature in Nineteenth-century England. 42 Ouyang, “The Arabian Nights in English and Chinese Translations: Differing Patterns of Cultural Encounter.” 33 account of Chinese empowerment through translation, however, focuses mainly on those areas of

Arabic literature that Chinese translators could appropriate and characterize in the same way that

European orientalists had before them.

As a result, the “orientalism by proxy” thesis tends to present a view of Arab culture that conforms to, or approximates, Orientalist attitudes. Following up on the translation of

Orientalist tropes into Chinese contexts, Lydia Liu discusses how Orientalist terms can function for an Arabic readership beyond the framework of “orientalism by proxy.” She provides a concept of co-authorship that interprets how Chinese intellectuals and European missionaries

“co-authored” an Orientalist concept in the Chinese context by using the multi-lingual process of co-authorship to extract different meanings from Orientalist literary conventions.43

These conversations are furthered in the work of Spencer Scoville, whose focus is the

Nahdawi view of Russia, arguing that Nahdawi translations of Orientalist texts into Arabic are not simply the co-opting of Orientalism Liu describes. Scoville’s study of three Nahdawi translations of European Orientalist texts suggests that Nahdawi translators actively engaged European

Orientalist discourse so as to insert Arab subjects into the source text, inventing an Arab presence that could transform Orientalist tropes.44 Scoville’s argument shows how Arab intellectuals seized the agency of intervening in European Orientalism through translation, pushing scholars to

43 Lydia He Liu, Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity- -China, 1900-1937 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995). 44 Spencer Scoville, “The Agency of the Translator: Khalil Baydas’ Literary Translations”; Scoville, “Reconsidering Nahdawi Translation: Bringing Pushkin to Palestine,” The Translator 21, no. 2 (2015); Spencer Scoville, “Translating Orientalism into the Arabic ‘Nahda’,” Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, no. 38 (2018): 33-35. 34 recognize a more complicated understanding of Nahdawi discourse operating within Orientalist discourse that casts Nahdawi translators as considerably more than simply a proxy of European

Orientalists.

Developing the Project: Archives and Methodology

To bring these combined insights to bear on the acts of translation involved in the triangular translation model I develop here, I found it necessary to explore different archives that hold the records of the subtle role of European authors in Arab-China textual relations. In order to navigate and correct the limitations of existing scholarship in the area of south-south relations, my research works across multiple archives, seeking to recuperate a body of writing and a cultural movement that history has rendered all but invisible. Triangular translation offers a way of reconstructing a body of writing that has been fragmented and scattered by the ravages of imperial collection and censorship. Analyzing texts that are only preserved in outline, through references from other texts, requires detective work that is not simply responsive to what is available in an archive, but that actively devises ways to reconstruct what is unavailable.

To undertake my project I conducted research mainly at the Library at Peking University and the Islamic Studies Library at McGill University. In Beijing, I located the Al-Ahram newspapers, photos, and manuscripts on Chinese Muslims scholars studying in Cairo in 1930s. At

McGill, I found an extensive body of Nahdawi journal articles on China. I researched the indexes of every issue of al-Muqtataf and al-Hilal searching them for keywords and titles that had anything 35 to do with China.45 Through my archival research, I identified a body of Nahdawi writing that was assumed not to exist, which meant working from multiple angles to reconstruct fragments contained in different archives.

One of my observations, when examining these texts as a group, is that the majority of these works were either translated from a European language or contained at least some translations. I then attempted to locate the source texts originally written in a European language.

I identified the original titles, the authors’ names, and the journal titles in the Arabic translations and then made an educated guess about the possible English or French titles and names.

Assembling the body of materials I sought to introduce to the scholarly community meant first tracking down a chain of links formed between book reviews and the books themselves, between titles referenced in journals and the works they referred to. In many cases, the materials proved unrecoverable. Reconstructing the French text upon which Salih Jawdat based his novel Ghadat al-Sin (discussed in Chapter One), for instance, pushed me to try to “feel” for the presence of

French idioms and language structures transliterated into the Arabic. What I discovered was that the Arabic translation brought with it transliterations of Chinese language, inflected by French pronunciations.

My methodology here often involves a degree of detective work, that led to the discovery of links between the European, Arabic, and Chinese sources. These links helped me to push myself to think further about the question of mediation. Throughout my archival investigations, I treated

al-Siniya ,(الصيني) al-Sini ,(الصين) The Keywords that I used in my search included: al-Sin 45 (الشرق) and al-sharq ,(الصينية) 36 the texts I was dealing with as something akin to what Bruno Latour calls a “mediator,” or texts that “transform, translate, distort, and modify the meaning or the elements they are supposed to carry.”46 Latour’s account of the transmission of knowledge through mediators was especially important in keeping track of politico-aesthetic decisions made by translators, as opposed to textual and linguistic effects of the act of translation. In the case of triangular translation, there are the conscious modifications Nahdawi intellectuals added to their translations in order to intervene in

Egyptian political debates. But there are also the unconscious distortions inherent to the act of translation itself, where texts mediated through multiple language communities retain a trace of each stage of translation, filtering Chinese language structures into the very structure of Arabic writing about China. It is not simply that scholarship has overlooked the presence of Arabic interest in China, but that texts manifesting that interest often involve a pastiche of dissimilar and contradictory ideas and stylistics that point to a translational practice that cannot be explained through available theories of how translation shapes print culture.

As noted above, this dissertation works against the heavily entrenched assumption that translation is a bi-directional process. Matthew Reynolds briefly addresses this limitation of translation studies by calling for "prismatic translations," or scholarly practices that attend to the different possible meanings a single text or language formation might hold in different language contexts.47 Building on current scholarship in translation studies, I propose to use the

46 Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 39. 47 Matthew Reynolds. Translation: A Very Short Introduction. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 37 concept of triangular translation as an interpretive method to read the multigeneric literary output of the Nahda. I have identified four types of translation practices, each discussed in one of the four chapters that follow. These triangular translation practices position Egypt and China in relation to one another through the mediation of Europe. To interpret them, I found it necessary to adopt flexible and multiple methodologies when approaching texts of different genres, historical eras, national traditions, and socio-political functions. What fiction means, simply in terms of a model of authorship and the assumption of intellectual property, does not hold true across the different types of texts I am positioning in relation to one another. In the body of writing this dissertation assembles, we cannot assume that even the most fundamental assumptions with which literary critics approach their texts hold true. Butrus Bustani’s encyclopaedia entry on “the novel,” for instance, defines the word as a play or piece of theatre--casually using the word to invoke a genre generally considered diametrically opposed to the prose narratives “novel” generally refers to.48

The ambiguous relationship between translated and original versions of texts during this period of

Nahda literary history requires a new analytic, built from an informed perspective on this cultural context, in order to avoid imposing assumptions about literature drawn from other contexts onto the exuberant and experimental practices of the authors I examine. The method I adopt in this dissertation looks at the textual layers that Nahdawi writing about China acquired by virtue of its translation from Chinese language to European languages to Arabic, and unpacks the way

Nahdawi translators used these ventriloquized voices to say things in their own cultural context

48 Butrus al-Bustani, “Riwayah,” in Da’irat al-Maʻarif [Encyclopedie Arabe], ed. Selim al- Bustani and Butrus al-Bustani (Beirut: Dar al-Maʻrifah). 38 that they could not otherwise have said.

Translating European texts into Arabic means not simply copying the original meaning into an Arabic context, but also giving the text new life in the Arabic context, as Water Benjamin argues in his seminal article “Task of the Translator.”49 By posing the question “Is translation meant for readers who do not understand the original?” Benjamin argues that translation can be conceived as the afterlife of the original text, ensuring the survival of many great works in world literature by enabling the continuation of the original text. Building on Benjamin’s idea, I suggest that translation specifically for readers who do not understand, or would have been marginalized by, the original is the condition of possibility for certain kinds of meanings. Benjamin’s argument is based on the premises that the translator seeks to “liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his own language.”50 Inverting Benjamin’s question for this context, I develop a methodology that can explain how meanings can become imprisoned in language in the first place: the acts of translation and appropriation through which these texts form as cultural material circulates between China, Europe, and the Arab world.

My method of analysis starts from a close reading of the Arabic texts. This close-reading method could best be described as reading against the Orientalist grain.51 It includes side-by-side analysis of the Arabic texts and the original European text, contextualized within the historical

49 Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator” in The Translation Studies Reader, ed. Lawrence Venuti (London: Routledge, 2000): 15-25. 50 Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” 22. 51 Jamie Barlowe Kayes, “Reading against the Grain: The Powers and Limits of Feminist Criticism of American Narratives,” The Journal of Narrative Technique 19, no. 1 (1989). 39 context of Egyptian and broader Arab culture and politics. I focus on the contradictions between

Orientalist descriptions quoted directly from European sources and those written against the grain of contemporary Orientalist writing about China as backward and/or exotic. By inquiring how and why these tensions exist, I explore their implications in order to unpack the complexities in the

Nahdawi imaginings of non-European Others.

Chapter Outlines

The four chapters that follow trace the overarching story of how Arab countries, China, and

Europe emerge in the late nineteenth century as distinct points--differentiated from one another by relationship of ignorance, violence, and oppression. At the same time, they also are joined by a triangular circuit of textual exchange. Investigating the transnational frameworks of cultural influence informing Nahdawi literary production on China from 1889 to 1939, I begin with the first contact established between Nahdawi writers and Chinese culture, mediated by European

Orientalist understandings of each region. I then use this to build towards the final move from triangle to straight line where European mediation dissolves and we see evidence of direct collaboration emerges between an Arab and a Chinese writer/translator. The entrenched European influence on Nahdawi knowledge production, particularly as this is related to China, persists even in this seemly bi-directional line of translation. This has led to me identify the key features of literary texts produced through the circuits of triangular translation as ambiguities of authorship and intellectual property, and a blurred line between foreign ethnography and domestic politics.

Tracking the prevalence of these features throughout Nahdawi literature, principally among 40 some of its understudied materials, I propose triangular translation as a framework for analysis that can be used to make sense of south-south relations structuring Nahda culture well beyond the four case studies I consider here.

Each chapter examines a text that is representative of a different literary genre and provides a distinctive case study of triangular translation. The four texts are differentiated by the availability of archival materials, whether source texts exist at all or in fragments, and the blurred line between fictional and non-fictional genres in Nahda writing. I read four texts through the concept of triangular translation in four chapters: (1) an Arabization of a European novel; (2) a rewritten biography based on uncited European sources; (3) translations of an English journal article about

China with strategic omissions; and (4) a co-authored play by a Chinese male Muslim writer and an Egyptian female writer who likely only communicated with one another in French.

Chapter One discusses a historical romance novel, Ghadat al-Sin, a self-proclaimed

Arabization of a Western novel, written by Ṣalih Jawdat in 1889. Positioning Ghadat al-Sin in a late nineteenth-century historical context, I argue for the existence of a subgenre of Arabic fiction that I call the “Ghadat novels,” which engages with the social discourse on the New Woman and

“proper” gender roles. Although the politics of nationalism made the cultural empowerment of women a prominent theme throughout Nahdawi literature, Ghadat al-Sin stands out from the other texts in this subgenre because of the unique treatment of a female character whose life is indexed by the acquisition of a job and performative adoption of new identities. This positive portrayal of female agency is a direct consequence of Jawdat’s use of negative Orientalist tropes of effeminate masculinity in order to clear space in the narrative for female empowerment. This creative 41 employment of Orientalist tropes, I argue, demonstrates how the author appropriates the Orientalist literary tradition to serve his own ideological purposes.

Chapter Two shifts to the biography genre and examines the biographical essays Saltanat al-

Sin wa mashakiluha [The Sultana of China and Her Problems], Imburaturat al-Sin [The Sultana of China], and Imburadura al-Sin wa siyasatuhah [The Empress of China, her Politics and

Policies], published in the widely circulated journals al-Hilal and al-Muqtataf in the early 1900s.

I survey Nahdawi literary representations of different female rulers worldwide, unpacking the way those representations formed through global circuits of translation. In particular, I compare literary depictions of the Chinese empress dowager Ci Xi (1861-1908), Queen Victoria (1837-1901),

Catherine the Great (1762-1796) and Egyptian queen Shajar al-Durr (May-June 1250). I explore how each of these images of female rulers negotiates a different balance of female political agency and domestic womanhood, modernizing the images of womanhood through which Chinese and

Arab culture represented themselves. I argue that the Arabic biographies of the Chinese Empress

Dowager and of the Egyptian Queen Shajar al-Durr use these women as emblems of eastern culture in order to claim modern forms of female participation in politics for their own societies, unlike the representations of Victoria that confine women’s agency to the home. Examining the visual culture surrounding these biographies, I unpack the Nahdawi visual imagination of the Empress

Dowager of China, exploring how this visual imagination was mediated through European images of the female ruler, in order to account for the curious racial hybridity of these representations.

Chapter Three explores the Nahdawi enthusiasm for the Chinese constitutional revolution through a close reading of three texts: John Otway Percy Bland’s book Recent Events and Present 42

Policies in China (1912), Lord Cromer’s “Some Problems of Government in Europe and Asia”

(1913) and its anonymous Arabic translation “Lord Cromer on China” (1913). Tracing the genealogy of these texts, I compare Cromer’s English original and its Arabic translation, contextualized within the genre of colonial political theory. I argue that the anonymous Nahdawi translator draws upon Lord Cromer’s authority in translating his text in journal article form, but subverts the rhetorical devices European colonizers used to justify colonial rule and uses the signs and symbols of imperial sovereignty to promote constitutionalism in Egypt instead. By leveraging the racist portrayal of the east in European political theory, the Arabic translator uses negative portrayals of China and the far east in order to advocate for political reform in Egypt. Egypt’s position, straddling east and west, allowed Nahdawi intellectuals to use western racism as the shadow of a threat haunting their society if certain reforms were not enacted, establishing a concept of Egyptian society as struggling to position itself on a political spectrum between China and

Europe. This sense that Egypt represented an oblique point somewhere between China and Europe demonstrates the way a triangular framework of international relations structured Egypt’s self- identification.

Chapter Four extends this historical arc to encompass a later moment when Arab intellectuals actively wrote about a world outside Europe, translating the Chinese anti-colonial resistance against other Eastern countries into a Nahdawi context. I examine a one-act Arabic play entitled Za’ir al-Sin (The Roar of China) co-authored by Ma Tianying, a male Chinese Muslim diplomat, and Munira Sayyim Shah, a female Egyptian Muslim playwright. Published in the

Egyptian literary journal al-Riwaya in 1939, Za’ir al-Sin was written during Ma’s visit to Egypt 43 as a member of the Chinese Islamic Near East Delegation. Focusing on the Islamic iconography of this play, I investigate how the two playwrights strategically domesticated the Chinese anti- colonial struggle for their Arabic-speaking audience by situating China within the Muslim umma through the rhetorical agency involved in the act of translation. My argument centres on the role of Islam in establishing transnational connections between the plight of Chinese Muslim communities under attack in the Sino-Japanese war and political questions under debate in

Egyptian society.

As Chapter Four demonstrates, this collaboration between Nahdawi writers and Chinese

Muslims intellectuals in Cairo brings the two points of the triangle into direct contact. Even as a direct cultural and linguistic conduit is established between China and Egypt, however, the mediating presence of Europe remains. This is most overtly apparent in the way French served as the lingua franca for collaboration between Arabic and Chinese intellectuals, and demonstrates the necessity of approaching textual objects almost like an archaeologist, breaking them open to observe the way their language bears the trace of its passage through different language contexts to arrive in Arabic form. I address this in the conclusion, where I discuss the possibility of using triangular translation as an interpretive framework that can address the complexities of south-south translation. I argue that this concept allows us to make visible the presence of European mediation in current scholarship’s knowledge production process on south-south relations.

Because of our ongoing scholarly reliance on translation to make literature of different language communities accessible to us and to side-by-side analysis, I seek in what follows to historicize the act of translation, especially in the way it served to negotiate and subvert the power 44 dynamic between east and west. Triangular translation provides a framework for understanding how translation is not simply something that we apply to Arabic texts externally and after the fact: translating foreign languages and cultures, I argue, was part and parcel of Nahdawi literary production. In this respect, my argument is further complicating the concept of Orientalism-by- proxy, which posits a bi-directional power dynamic as one language is subordinated to another; by contrast, the triangular translation framework enables us to examine how “translation” unpacks into a productive feedback loop between acts of linguistic translation and processes of cultural assimilation involved in the transmission of knowledge between China, Europe, and the Arab world. Within this circuit of transmission, the stereotypes and idioms of Orientalism lose the fixed meanings they held in a European context and are instead opened up to the creative redeployment of Nahdawi translators. In effect fashioning an understanding of China out of the raw materials of

European Orientalism, practices of triangular translation appropriate the mastery of the western gaze, redirecting it in relation to the rest of the world, but for more specific political and cultural purposes tied to the establishment of a transnational identity. 45

CHAPTER 1 Ghadat al-Sin: Translational Practice in a 19th-Century Arabic Novel About China

This chapter explores the triangular nature of the translational practices that joined Egypt to the wider world through a close reading of a nineteenth-century historical romance, Ghadat al-Sin

[The Girl from China]. Written by Egyptian writer and translator Salih Jawdat and published in

Cairo in 1889, Ghadat al-Sin is perhaps the earliest extant Arabic novel that deals with China exclusively. Ghadat al-Sin was part of a significant body of Egyptian literature that engages with discussions of female gender roles through the positive portrayal of female protagonists. These novels use the basic template of “The Girl from Somewhere” as their titles, and were published from the late 1880s into the 1930s. Even among similar novels, Ghadat al-Sin stands out as the only one to situate the plot in China, and by providing an entirely different level of knowledge about the traditions and customs of its setting for its Arabic-reading audience. Jawdat’s richly detailed descriptions of Chinese history, architecture, religious practices, ethnic groups, and regional landscapes give this fiction a distinctively “ethnographic” feel.

In what follows, I will use this “Girl from Somewhere” subgenre to explore the way translation and transnational mediation of texts shape the representation of women in Egypt and reframe our understanding of Orientalism in these decades. The transnational textual circuits on which concepts of eastern regional identities developed in these decades makes the ethnographic an essential and frequent mode that arises throughout Nahda writing, in which the transliteration of foreign terms into the Arabic reflects a multicultural consciousness developing in literature. As I will argue, Ghadat al-Sin demonstrates how Nahda literature more generally borrows European

Orientalism, especially stereotypes of eastern masculinity, for hitherto unacknowledged purposes.

As Ghadat al-Sin makes clear, the Arab appropriation of Orientalism was motivated by a 46 controversial desire to create room for female agency by downplaying the potency of male characters. The novel’s emphasis on female agency in China, particularly in light of Orientalist attitudes that viewed the liberation and empowerment of women as a sign of Europe’s superiority to non-Western cultures, demonstrates the way Jawdat was able to invert the ideological message of Orientalist texts through the translation process.

What makes Ghadat al-Sin stand out from contemporaneous ethnographic novels is that it is an openly acknowledged Arabization of a Western, most probably French, novel about China.

Although the practice of Arabization has been criticized by advocates for Arab culture and dismissed by literary scholars as “non-literary,” Arabized fictions made up a majority of popular fictional works and enjoyed a broad readership during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By offering a case study of how translation practices were paired with the author’s original writings in producing early Arabic novels, Ghadat al-Sin provides a window into the political significance and function of Arabization and its popularity among the emergent novel- reading public.

The existence of a French source text for Ghadat al-Sin, however, makes the cultural politics of this novel more complicated. In France, there was a well-established literary tradition of ethnographic writing on colonized or “exotic” Oriental societies, and Jawdat imports this ethnographic style from the French source text into an Arabic context. This is especially visible in the Chinese terms Jawdat copied from the French original, which saturate the deepest linguistic levels of his novel with an ethnographic project that goes beyond the simple appropriation of exotic cultural materials for entertainment value. This strategy of keeping the Chinese terms in a text otherwise domesticated to the Arabic context serves to establish Jawdat’s authority as a mediator who transmits “scientific knowledge” about China from a French source text to an Arab 47 readership.1

Despite this scientific project, the act of translation inevitably generates additions, distortions and aesthetic choices based on what a readership demanded, making a text function not only as a product of a specific context, but also as a record of reading and interpretive practices in that context. To interpret the parallels between the original and translated versions of Ghadat al-Sin, I will elaborate on my concept of triangular translation in order to analyze how Nahdawi writers not only translated European sources about China but also negotiated those sources with their own perspective. I aim to provide a contextualized reading of Ghadat al-Sin using the triangular framework to help unpack the way gender and political issues are expressed.

My analysis of the female protagonist of this novel focuses on how the author portrays her with strategically constructed traits drawn from Egyptian discussions of ideal womanhood, but embeds those traits within a sophisticated ethnographic project that lends them the force of scientific knowledge. The triangular nature of this text, I argue, enabled the author to participate in the Nahdawi discourse on gender while outmanoeuvring attacks from conservative intellectuals and literary critics. Ghadat fiction’s strong female protagonists take shape within narrative spaces left vacant due to the morally and intellectually weak male characters. In this example of one such novel, Jawdat borrows from the generalized representations of Oriental males in French Orientalist writings. In this sense, powerful interventions into gender politics in Egypt are bound up with cultural representations of other eastern regions appropriated from Europe. To contextualize this fiction and its strategies, the first half of this chapter will provide a brief survey of the practice of ta‘rib, or Arabization, in early novels of the Nahda period. This will bring light the little-known subgenre of the novel constituted by the “Ghadat” novels, and then move on to discuss Jawdat’s

1 Salih Jawdat, Ghadat al-Sin: Riwaya Adabiya Tarikhiya Gharamiya (Cairo: Matba‘at al- Ma‘arif, 1899), 2. 48 use of ethnographic writing about China as a political tactic to intervene in Arabic literary discourses.

Arabization and the Translation of Popular Fiction

The specific version of triangular translation that Ghadat al-Sin mobilizes is what scholars have called Arabization, or ta‘rib, which literally means “Arabicizing, translation into Arabic and giving an Arabic form.”2 When literary critics use this term to describe translation practices used in the adaption of literary works into Arabic, it tends to get collapsed with a range of other adaptation processes including tamsir (Egyptianization), ta‘rib bi-tasarruf (free or creative adaptation), talkhis (summary or abridgement), and naql (transfer), which this chapter will seek to disentangle from one another.3 Tarjama (translation) – the currently used term for translation – did not frequently appear during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to describe this process.4 The distinctive process of ta‘rib is especially important for understanding the inherently transnational nature of gender discourse in middle eastern and east Asian culture in these decades.

By situating his works as key actors within a larger cultural process of ta‘rib, Jawdat is able to assume considerable agency in inserting his own additions into the literary source text.

Arabization does not simply mean adapting a foreign text into the Arabic language; it involves a process of what Samah Selim refers as “radical domestication.”5 This concept borrows from theories of linguistic domestication, a translation strategy that seeks fluent translation and semantic equivalence in order to assimilate a text to the target language’s cultural values. When defining domestication as a translation strategy, Lawrence Venuti explains it as “an ethnocentric

2 A Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic, 4th ed., s.v. “ta‘rib.” 3 Selim, “Translations and Adaptations from the European Novel, 1835–1925,” 123. 4 Selim, “Translations and Adaptations,” 123 5 Selim, “Translations and Adaptations,” 123 49 reduction of the foreign text to the target language’s cultural values, bringing the author back home.”6 In the context of Nahdawi translation, Arabizers adapt the source text to their home culture primarily by using two domesticating transition strategies. First, the literary tastes and preferences of Arabic readerships shaped Arabizers’ choices of which works to translate. Studies on early

Arabic fiction indicate that the emerging Arabic reading public tended to favour romantic, sentimental, and adventure fiction.7 Accordingly, Matti Moosa’s study of the Nahdawi translation of western fiction shows that detective and mystery plots made up a majority of translated fictions until the end of 1940s, and detective and romance-adventure stories still enjoy a vast popularity among readers.8 Indeed, Jawdat himself states that he chose to translate this novel among others because “it includes bizarre events and wonderful situations,” indicating that it would likely be a hit among his target audience.9

Secondly, selecting texts that fit audiences’ expectations meant selecting for and manipulating at a deeper level the language structures and stylistics with which readers were familiar. That meant, in most cases, that Arabizers preferred to write in a prose style close to Classical Arabic. Ghadat al-Sin is again a good representative as Salih wrote in “formalized rhyming prose style.”10 Beyond the prose style, he also emulated the Classical Arabic practice of inserting a significant number of poems into the text, which likewise appears designed to fit the Arabized text to the taste of his

6 Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility, 20. 7 Sabry Hafez, The Genesis of Arabic Narrative Discourse, 87 and Holt, Fictitious Capital: Silk, Cotton, and the Rise of the Arabic Novel. According to Hafez’s and Holt’s studies on the reading public during the Nahda, certain genre and literary forms, namely the short story genre and the suspense-generating form of serialization, emerged and evolved as a response to the taste of the new reading public. Hafez’s and Holt’s approach is also useful in examining whether Nahdawi translators consciously selected literary works to match the tastes of their audience. 8 Moosa, The Origins of Modern Arabic Fiction. 9 Jawdat, Ghadat al-Sin, 2. 10 Roger Allen, “The Beginnings of the Arabic Novel,” in Modern Arabic Literature, ed. M. M. Badawi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 182. 50 audience.11 Considering as well that fiction was an emergent genre during the 1890s, Jawdat’s addition of classical poems to the plot was likely intended not only for market appeal, but also as a gesture to more settled Arabic literary history so as to legitimize his novel.

Although Arabizers employed these and other domesticating translation strategies, we cannot simply equate the concept of ta‘rib, or the larger process of Arabization, to the textual process of domesticating through translation. Unlike translation, which aims to construct equivalence between the source text and the translated text, the practice of ta‘rib involves radical changes as

Arabizers freely altered the plots, characters, actions, and titles. For example, some Arabizers simplified or even omitted plotlines and characters, thinking that the original plots were too confusing for the audiences to follow, and in other cases, changed foreign characters into Arabs.12

For instance, when adapting Walter Scott’s Tales of the Crusaders into Arabic, Najib Haddad completely reversed Scott’s ideological project by giving it the Arabic title Salah al-Din.13 The linguistic process of ta‘rib correlates to a cultural process of domesticating foreign scenes and customs, as authors found ways of managing the transnational flow of texts for nationalized readerships.

The primary strategy involved in ta‘rib was condensing multiple texts into a single story.

Jawdat frequently provided examples of this, as he combined the plots of two novels, Alexander

Dumas’s La Marquise de Brinvilliers (1840) and Emile Gaboriau’s Les Amours D’une empoisonneuse (1881), into one Arabized fiction, bringing his own aesthetic judgements and

Egyptian literary preferences to bear on the source texts.14 As these two novels involved the same

11 Scoville, “The Agency of the Translator: Khalil Baydas’ Literary Translations,” 111. 12 Hafez, The Genesis of Arabic Narrative Discourse: A Study in the Sociology of Modern Arabic Literature, 88. 13 Moosa, The Origins of Modern Arabic Fiction, 79. 14 Moosa, The Origins of Modern Arabic Fiction, 103 and 208. 51 historical figure, Jawdat commented that, because Dumas’s fiction “was closer to the satirical than the fictional...and Gaboriau’s story is closer to the novelistic than to the history, I chose to compose between the two subjects so that the reader might not fail to profit from [the lessons of] history on the one hand and the entertainment of fiction on the other.”15 Ta‘rib thus differs from standard accounts of translation, in that it occupies a grey zone between translation and creative writing that opens up new ways in which Arabizers could shape their culture’s self-understanding.

As radical as many of these alterations were, the ambiguity of authorship that ta‘rib created was perhaps the most controversial aspect of Arabization. The question of whether the Arabizer owned the authorship of their Arabized works, or whether they should cite the title and author of the original works, was notably left unaddressed. In practice, Arabizers did not often attribute their works to the source texts and their original authors, only mentioning the source language or stating that their works were “ta‘rib.” In the preface to Ghadat al-Sin, for example, Jawdat wrote only that

“this is a Western novel,” without further information on the source language, the title of the original work, or its author.16 This systematic omission of citations and disregard for intellectual property caused reviewers and literary critics generally to disregard these Arabized works and harshly rebuke the Arabizers. Even Arab intellectuals such as the editor of al-Hilal criticized

Arabizers for violating the rights of the author of the source texts. Perhaps because the Arabic intelligentsia tended to disown Arabized work, it has fallen further into neglect even within more recent literary criticism.17

15 Moosa, The Origins of Modern Arabic Fiction, 103 and 208. 16 Jawdat, Ghadat al-Sin, 2. 17 Although European colonizers tended to belittle Arabic literature because it did not always observe rights of authorship, the concept of the author as an individual whose work took the form of intellectual property is itself a historical construct that did not characterize literary culture even in Europe until the early eighteenth century. On the historicity of the author as an individual, see Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?” in Michel Foucault, Language, 52

Jawdat was specifically criticized for not attributing his Arabization to the author of its original in a short review published in al-Hilal. After conceding the entertainment value of this work, the reviewer wrote:

But we saw that Arabizers fall into a trap that a lot of our Arabizers fell into before. When

they Arabized a novel, they would only say that this novel is Arabized, or if they were

clearer they would mention the language they Arabized from. But rarely did they mention

the name of the author. This entails an abuse to the authors’ rights which is obvious to any

rational reader.

ولكننا رأينا حضرة المع ّرب وقع في ما وقع فيه كثيرون من معربي الروايات عندنا. فهم اذا عربّوا رواية

اقتصروا على قولهم. أنها معربة واذا زادونا ايضاحا ذكروا اللغة التي نقلوها عنها. واما اسم المؤلف فيندران

يذكره احد منهم. وفي ذلك من االحجاف بحقوق المؤلفين ما ال يخفي علي اللبيب.18

This critique reflects the dominant attitude among elitist and nationalist Arabic literary critics towards Arabized fiction. In other words, by western standards of canon-formation, the contribution of Arabizers to world literature are rendered almost invisible, regardless of their agency in creatively adapting the source text into a local context, let alone the act of subverting

European models of authorship.

Indeed, this claim that ta‘rib is plagiarism fails to consider that, as Selim Samah rightly points out, during the Nahda period, “the line between original, translation, and unattributed works was a very thin one, both in terms of narrative styles and themes, and, one might speculate, reader

Memory, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977. On the development of intellectual property laws that allowed authorship to become a profession in Europe, see Mark Rose, Authors and Owner: The Invention of Copyright, Cambridge: Harvard, 1993. 18 Anonymous, “al-Matbuʿat al-Jadida,” al-Hilal 9 (1900-1901): 703. 53 reception.”19 What further complicates our understanding of Nahda authorship is that the huge popularity of Arabized fiction resulted in the fact that young authors intentionally mislabelled their original work as Arabization or translation for a better chance to get their fiction published.20

As we can see, the practice of ta‘rib is much more complicated than what elitist literary critics considered simply adaptation and plagiarism. Despite its controversial nature, Arabized fiction enjoyed a broad readership and consequently gained commercial success and influence over

Egyptian literary production. In what follows, I suggest that it is necessary to recognize the literary value of this large body of Arabized fiction during the Nahda period and re-examine the practice of ta‘rib in early Arabic fiction writing, which can in fact challenge some of our fundamental understandings about translation—in Selim’s words, “that stories must have authors; that equivalence in transition is always and everywhere desirable; and that the things we call “texts’ are fixed, immobile, and inviolable.”21 The passage of texts between east and west involved not only linguistic transliterations, but also more complex forms of cultural translation. The practice of Nahdawi translation often involved a process of cultural domestication, or strategic adjustment to speak to a new culture’s tastes and preferences, and differed from European copyright laws, which viewed texts as intellectual property that could not be borrowed or modified without proper attribution. As such, the textual flow between cultures I have been describing does not align with existing accounts of translation and cultural influence. In order to place a text like Ghadat al-Sin, which exemplifies these dynamics, within its context, a new analytic is necessary that is sensitive to the unusual transnational circuit that shaped this fiction.

One of the most compelling examples of how a concept of a region and its culture could form

19 Selim, “Translations and Adaptations,” 123 20 Selim, “Translations and Adaptations,” 127. 21 Selim, “Translations and Adaptations,” 120. 54 within this transnational exchange of print material is the “porcelain tower,” or a pervasive image of China that emerged from French discourse. This image, which makes its way into Ghadat al-

Sin from its French source, was a central organizing trope in nineteenth-century French writing about China. Influential literary figures including Baudelaire, Voltaire, Mallarmé, and Gautier condensed the wide range of representations of China into this architectural image that demonstrates European understandings of Chinese architecture, commerce, beliefs, and social organization.22 It appears most commonly as a literal tower made of porcelain whose beauty and craftsmanship makes it stand out as a wonder of the world. The romanticized notions of China that emerged from the extensive chinoiserie movement, or the French reproduction of Chinese style from literature to fashion to commodity production, were perfectly encapsulated in this tower whose exoticism primarily emphasized China’s imagined differences from more practical

European customs and rationality.23

22 For more on work on French and English writings about China in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see William Leonard Schwartz, The Imaginative Interpretation of the Far East in Modern French Literature, 1800-1925 (Paris: H. Champion, 1927); Raymond Dawson, The Chinese Chameleon: An Analysis of European Conceptions of Chinese Civilization (London: Oxford Uiversity Press, 1967); Colin Mackerras, Western Images of China (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); Yvonne Y. Hsieh, From Occupation to Revolution: China through the Eyes of Loti, Claudel, Segalen, and Malraux (1895-1933) (Birmingham: Summa Publications, 1996); Bettina Liebowitz Knapp, Judith Gautier: Writer, Orientalist, Musicologist, Feminist, a Literary Biography (Dallas: Hamilton Books, 2004); Meng Hua, Studies in Sino-French Literary Relations (Shanghai: Fu dan da xue chu ban she, 2011). 23 Despite the French literary circle’s continued observation of chinoiserie conventions, represented by Voltaire and his school, this literary interest in China declined during the early nineteenth century. One of the reasons for this decline of interest was the severing of the connection between French missionaries and China during the Napoleonic wars. However, this shortage of first-hand French accounts on China stimulated the early sinologues to translate Chinese literary works, including Chinese novels, plays, classical poems, and religious writings, as a way to understand Chinese society. In his classic study of the imaginative interpretation of China and Japan in modern French literature, William Leonard Schwartz recognizes the role French romantic poets Théophile Gautier, Hugo, and Baudelaire played in reviving French literary interest in China. In particular, Gautier, driven by his personal interest in East Asia, influenced a group of romantic poets, including his daughter Judith Gautier, to write about China as a land open to romanticized re-imagination. Among the romanticized images of China, the Porcelain Tower of Nanking is the 55

The way this tower appears in Jawdat’s novel models in miniature the argument I will be unfolding throughout this chapter. The caricature of eastern culture produced by European

Orientalism gets imported through the act of translation in Egyptian texts where it takes on new meanings and uses in that new context. Placed prominently at the beginning of the novel, the tower

Jawdat describes is used as a microcosm of the civilization where the novel is set: having outlined the landscape and society, Jawdat zooms in on a breathtaking tower to show how its construction offers a deeper insight into the society’s culture. He emphasizes the skill, ornate design, and rare materials that went into the tower’s construction, commenting on the height of the spiral staircases leading to the top, the silver-inlaid walls, and emerald ceiling that “takes the mind and eye away,”

all in an effort to illustrate “the skilfulness of the workers, and the (سلبت العقول وأخذت باألبصار)

The 24(مهارة العمال وتقدم هذه البالد في فن الصناعة) ”.advancement of this country in the art of manufactory result of the lavish design and high cost of construction “would amaze the most talented

and points to the cultural priorities and stylistics (ابرز مصور لبهت وانبهر من بديع اتقانه) ”,photographer of Chinese culture.25

Jawdat’s version of the tower reproduces the Orientalist fascination with the seductiveness of representations of China—its ability to captivate the senses and relax the mind--but repurposes its effect. As we will see, the novel’s ethnographic project employs images like this one of Chinese culture primarily to educate readers about China, making the perspectives and customs of Jawdat’s characters more relatable than inscrutable. Throughout the body of fiction Arabized from European

most famous literary image that represents China. For example, Gautier mentions the porcelain tower in his poem Chinoiserie, “Celle que j'aime, à présent, est en Chine,/ Elle demeure avec ses vieux parents,/ Dans une tour de porcelaine fine,/ Au Fleuve Jaune, où sont les cormorans.” Schwartz, The Imaginative Interpretation of the Far East in Modern French Literature, 1800-1925. 17-23. 24 Jawdat, Ghadat al-Sin, 7. 25 Jawdat, Ghadat al-Sin, 7. 56 sources, the Orientalism of the French texts loses the racialized barbs that Edward Said’s classic argument has identified as a strategy of imperial control. The ethnographic strain in Nahda fiction, as Jawdat’s novel exemplifies, repurposes European Orientalism’s ethnographic mastery of the east as a project of popular education about other eastern regions.

The “Ghadat novel”: a sub-genre of early Arabic fiction

Ghadat al-Sin was part of an important, though little-studied, outpouring of Egyptian fiction with similar titles that dramatize this ethnographic function. The mushrooming growth of novels that shared similar titles with Ghadat al-Sin in Arabic literary circles occurred mainly between the

1890s and the 1910s. There were over twenty-two novels published with this formula used in the title, dealing with locations from Andalusia to Berlin, from Cairo to Russia. These novels reached a peak in popularity in the early decades of the 20th century, but continued to be published in significant numbers into the 1960s.26 The appearance of novels with titles such as al-Ghada al-

26 Hamdi Sakkut, The Arabic Novel: Bibliography and Critical Introduction, 1865-1995 (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2001): 2695-2697. These titles include the following: Ghadat Lubnan [The Young Girl from Lebanon], published in Alexandria in 1889; al-Ghada al- Ingliziyya [The Young Girl from England], published in Cairo in 1895; Al- Ghadah al-Urubiyyah [The European Girl in the East], published in Cairo in 1897; Ghadat Jabal Anasiya [The Young Girl from Anasiya Mountain], published in Alexandria in 1897; Al-Ghadah al-Misriyyah [The Young Girl from Egypt], published in Cairo in 1899; Ghadat al-Andalus [The Young Girl from Andalusia], published in Cairo in 1901; Ghadat Karbala’ [The Young Girl from Karbala’], published in Cairo in 1901; Al-Ghadah al-Suriyyah Fi al-Diyar al-Amrikiyyah [The Syrian Girl in America], published in Cairo in 1902; Ghadat Finis [The Young Girl from Venice], published in Cairo in 1903; Ghadat al-Transfal aw al-Tabib al-Khaniq [The Young Girl from Transylvania or the Choking Doctor], published in Cairo in 1905; Ghadat Birlin [The Young Girl from Berlin], published in Cairo in 1906; Ghadat al-Masyaf [The Young Girl from the Summer Resort], published in 1908; Ghadat ‘Amshit [The Young Girl from Amshit], published in New York and Beirut in 1910; Ghadat al-Ahram [The Young Girl from the Pyramids]; Ghadat Babil [The Young Girl from Babylon], published in Iraq in 1927; Ghadat Yildiz wa Ashhar Qisas Gharam al-Muluk wa al-Umara’ [The Young Girl from Yildiz and the Most Famous Love Stories of Kings and Princes], published in Cairo in 1928; Ghadat Hammana [The Young Girl from Hammana], published in Cairo in 1930; Ghadat al-Shuwayr [The Young Girl from Shuwayr], published in Beirut in 1933; Ghadat Rashid [The Young Girl from Rosetta], published in Cairo 57

Ingliziyya illustrates the way Nahdawi culture was positioning itself in relation to conceptions of both east and west, using female protagonists as a way of understanding points of cultural similarity and difference.27

The proliferation of novels with these titles suggests that we might identity “the Ghadat novel” as a subgenre of early Arabic fiction in these years. To explore how attention to this subgenre would modify dominant accounts of fiction in this region, this section examines Jawdat’s Ghadat al-Sin, which I will contextualize within this subgenre with brief discussions of Ghadat Lubnan by ‘Abdu Badran [1867-1924], Ghadat Karbala’ by renowned Lebanese writer Jurji Zaydan

[1861-1914], and Ghadat ‘Amshit by ‘Afifa Karam [1883-1924]. I build on Fredric Jameson’s influential definition of genre, but modify that argument as necessary in order to read Ghadat novels as representatives of the Arab Nahda, in which the discussion of gender and womanhood occupy a central position in social discourse.28 In keeping with Jameson’s account of how literary form serves a function specific to its socio-political context, I argue that the unusual model of translation involved in the production of early Arabic fiction offers a window into the politics of womanhood. In particular, by offering multiple, flexible models of the “new woman,” Jawdat positions himself as a progressive within rigid Egyptian gender politics. In order to circumvent censorship and criticism, however, he manipulates time and space in order to stage his politics in distant cultural and historical areas, with the result that the Ghadat novel subgenre emerged as a

in 1945; Ghadat Basra [The Young Girl from Basra], published in Cairo in 1952; Ghadat al- ‘Iraq [The Young Girl from Iraq], published in Beirut in 1960; Ghadat al-Hawdaj [The Young Girl from the Tent], published in Cairo; and Ghadat al-Rusiya [The Young Girl from Russia] in 1900. Many of these titles have been recovered from references in book reviews and journal articles if the novels themselves were no longer extant. As a result, some of the available publication information is incomplete. 27 Labiba Hashim, al-Ghada al-Ingliziyya (Cairo: matba‘at al-ma‘arif, 1895), 1. 28 Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 106. 58 hybrid literary form whose politics required Jawdat to combine features of the historical novel, the

Arabized translation, and the adventure-romance.

Yet despite more than twenty catalogued titles, currently there are fewer than eight Ghadat novels readily available for scholars to read in the original Arabic. The four titles I have chosen to address here demonstrate the hybridity of this subgenre, including the canonical historical novel

Ghadat Karbala’, which remains popular among Arabic reading audiences and has been reprinted many times, but also novels written by lesser-known authors that more explicitly indulge the popular taste for romance. All four were published around the same period, with the earliest in

1889, the latest in 1910. Their authors include both males and females, journalists and translators, as well as the somewhat archaic figure of the author who wrote under the patronage of a wealthy public figure. It is worth mentioning that one of these authors, ‘Afifa Karam was a pioneering female writer. As a Lebanese-American immigrant writer, journalist, and translator, she was based in Louisiana and published three novels in New York City.29 Although almost entirely unstudied in current literary scholarship, Karam was an important contributor to the Nahda and a prominent member of the Mahjar literary community.30

As Jameson argues, genres serve as “essentially literary institutions or social contracts between a writer and a specific public, whose fiction is to specify the proper use of a cultural artifact.”31 Based on this understanding of genre as something that enacts a cultural purpose, I will explore the social function of the Ghadat novel in the Nahdawi context, underlining its overt

29 For more on the life and the works on ‘Afifa Karam, see Saylor, “A Bridge Too Soon: The Life and Works of ‘Afifa Karam, the First Arab American Woman Novelist.” 30 These authors actively participated in journalism: Zaydan was the founder of the widely- circulated Nahdawi journal al-Hilal, and Salih Jawdat was a frequent contributor to the literary periodical Musamarat al-sha‘b (The People’s Entertainments, 1904-1911). As for ‘Afifa Karam, she started her writing career as a columnist in the most influential Arabic-language newspaper in North America, al-Huda, and was later promoted to the rank of acting editor-in-chief. 31 Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, 106. 59 educational purposes and the more covert political influence it wielded in the guise of education.

However, Jameson’s emphasis on “a specific public” and the idea of an artefact that can be traced to an origin in a specific culture indicates the presence of a set of assumptions in his theory about novels belonging to a national tradition. Jameson hints at a nation-specific template for novel studies, where fiction is written in a particular language for a particular readership and only spreads transnationally as a secondary effect of popularity. By contrast, this Ghadat subgenre is written specifically for transnational circuits through which different regional populations formed ideas of one another, thus demanding a renovated sense of the genres that were emergent in early Arabic literary circles.

The best tools for understanding how these novels functioned culturally have been developed by literary critics in the context of historical fiction. In calling Ghadat fiction a kind of historical novel, it is important to notice a “historical trend” in fin-de-siècle novelistic writing in the Arab world.32 Perhaps best represented by Jurji Zaydan, a group of authors integrated both historical elements and a romance story into their novels. Each of Jurji Zaydan’s twenty-two historical novels is situated in a crucial moment of Islamic history, and involves a love story between hero and heroine.33 These historical novels played an important role in the development of Arabic prose fiction.34 Since the novel was still a controversial genre during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the popularity of the historical novel not only helped to legitimize this emerging genre by tying it to the region’s long-standing cultural identity, but also increased the number of novel readers among the Arabic reading public.

According to Egyptian literary critic, ‘Abd al-Muhsin Taha Badr, the historical novel

32 Paul Starkey, Modern Arabic Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 99- 102. 33 Starkey, Modern Arabic Literature, 101. 34 Starkey, Modern Arabic Literature, 101. 60 combines educational and entertainment functions.35 As Badr explains, the prevalent practice of using the novel to educate readers about history generally involved rich paratextual information in footnotes and prologues, extensive description of geographical landscapes and historical events, and the insertion of an authorial voice into the narrative as direct address to the reader.

Many of the Ghadat novels identify themselves explicitly as historical novels; three of the four that I examine here do so on their titles pages. The subtitles identify Ghadat al-Sin as a

“historical romance novel;”36 Ghadat al-‘Amshit as a “nationalistic, historical, literary, and social novel;”37 and Ghadat Karbala’ as part of a series of “novels of Islamic history.”38 Because critics tend to associate the historical novel with the formation of national traditions, these subheadings appear to urge an interpretation of the Ghadat fiction as nationalist propaganda. Through close readings of the way the authors present these works in the prefaces, however, here I would like to question what the historical novel means as an emergent genre in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Egypt. In the context of the four Ghadat novels, the authors indicate that their primary intention is to educate their audiences. Zaydan, for instance, claims that his aim in writing a historical novel is to “write history in the novel or story form.”39 He further explains his point in an essay called “History of Islamic Civilization” that “since the majority of readers in the Arabic- speaking world during his own time will find reading works of history a heavy burden, he has needed to resort to tricks in order to provide such educational material; for Zaydan, the novel has

35 ʿAbd al-Muhsin Taha Badr, Tatawwur ar-Riwwya al-ʿArabiyya al-Hadita fi Misr (1870 - 1938) (Cairo: Dar al-Maʿarif, 1983), 409-21. 36 Jawdat, Ghadat al-Sin, 1. 37 ‘Afifah Karam, Ghadat ‘Amshit: Riwaya Wataniya, Tarikhiya, Adabiya, Ijtima‘iya (New York: Matba‘at Jaridat al-Hud·, 1900), 1. 38 Jirji Zaydan, Ghadat Karbala’ (Cairo: Dar al-Hilal, 1984), 1. 39 Walid Hamarneh, “Jurji Zaydan,” in Essays in Arabic Literary Biography, 1850-1950, ed. Roger Allen (Leipzig: Harrassowitz 2010), 385. 61 offered the most effective way of attracting such readers.”40

Zaydan’s mission of advocating the importance of Islamic history to his audience led to his inclusion of footnotes citing both his Arabic and European-language historical sources.41 Similar to Zaydan, Jawdat and Karam also highlight the educational purposes of their novels. In the preface of Ghadat al-Sin, Jawdat notes that, “I embellished [the text] with some scientific findings, historical events, manners and customs, wisdom and benefits.”

"وزينتها ببعض االكتشافات العلمية والحوادث التاريخية. واألخالق والعوائد. والحكم والفوائد" 42

In addition to introducing historical and geographical information to the audience as appealing decoration, Jawdat also addresses the importance of moral values, such as keeping a promise, throughout the text—a link not simply to historical events, but also the history of Islam’s cultural values and self-understanding. ‘Afifa Karam also indicates that the novel genre contains a particular educational function for female audiences. Karam states in the preface that she is dedicating her work in the novel to “the girls today and the universal mothers of tomorrow, to the pure virgins of Lebanon.”

"اهديها إلى فتيات اليوم وزوجات وامهات الغد إلى عذارى لبنان الظاهرات"43

Moreover, Karam conceives of the novel genre as the most appropriate genre for female audiences to read and the most effective genre in influencing them.44 According to Karam, “ladies possess a stronger passion for reading novels…than other kinds of books.”45 Due to women’s

40 Hamarneh, “Jurji Zaydan,” 385. 41 Hamarneh, “Jurji Zaydan,” 385. 42 Jawdat, Ghadat al-Sin, 3. 43 Karam, Ghadat ‘Amshit, 2. 44 Saylor, “A Bridge Too Soon: The Life and Works of ‘Afifa Karam, the First Arab American Woman Novelist, ” 70. 45 ‘Afifa Karma, “Bahth fi al-Riwayat,” al-Huda 9, no. 19 (March 1906), i. Quoted in Saylor, “A Bridge Too Soon: The Life and Works of ‘Afifa Karam, the First Arab American Woman Novelist,” 70. 62 preference for reading this genre, Karam chose to write novels “to influence their [female audiences’] minds and hearts as well as [to] entertain them.”46 Badran’s Ghadat al-Lubnan also aims to shape readers’ moral judgment, reminding its audience of the danger of base activities

(obscenity, promiscuity, gambling, etc.) that the author views as the product of western ideals of freedom and materialism which threaten to define what modernity means for the Arab world.

Specifically, the form of the historical novel offered the authors of Ghadat novels a way of telling stories that traveled through both time and space, providing a literary form that could encompass the transnational dimensions of the social and political situation in which they wrote, and position female characters within this situation in order to think through modern gender roles.

Jawdat uses Ming dynasty China; Karam chose her hometown, a village named ‘Amshit in Mount

Lebanon. In Ghadat al-Lubnan, most of the plot takes place in late nineteenth-century Beirut and

Mount Lebanon. In Ghadat al-Karbala’, the plot starts in a monastery in Damascus, the capital city of Umayyad dynasty under the caliph Yazid, and features the tragic death of Husayn Ibn ‘Ali.

These novels employ a shared narrative structure in order to capture and represent historical and regional experience. More specifically, these novels all involve a love triangle between the hero, the heroine, and a powerful male character, whose adventures allow authors to introduce new geographical areas to educate readers, and also to explore the changing politics of gender by repositioning these stock characters in relation to one another in terms of who holds moral and social agency. The hero and heroine are often lovers who have known each other for a long time, even childhood sweethearts. Their relationships are interrupted by another male character. These powerful intruders—namely the emperor Huai Zong, the Caliph Yazid, the rich merchant Habib, and Yusuf, the son of rich eastern Egyptian parents--take advantage of their political positions and

46 Saylor, “A Bridge Too Soon: The Life and Works of ‘Afifa Karam, the First Arab American Woman Novelist,” 70. 63 wealth to force the female protagonists to marry them. To escape marrying and being abused by these male intruders, these four young women/ghadats exercise newfound agency; many of them escape from home and go through long adventures that illuminate historical events and other cultures.

Salma, the heroine of Ghadat Karbala’, takes revenge on Yazid, who killed her father. She then finds ‘Abd al-Rahman, her cousin and lover, travels to Mecca, and marries him there. Another

Salma, the female protagonist from Ghadat Lubnan, throws herself into the Nile to avoid an arranged marriage with Yusuf, her suitor, whose obscenity, promiscuity, and gambling she finds unacceptable. Fortuitously, readers find out that right after Salma throws herself in the river, that

Malik, her cousin and childhood sweetheart, saves her and they later get married in Malik’s village.

Unlike the happy endings in Ghadat Karbala’ and Ghadat Luban, the narrative arcs of the female characters in Ghadat al-Sin and Ghadat ‘Amshit end in tragedy. Lon Fun, the female protagonist of Ghadat al-Sin, jumps into the river to escape a forced marriage with the emperor and to keep her promise to her lover who, unlike Malik, is not there to rescue her. Farida, the heroine in Ghadat

‘Amshit, dies in a convent at the young age of twenty-three.47 These female protagonists not only possess physical beauty, but also are portrayed as intelligent women who are willing to express their opinions and exercise their agency to achieve their goals.

In contrast to the female characters in these novels, the male characters are in general negatively portrayed for their moral defects. Some examples of these male characters include evil rulers, such as Caliph Yazid from Ghadat Karbala’ who indulges in women and leisure, weak lovers such as Li Tsubi in Ghadat al-Sin who fails to protect his beloved, abusive husbands such as Habib in Ghadat Lubnan who constantly beats his wife, and the spoiled sons of wealthy families

47 Saylor, “A Bridge Too Soon : the Life and Works of ‘Afifa Karam, the First Arab American Woman Novelist,” 147. 64 like Khalil in Ghadat Luban who plots to marry his sister to an objectionable suitor after receiving

20,000 francs from this suitor. In these four novels, it is usually the conflict between the female protagonist, who rebels against the arranged marriage, and the male characters, who attempt to force the heroines to accept it, that drives the plot.

Jawdat’s version of the subgenre, Ghadat al-Sin, which this chapter takes as its central focus, centers the love triangle on Lun Fu, a proto-feminist figure who must resist the obsessive pursuit of the emperor, Huai Zong, and attempt to reunite with her actual lover Li Tsubi. The action takes place in the 4th year of the emperor’s reign, which appears to align the novel with the Ming dynasty, roughly setting the novel between the years 1368 to 1644. Having accidentally caught the eye of the emperor while she is returning home in the middle of the night from a secret tryst with Li Tsubi in a graveyard, Lun Fu refuses the emperor’s lavish gifts and the social pressures of those around her to accept him. The emperor, however, is insistent that his position and power entitles him to the woman he desires, causing Lu Fun to leave her parents’ house and go on a string of adventures where she finds a career, evades the imperial police force, and starts working to find Li Tsubi who has also run away. His parallel adventures include falling in with a prince who discovers and thwarts a Mognol scheme to invade China by tunnel. When the emperor discovers the new life Lun Fu has made for herself, he ambushes her and she ultimately kills herself rather than submitting to his wishes, leaving Li Tsubi with only her corpse.

The Social Discourse on Gender during the Nahda

By putting strong female characters into exciting and often heartrending situations, these novels tapped into contemporaneous debates surrounding the new woman, but also contributed to those debates semi-covertly thanks to the temporal and spatial displacement of the stories to the 65 historical past of other cultures. The Egyptian debates about modern women, or New Women-- such as issues of women’s education and the duties of a proper wife and mother--occupy a central position in both colonial and nationalist discourses. In the context of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Egypt, British colonial forces and European travel literature generally use the oppressed status of Egyptian women, especially their segregation, veiling, and subjection to polygamy, to justify the British occupation of Egypt. 48 Conversely, Egyptian nationalists demonstrated their readiness for independence through advocating for educating women and reforming family politics.49 The gender politics that the Ghadat novels intervene in, then, carries a particular significance for colonial resistance and the middle east’s claims to modernity.

Although both male and female Arab intellectuals participated in this wider social discourse of ideal womanhood, it was dominated by male writers. This male-dominated discourse is best represented by the works of Qasim Amin, the so-called “father of Arab feminism.” Following the lead of European colonial and travel literature, Amin attributed the backwardness of Egyptian society to Egyptian women. He advocated for requiring (and limiting) a certain level of education for women, suggesting that, after receiving a fifth-grade level of education, they would be qualified to bring up the next generation of modern citizens.50 In this narrative, although the nationalists considered women’s education and liberation crucial for the progress of the society, women could only exercise a limited degree of agency and men were still intellectually superior to women. This single model for female development standardized what it meant to be a woman and reified the cultural role of the female into a set of household duties that crystalized into a single, rigid ideal

48 Pollard, Nurturing the Nation: The Family Politics of Modernizing, Colonizing and Liberating Egypt 1805-1923, 178. 49 Pollard, Nurturing the Nation: The Family Politics of Modernizing, Colonizing and Liberating Egypt 1805-1923, 178. 50 Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 159. 66 of femininity.51

Multiple Models of Ideal Womanhood

By reading the protagonists of Ghadat novels in the context of Nahawi social discussion on gender, I argue that these four fictional texts engage in this social discourse by establishing their own models of ideal womanhood through the portrayals of their respective Ghadats [young women/ girls]. In my reading of the female protagonists, I suggest that, while Ghadat Karbala’ and Ghadat Lubnan construct female protagonists who might be considered as complicit in a male- centric view of what constituted a proper woman, Ghadat ‘Amshit introduces a more progressive type of female character, which receives its most complex and rigorous depiction in Ghadat al-

Sin’s female protagonist Lun Fu. The novels in this subgenre re-think the relationship between the agency of women as individuals and the cultural roles they were supposed to serve. We see that marriage and the household are represented at times as a form of confinement that heroines must liberate themselves from, and at other times a form of fulfillment that women can only achieve by exercising newfound willpower. One of the primary interventions this body of fiction as a whole tends to make is the rejection of arranged marriage in favour of a heroine’s free choice to be married.

51 This male-centric discourse about women’s liberation was challenged by a group of female intellectuals such as Malak Hifni Nasif, Labiba Hashim, and ‘Afifa Karam, who participated in the discussion of the gender question through their literary production. The first generation of women writers included Warda al-Yaziji, Aisha Taymur, Zaynab Fawwaz, Hind Nawfal, and May Ziyada. These female writers not only addressed women’s concerns about gender segregation and women’s education, but also openly defended their right to publicly express their opinions. Compared to male Nahdawi authors, these female writers actively engaged with taboo issues and some of them openly criticized the male-dominated nationalist discourse on womanhood. See El Sadda, Gender, Nation and the Arabic Novel: Egypt 1892-2007. 67

An example of this is Ghadat Karbala’, in which Zaydan introduces Salma as an orphan girl who is determined to take revenge on the Caliph Yazid when she finds out that her father, Hujr

Bin Adiyy, a noble from the Hashem family, had been killed by Yazid’s father, Caliph Mu‘awiya.

Salma’s father was executed, we discover, because Mu‘awiya forced people to denounce his rival, Caliph ‘Ali, which Salma’s father refused to do. Before his death, her father had asked ‘Amir, a trusted friend and advisor, to take care of Salma and ensure that she doesn’t marry anyone other than ‘Abd al-Rahman. Salma is portrayed as a girl who is extremely beautiful, particularly her eyes, which no words can describe. She is also intelligent, assertive, and courageous, and she makes her own decisions in order to save her lover, ‘Abd al-Rahman, and kill Caliph Yazid. She turns marriage into a tool she can use to achieve her own goals, accepting a marriage proposal from Yazid on purpose to get close enough to kill him. However, despite these empowered traits,

Zaydan greatly emphasizes the physical beauty of the heroine to the degree that almost every male character who sees her is enticed by her. Zaydan subtly implies that it is Salma’s beauty, not her intelligence, that saves her from several attempted murders because her male would-be assassins become infatuated with her.

By contrast to the stylized physical appearance of the heroine of Ghadat Karbala’, the heroine

Salma in Ghadat Luban is described in more liberated terms as a girl who is loyal to her love, is brave enough to speak her own ideas, and pursues her right to decide her own marriage. For instance, she resists her family’s pressure to marry the undesirable Yusuf, and the climax of the plot occurs when Salma, knowing that she will be forced to marry Yusuf that night, jumps into the

Nile to escape the coming wedding. When she wakes up, she discovers that, right after she had thrown herself in the river, her actual lover, Malik, grabbed her by the upper arm and got her out.

The scene of Salma’s rescue ultimately neutralizes much of her struggle for free marriage, 68 indicating that her agency is ultimately dependent on the agency of the male protagonist. As we can see, Ghadat Karbala’ and Ghadat Lubnan offer a kind of womanhood that is compatible with the male-dominated nationalistic discourse on femininity and womanhood. 52 Their female protagonists, both named Salma, claim a certain degree of agency, but ultimately fail in attempting to escape an arranged marriage without the help of a man. It is, of course, their physical beauty that attracts the help of these male characters. In this way, these two novels achieve at best an ambivalent position on female agency.

As the only female author among these four Ghadat novels, Karam offers an example of a female Nahdawi’s interpretation of ideal womanhood and a valuable critique of the nationalist discourse on gender. Unlike the heroines in other Ghadat novels, who are outspoken and assertive at the beginning of the plot yet not so much by the end, Farida, the female protagonist in Ghadat

‘Amshit, undergoes a radical change in order for her character development to culminate in complete self-possession.53 At the beginning of the novel, Farida appears as a silenced, obedient and submissive girl who endures abuses and dehumanization from her father and husband.54 In spite of her affection for her childhood sweetheart Farid, she is forced to marry to a man who is much older than she is at fourteen. 55 The custom of child marriage was prevalent in Mount

Lebanon at the time.56 Her husband, a rich man who is abusive, ignorant and addicted to alcohol,

52 Much discussion of Nahdawi gender politics was bound up with the Arab nationalist movement, which countered the British view that the alleged Arabic oppression of women justified colonial rule. By making the case for women’s liberation on this basis, male nationalistic writers called for women’s freedom but ultimately did so in a way that limited female agency in shaping the women’s liberation movement for themselves. See, for example, El Sadda, Gender, Nation and the Arabic Novel: Egypt 1892-2007. 53 Saylor, “A Bridge Too Soon,” 144-145. 54 Saylor, “A Bridge Too Soon,” 144-145. 55 Saylor, “A Bridge Too Soon,” 144-145. 56 Karam, Ghadat ‘Amshit, 3. 69 constantly tortures her both physically and mentally.57 However, starting in the second half of the novel, Farida becomes a woman who is self-determined, speaks out, and claims the right to act on her own subjectivity rather than external pressure.58

This novel not only attacks patriarchal practices such as child marriage and domestic violence that led to the miserable life of many women in the author’s homeland of Lebanon, but also provides a powerful critique of nationalist reformers through the voice of the female protagonist. Karam dramatizes the figure of the male-centric nationalist in the character of Farid.

In one especially telling scene, Farid dresses as a woman to meet Farida in her house, persuading her to come to America with her. When Farida questions this plan, Farid flies into a frenzy and

Farida must be to resist his good intentions (مظلومة) ”and “oppressed (ضعيفة) ”criticizes how “weak to save her. 59 At this point, Farida voices a powerful critique of the nationalist effort to liberate women from their own weakness: “You men call women “weak” in spite of the fact that you are the cause of their weakness. If you want us to be on equal footing, then why don’t you give women all of their rights?”60

"انكم معاشر الرجال تلقبون للمرأة ’بالضعيفة‘ مع انكم سبب ضعفها فاذا كان الضعف خلة قبيحة فلماذا خصصتموها بها وان

كنتم تحبون ان تجاريكم بكل شيء حتى بالقوة فلماذا ال تنيلونها حقوقكم كلها"61

From this scene, Karam suggests that the male nationalist reformers, despite their advocacy for women’s liberation within the larger discourse of nationalist struggle, still hold patriarchal ideas of women. The nationalists’ agenda to reform women’s rights ultimately continues to oppress women because the good intentions of individual reformers cannot reshape the deeper patriarchal

57 Saylor, “A Bridge Too Soon” 146. 58 Saylor, “A Bridge Too Soon,” 145. 59 Saylor, Saylor, “A Bridge Too Soon,” 146. 60 Saylor, Saylor, “A Bridge Too Soon,” 146. 61 Karam, Ghadat ‘Amshit, 278. 70 system that define women as valuable property—if they are no longer the property of a husband or father, then they are the property of a culture that wants to use their liberation for its own ends.

This irony of male nationalist reformers calling for women’s emancipation but simultaneously denying women’s voices suggests that nationalists used this “women’s question” in order to further their own political interests. Although it might seem to be merely a novelistic cliché to represent romantic desire liberating itself from oppressive social norms, the cliché acquires a controversial politics in the context of debates about ideal womanhood and the nationalization of gender roles.

One reason that Ghadat novels breathe new political life into a novelistic cliché is that this subgenre draws from a transnational body of ideas and source texts in order to construct their narratives, importing transnational cultural materials that have disruptive meanings within nationalist discourses. Ghadat al-Sin is exemplary of this dynamic in the way it presents a unique model of womanhood. Locating the setting of the novel in China allows the author to imagine his own version of ideal womanhood detached from the constraints of the inevitable criticism of

Egyptian cultural commentators. Ghadat al-Sin’s more transformative gender politics, as I will go on to argue, derive from the way it mobilizes the full potential of triangular translation, particularly the power of the translator to persuade while seeming merely to educate.

The Ethnography of Gender: Ghadat al-Sin and Contemporary Fiction about China

Ghadat al-Sin distinguishes itself from the other members of its subgenre by investing far greater attention to educating readers about China—beyond simply its history and customs, and beyond simply what is necessary to the plot. Ghadat al-Sin stands out not only within the Ghadat novel subgenre but also within Arabic literature more generally as perhaps the only novel of the era set in China. In reading Jawdat’s detailed description of seventeenth-century Chinese history, 71 culture, geography and tradition in his fictional writing, I want to address the relationship he implies between ethnography and gender politics. Indeed, Jawdat explains his ethnographic intention in the preface, stating that this fiction aims to provide knowledge about China, which he realizes through his use of Chinese names, transliterations of Chinese terms, and in-text insertions explaining Chinese geographical locations, customs and traditions 62 These markers of the ethnographic further reinforce the epistemological authority of his novel, speaking to readers in a pedagogical mode that educates them about distant regions. By making gender in China a frequent subject of his ethnographic explorations, he sidesteps the divisive political discourse on gender in

Egypt, speaking with a more factual authority about a variety of issues—especially female agency-

-than would have been available to him without these ethnographic tactics.

When viewed in these terms, Ghadat al-Sin functions much like novels that Michelle Hartman has identified as participating in an “ethnographic pact.” Her study identifies Lebanese francophone fiction written in the 20th century that “draw[s] on the idea of explaining customs, traditions, and culture that is meant somehow” to articulate a regional culture to foreign readers in order to “establish complicity with their readers.”63 This complicity between writer and reader provides “alternative knowledge” that disrupts colonial knowledge production by imitating and challenging the colonial techniques of ethnography.64 By offering readers an appealing storyline in exchange for an education in Chinese culture, Jawdat works within the form of the contract

Hartman outlines. Yet Ghadat al-Sin, as I will argue, ultimately inverts this model of complicity, as it offers readers a deceptive pact where the educational function of ethnography smuggles in a progressive political position regarding gender that disguises its controversial political nature. In

62 Jawdat, Ghadat al-Sin, 3. 63 Hartman, Native Tongue, Stranger Talk: The Arabic and French Literary Landscapes of Lebanon, 59. 64 Hartman, Native Tongue, 60. 72 what follows, I will examine the ethnography of gender performed by this fiction, which borrows the authoritative ethnographic voice and cultural stereotypes of western Orientalism ostensibly to understand a different region, but actually to enact a political agenda in the home culture.

The transliteration of Chinese words into Jawdat’s Arabic text offers a way of tracing how

European ethnographic strategies made their way into Arabic writing not solely through author’s intentional appropriation of those strategies, but also at the deeper linguistic levels of the text.

Although Ghadat al-Sin is remarkable for its rich linguistic engagement with Chinese words, names, and linguistic structures, it is highly unlikely that Jawdat was able to speak Chinese. The transliteration of Chinese words into Arabic, then, appears to have come from the French source text when Jawdat translated it into Arabic. Indeed, based on comparisons between the Arabic transliterations in this novel, the original Chinese terms, and the way the Chinese terms appear when translated into French, it becomes apparent that Jawdat’s transliteration of Chinese is closer to the French pronunciation of Chinese.

A number of other linguistic clues also help identify this novel’s source language as French.

which is ,(النهر األزرق) For example, the author translates the Yangtze River as the Blue River commonly referred to as Le fleuve bleu in French.65 In addition, the Arabic transliterations of the

match its contemporary French (هواى تسونغ) Chinese name of the Emperor Huai Zong transliterations of his name in fictions and translations about China.66 In addition to Jawdat’s facility as a French translator, then, the presence of these inflected transliterations of Chinese acts as a kind of forensic mark indicating that Jawdat’s source text was almost certainly from the French literary tradition.67 The work of ethnography that defined European Orientalism thus spreads,

65 Jawdat, Ghadat al-Sin, 5. 66 Henri Cordier, Bibliotheca Sinia (Paris: Librairie Orientale & Américaine, 1907-1908), 1761- 1780. 67Salih Jawdat’s use of foreignizing strategy in dealing with the characters’ names seems like an 73 almost independent of authorial intention, at the level of language from text to text through the medium of translation. Within the literary milieu in which Jawdat participated, translations from

French into Arabic flourished. As Henri Pères’ bibliography of Arabic versions of French fiction indicates, Jawdat was an expert in the literary works of Alexandre Dumas, having translated three of his novels into Arabic. Together with his translations of other French works, these were all an Egyptian literary periodical active from 1904- (مسامرات الشعب) published in Musamarat al-sha‘b

1911 that focused on publishing Arabic fiction and translations of fiction into Arabic.68

While Ghadat al-Sin is unusually linguistically attuned to its Chinese setting, this is a phenomenon best understood by contextualizing it within a French tradition. Given the fact that

Jawdat does not provide the title or the author’s name of the original text of his translation, an alternative approach to tracing its origins is to survey nineteenth-century French literary works about China. The nineteenth century witnessed a significant increase in the number of French translations of Chinese literary works. Almost all of the important French Sinologists published

French translations of Chinese literary works, as part of an Orientalist tradition of using literary works as a source to study a civilization and society.69 As part of the massive Orientalist project organizing European culture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a French novel dedicated to China would have born certain hallmarks of the detailed philological study of eastern languages that Edward Said diagnosed in European literature of this era. The proliferation of French novels

unusual practice among his contemporaries. As Sabry Hafez has argued, many 19th-century translators rewrote the titles of the works they translated in a rhymed form and changed characters’ names into Arabic. For example, Hugo’s Hernani was translated into Arabic under the title Himdan. See Hafez, The Genesis of Arabic Narrative Discourse: A Study in the sSociology of Modern Arabic Literature, 88. 68 Henri Pères, Le roman, le conte et la nouvelle dans la littèrature arabe moderne (Paris: Librairie Larose, 1937), 297. 69 Hua Meng, Studies in Sino-French Literary Relations (Shanghai Shi: Fu dan da xue chu ban she, 2011), 102. 74 translating and exploring Chinese culture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was characterized by extensive scholarly procedures such as footnotes and appendices explaining the terms transliterated from Chinese. Literature routinely functioned as both an opportunity to use eastern customs and mythology to entertain readers, but also as a chance to demonstrate academic mastery of eastern languages and literary forms.

Translating a novel from this Orientalist tradition, Salih Jawdat allowed this culture of academic expertise concerning China to make its way into his Arabic novel, mediating China through the European project. However, Jawdat’s inclusion of Chinese terms should be interpreted differently. It is important to notice that, although Jawdat includes a significant number of Chinese terms, he does not provide footnotes to explain these terms. In that respect, his text differs from the practice of adding detailed references of each transliterated Chinese term, a trend that is prevalent in nineteenth-century French translations and adaptations of Chinese literary works.

Instead, Jawdat appears to revel in what the experience of the Chinese language adds to the narrative, rather than academic mastery. He makes use some translations and explanations of specific Chinese terms that contain rich cultural details. One such example is that the author refers

which literarily means “the son of heaven.”70 Although ,(ابن السماء) ”to the emperor as “ibn al-sama this expression is not common usage in Arabic to describe an emperor—he could have used a term

in Arabic which would convey the meaning--his use (سلطان) ”or “sultan (إمبراطور) ”like “imbiratur of it makes perfect sense if we link it to its Chinese equivalent Tian Zi, which also means the Son of Heaven.

Arabic Interventions

70 Jawdat, Ghadat al-Sin, 22. 75

Longstanding French traditions of chinoiserie had, since the 18th century, absorbed particularities of the Chinese language into French rhetorical traditions for writing about China and the east. When Jawdat translated his French source text into Arabic, then, the Chinese influence suffusing both the language and themes of his novel was the result of the mediated circuits of influence that I am calling “triangular translation,” or the way in which eastern regions re- appropriated European conceptions of the east in order to form an intra-eastern cultural consciousness. Unlike Alf Layla wa Layla, whose Chinese setting is purely a nominal and surface- level idea that could easily be exchanged for any other eastern region without changing anything about the stories, Ghadat al-Sin exhibits a Chinese influence that penetrates to a much deeper textual level. As its purpose is to educate an Arab readership about China, it speaks in an ethnographic voice that engages seriously with Chinese customs and literary traditions. But at a still deeper level, the text reflects a cross-cultural engagement that is written into the idioms, names, and sentence structures.

Jawdat relocates the European editorial voice from footnotes into the body of his narrative, where his frequent insertions of specific cultural and historical details about China lose the

European tone of intellectual mastery and instead assume a more contractual tone with readers of exchanging an entertaining story for a brief ethnographic education.

One particularly prominent example of this is where Jawdat includes a separate section of eleven lines in the text to explain the history between China and the Mongols.71 In one scene, the male protagonist Li Tsubi and his friend San Hu, find out that the Mongols plan to invade their city. At this point, Jawdat interrupts the plot and inserts a note within the text, saying:

The enmity between Mongols, Tatars, Manchurians, and the Chinese is old. It is

71 Jawdat, Ghadat al-Sin, 62. 76

normal and natural for the neighbouring nations, for those who read history, to see

that most wars broke out between neighbouring or nearby nations. And our

evidence of this Mongol-Chinese enmity is the construction of the Great Wall that

surrounds the kingdom of China to the north and extends to 3000 kilometers.

وعداوة المغول والتتر والمندشوريين ألهل الصين قديمة وهي غزيزية طبيعية شأن كل األمم المتجاورة. فمن

تأمل في التاريخ رأى ان أغلب الحروب انتشبت بين أمم متجاورة أو متقاربة ودليلنا في تلك العداوة المغولية

الصينية بناء السور األعظم الذي يحيط بمملكة الصين شماال ويتمد على طول ثالثة آالف كيلومترا72

These historical and cultural asides help the author construct a particular narrative about the cultural specificity of China, which is different from the generalized and generic representations of China in, for instance, Alf Layla wa Layla. More importantly, the author participates in Nahdawi knowledge production about China for the Arabic reading audience. He accomplishes this pedagogical function with varying degrees of accuracy, but unlike the European institutions of

Orientalism, the inaccuracies that enter Jawdat’s text appear less as intentionally harmful representations and more as distortions brought about by layers of translation.

Lun Fu: Imagining Ideal Womanhood in a Chinese Context

As these minor distortions indicate, Jawdat was constructing an imaginary version of China where, despite his detailed interest in Chinese culture, some inaccuracies could be incorporated insofar as they aided his project. While exaggerating customs like braided hair does little more than add exoticism, Jawdat’s most strategic interventions into his source material are focused on gender. By setting a story of radical female agency in China, Jawdat appropriates the authoritative voice of the ethnographer to describe such agency as a fact about China rather than to advocate for

72 Jawdat, Ghadat al-Sin, 62. 77 it as an opinion within Egyptian social politics. The prolific propaganda fiction of male writers had made obedient, silenced female characters increasingly prevalent stock characters in early

Nahdawi literature, but Ghadat al-Sin constructs a female protagonist who displays her agency and independence in living her own life. However, the text makes it clear that Lun Fu, the female protagonist, is a rare case among Chinese women, since her character is highly unlike the representation of Chinese women in Orientalist tradition, passive, domesticated, and foot-binding.

As the text indicates, Lun Fu’s upbringing with a love of absolute freedom is a privilege that very few Chinese girls could enjoy. Lun Fu enjoys that privilege because she was an orphan from an early age, as her mother passed away in childbirth, and her father was a casualty in one of the wars.73 Her grandmother took care of her and treated her like her own child with tenderness and love.74 Her grandmother would ignore any small mistakes she made, due to her fondness for Lun

Fu.75 As a result, Lun Fu “is sensitive to the lightest words that would hurt her feelings. She has a dedicated character/attitude but she does not listen to advice and suggestions.”

"تتأثر ألقل كلمة تجرح احساساتها ذات طبع رقيق لكنها أبي ةال تسمع نصح ناصحة وال مرشد."76

As a result, Lun Fu is never restricted to domestic spheres. “She does not like to stay at home

لم تكن لتهوى جلوس المنزل حيث تالزم االشغال اليدوية ) ”,where she would do handicrafts such as embroidery

Enjoying 77.(لتهوى جلوس المنزل) ”to such a degree that “staying at home was painful for her (من تطريز

she “prefers to read and to walk in gardens (وشاء هللا ولمشيئته حكمة بالغة ) ”,great wisdom in languages“

especially after she meets Li Tsubi and (كانت تفضل المطالعة والقراءة والتنزه في الحدائق) ”to handicrafts falls in love with him. 78 In the early stages of the book, however, she still channels her

73 Jawdat, Ghadat al-Sin, 22. 74 Jawdat, Ghadat al-Sin, 22. 75 Jawdat, Ghadat al-Sin, 22. 76 Jawdat, Ghadat al-Sin, 22. 77 Jawdat, Ghadat al-Sin, 22. 78 Jawdat, Ghadat al-Sin, 23. 78 independence towards traditional life goals, spending most of her daytime collecting flowers and talking to birds under the shadow of the tree until her lover comes. At these early points in the narrative, these forms of fulfillment are all it takes to relieve from her anxieties and make her happier.79

Her agency and subjectivity develop past this point, however, when she is displaced from these circumstances and forced to find new goals in life. Her first struggle comes when she finds herself pursued by the emperor for marriage, yet unwilling to consent. She first manages to escape the engagement with the emperor through a transformative act of autonomy. The narrative emphasizes a sharp contrast between the crowds of relatives and friends congratulating Lun Fu, and how she herself stays quiet, not responding to the congratulations and not returning any of the attention.

The subtle, coercive pressures of normative social judgement, then, do not have a hold on this protagonist that would make her surrender her personal judgement to what those around her think and expect her to think. Although the crowd thinks that her new status simply made her disregard her neighbours’ greetings, Lun Fu understands that they did not know what she was going through-

-that she alone has the insight necessary to navigate her situation. As she says to herself, “Today I am still free, tomorrow I would be in the prison of that royal palace.”

"إني لم أزل ح ر ة. وغدا أكون سجينة في ذلك القصر الملوكي"80

While the household is deep asleep, she takes her clothes and daily allowance and walks on tiptoe to the gate. Realizing the gate is locked from inside, she opens the window and jumps from it.81

Her adventures continue in this vein, including her escape from the secret police who hunt for her. While on the run, she enters a household at random in order to avoid the secret police. Its

79 Jawdat, Ghadat al-Sin, 22. 80 Jawdat, Ghadat al-Sin, 30. 81 Jawdat, Ghadat al-Sin, 31. 79 occupants, an old couple, think she is a prostitute, as the narrative tests out the idea that an empowered woman risks losing her virtue in the eyes of society. She speaks out to defend herself, saying, “I am not like what you thought. I come from a noble family. I left the house of my husband to escape the ill-treatment of his family. I entered your house only to avoid the secret police that are hanging around in this neighbourhood.”

"اطمئنا فلست كما تظنان انما ابنة من عائلة شريفة تركت منزل زوجي ألهرب من سوء معاملة أهله لي واني ما دخلت منزلكم

اال أللقى شر العسس المتجول بين الدور."82

This outspoken manner distinguishes her from the passive and silenced models of femininity found in influential Arabic novels of the early twentieth century such as Muhammad Husayn

Haykal’s 1913 Zaynab.83 Noticing that the couple are not able to pay the rent, she proposes to cover it on the condition that she can stay one night in their house and borrow a disguise.84

This autonomy, outspokenness, and ability to perform new identities lead to her finding a job,

indicates. After she leaves the house of (مهنة جديدة) ”as the title of the chapter, “A New Profession the old couple, she laments, “Where do I go? I do not know anything in this world except feeding the birds and gardening the flowers, and my lover has separated from me.”

"وأين أذهب انا التي ال أدري من الدنيا شيئا غير تربية الطيور وزرع الزهور وقد غاب عني الحبيب"85

Meanwhile, her financial situation worsens to the point where she starts counting her money over and over again. She soon sees a woman who operates the ferry, and notices that the woman is wearing the same clothes as the used clothes that she bought from the old couple. Realizing that

82 Jawdat, Ghadat al-Sin, 50. 83 Michelle Hartman, “Muhammad Husayn Haykal,” Essays in Arabic Literary Biography, edited by Roger Allen, (Wiesbadan: Harrassowitz, 2009), 129-131. El Sadda, Gender, Nation and the Arabic Novel: Egypt 1892-2007, 41-46. 84 Jawdat, Ghadat al-Sin, 52-53. 85 Jawdat, Ghadat al-Sin, 55. 80 being a ferrywoman might be an ideal vocation for her, she buys the ferry and starts a new career.86

The culmination of the plot – the tragic scene of Lun Fu’s death-- shows how she defines a life stripped of autonomy and subjectivity as, essentially, death. The emperor finds the girl after using every possible means of inquiring after her whereabouts. He pretends to be an ordinary person asking to take the ferry. On the ferry, he hears Lun Fu reciting a romantic poem about how she misses her lover, Li Tsubi. Although burning with jealousy, the emperor controls his emotions and tries to persuade Lun Fu to go back to the palace. “It seems to me,” he says, “that this job does

and tells her refinement and beauty (يظهر لى ان هذه المهنة ال تصلح لمن مثلك) ”not fit someone like you are too great for a career on a ferry.87 Attempting to use the male gaze to neutralize her agency, the emperor associates female beauty with helplessness, telling her that she belongs, inactive, in the royal palaces. Shuddering, she rejects his logic.

The furious emperor, for whom this is the first time being rejected by a woman he likes, announces that the wedding will take place on the ferry. All of a sudden, hundreds of decorated boats appear in the river, with local nobles in them along with soldiers waving flags, servants playing music, and drums to celebrate the wedding. The principle of autonomous individuality and the importance of female consent to romance are both dramatized in the sharp contrast between the crowd celebrating the wedding and the desperate Lun Fu, finding that there is no way out.

Following an emotional apostrophe to Li Tsubi, expressing her love and her right to insist on the life she wishes for herself, she throws herself into the river, shocking the crowd. Though they search, the soldiers find only her corpse.

To avoid being forced to marry a man she does love or even like, even though the man is the emperor, Lun Fu demonstrates her agency by continually rejecting any option that is not born of

86 Jawdat, Ghadat al-Sin, 59. 87 Jawdat, Ghadat al-Sin, 70. 81 her own desire. It is especially interesting to note how the author moderates this logic somewhat by using Lun Fu’s love for a man to authorize her rejection of another man. Such constraints and limits set around female agency are still palpable in this story, yet they merely buttress the inborn will of the protagonist--they do not serve as her core motivations. A love of liberty, with all its political resonances, motivates Lun Fu’s adventures and determinations.

Oriental Despots and Emasculated Men

Whereas the novel incorporates but transcends these cultural limitations on female agency, the novel is surprising in its wholesale inclusion of Orientalist tropes of a tyrannical “Eastern” ruler who is only interested in chasing women. Lun Fu initially embodies but ultimately diverges from the stereotype of an innocent, flawlessly beautiful Oriental girl who becomes the victim of such tyranny. But the men in the narrative—Li Tsubi himself in addition to the emperor—appear to embody Orientalist stereotypes without any redemption. Below, I discuss how the portrayal of these characters uses Orientalist gender paradigms directed at China in the context of Egyptian gender politics—a move that essentially explores the “Orientalism by proxy” thesis that has defined scholarship on intra-eastern relations in recent years from the opposite direction.88

One of the most central Orientalist tropes is the masculine paradigm of a strong Occidental male who victimizes a weak feminine character who allegorizes the Orient. Said briefly mentions this gendering of east-west relations in his discussion of Flaubert’s encounter with Kuchuk Hanem, an Egyptian dancer.89 Hanem is portrayed as a passive woman capable of only sensual transactions,

88 Wen-Chin Ouyang, “The Arabian Nights in English and Chinese Translations: Differing Patterns of Cultural Encounter,” 371-391. 89 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), 186-188. 82 not intelligence, who is willing to be “penetrated” by a wealthy Occidental man.90 The novel

Ghadat al-Sin invokes this gender paradigm in the emperor’s designs on Lun Fu, but also complicates it by liberating Lun Fu from these limitations and instead imposing on the male characters different representations of Oriental masculinity, such as the tyrannical Oriental despot, the feminized Chinese male, the emotionally incontinent Indian, and the animalistic Mongol.

In Ghadat al-Sin, the Orientalist image of a feminized man is best represented by the male protagonist, Li Tsubi. He is portrayed as a weak, weepy man who does not have his own opinions and does not exercise his agency; he registers as yet another instance of deficient masculinity in the Oriental male. 91 The weakness of Li Tsubi, however, is not reflected in the description of his physical attributes. In fact, he is portrayed favourably as a handsome tall young man from an elite family: “A tall man with … two black eyes, elevated towards to his eyebrows, that emanate rays of intelligence [with] a lock of hair hanging down his back (the Chinese wear a ponytail as decoration).”

"شاب طويل القامة...والسمت له عينان سودان مرفوعتان نحو نازعتيه تنبعث منهما بروق الذكاء ...له ذؤابة من الشعر مدالة

وراء ظهره )ويتخذ الصينيون هذه الذؤابة زينة(."92

The elite family he comes from is demonstrated not only through his strong physical features, but specifically through features that are coded as Chinese, including slanted eyes and habits of hairdressing. Despite this positive outward description, his mental weakness is emphasized throughout as a counterpoint to Lun Fu. One example of this weakness and lack of independence

90 Desmond Hosford and Chong J. Wojtkowski, French Orientalism: Culture, Politics, and the Imagined Other (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2010), 24. 91 For a discussion of Orientalist conceptions of masculinity, see Joseph A. Boone, “Vacation Cruises; Or, the Homoerotics of Orientalism,” PMLA 110, no. 1 (1995); Reina Lewis, Gendering Orientalism: Race, Femininity, and Representation (New York: Routledge, 1995); Philippa Levine, “Orientalist Sociology and the Creation of Colonial Sexualities,” Feminist Review, no. 65 (2000). 92 Jawdat, Ghadat al-Sin, 9. 83 can be shown from his conversation with Lun Fu on the possibility of confronting his parents about the marriage they have arranged for him. Although Lun Fu suggests this option, Li Tsubi clearly states that he does not dare to disobey his parents on the matter of his arranged marriage. He exclaims, “Disobey my parents? That would be an outrage!” citing “the great emphasis on respecting parents in China” as an explanation of his shock at Lun Fu’s suggestion that autonomous judgment is more valuable than obedience.

"أاعصى والد ّى. يا لها من مصيبة. انسيت يا شقيقة الروح التشديد العظيم على احترام االهلين ببالد الصين. ومن ذا الذى يعرض

بنفسه لغائلة العواقب. من عصيان األقارب."93

The mental weakness of the male protagonist is positioned as a clear contrast with the strong determination of female protagonist to escape her engagement with the Chinese emperor. Whereas she could resist not only the emperor but also the temptation to let the clamouring crowd sweep her along into their collective behaviour, Li Tsubi’s decisions seem to arise only from the dictates of social custom.94

Throughout the novel, when he doesn’t have societal rules to guide his judgement, Li Tsubi cannot exercise autonomy or come to any decision on his own. As a character, Li Tsubi fails to drive the plot since his movements are decided entirely by other characters, and his own storyline is tangential and ultimately inconsequential to the main plot that follows Lun Fu instead. For

Li Tsubi has no ,(صديق جديد) ”,instance, at the beginning of the third chapter titled “A New Friend idea where he can go. This places him in a parallel situation to the homeless Lun Fu, yet they take opposite courses of action. While he is wandering in the street aimlessly, a hand touches his shoulder and a well-muscled man suddenly appears, asking Li Tsubi whether he wants to take a part in a caravan the port city of Lanzhou. Later in this chapter, Li Tsubi’s trajectory is similarly

93 Jawdat, Ghadat al-Sin, 17. 94 Jawdat, Ghadat al-Sin, 30. 84 influenced by Sun Huan, a new friend that he made during the trip. In this way, he abdicates agency over his actions to more decisive figures around him.

Perhaps the most representative type of scene throughout Li Tsubi’s episodic storyline is any one of the many scenes of him crying, demonstrating his deficiencies that are opposed to the characterization of Lun Fu. When facing similar situations, she tends to focus on how she overcame her initial fear and managed to solve the problem through her own thought process and abilities. By contrast, the many repeated descriptions of the crying, weak male protagonist transforms the weakness and passivity of his state of mind into a physiological, embodied condition that prevents him from turning feelings into actions. This emasculated condition is a loaded image within a long tradition, well documented in scholarship, of Western authors using eastern culture to represent emasculated, often castrated, figures of deficient masculinity. 95

Whether that says more about displaced self-conceptions of Western masculinity or about

Orientalists’ limited understanding of eastern culture, what is clear is that the author of this novel seized on that tradition of representation to use it as space for female empowerment and expansion.

If the weak man stereotype allows female agency to expand into the narrative space evacuated by this emasculated male figure, the opposing stereotype of eastern masculinity, the libidinal and crafty despot, also is used for a parallel purpose in this novel—not only allowing Lun Fu to develop as a character in response to this threat, but also forcing readers to expand into a position of ethical and moral agency, questioning absolute authority in the name of individual freedom and female liberation.

The portrayal of another male character—the Chinese emperor Huai Zong—fits a closely

95 See Philippa Levine, “Orientalist Sociology and the Creation of Colonial Sexualities”; Reina Lewis, Gendering Orientalism; and Joseph Boone, “Vacation Cruises; Or, the Homoerotics of Orientalism.” 85 related Orientalist category of evil eastern rulers in European literary imaginations, highlighting an exotic and backward image of the Orient.96 The despot figure has been used to authorize

European fantasies of liberalism and self-government since the eighteenth century, but the way it is deployed in this novel, as a challenge that women in society have to overcome, has been less common.97

Instead of directly introducing the emperor, the text gradually reveals his identity and personality in a way that adds suspense to the plot and puts the reader in the perspective of Lun

Fu, who learns the emperor’s identity and plot at the same time that we do. In the first scene where the emperor appears, he seems an ordinary young man except “[he] showed the signs of being a

While the emperor is praying one evening he notices the female (رجل تظهر عليه سحاة االمارة) prince.”98 protagonist and was astonished by her beauty. Readers do not learn his true identity until a group of horsemen come to Lun Fu’s house. The head of the group tells her that she is the most fortunate woman in China because of the gift—a box full of fine jewellery that she received, which is revealed to have come from the emperor when he announces his engagement with her. As the plot develops, it becomes clear that the emperor is not a youth who is completely infatuated with the

By contrast 99.(انهمك في لذاته) ”girl, but rather a tyrant ruler “who fell a victim to his own pleasure to Li Tsubi’s inability to match Lun Fu’s agency in attempting to bring the two lovers together, the emperor proves extraordinarily resourceful and driven in tracking Lun Fu down and pressing his suit.

96 See, for instance, Richard Burton’s translation of The Arabian Nights and its use of the oversexualized Arabian stereotype, in addition to European concerns about violence and social unrest among Arabs. 97 See Charles de Secondat Montesquieu et al., The Spirit of Laws (London: The Colonial Press, 1900). 98 Jawdat, Ghadat al-Sin, 21. 99 Jawdat, Ghadat al-Sin, 42. 86

The category of the tyrant and sexualized Oriental rulers in Orientalist literary imaginations generally implies a certain view of women as vulnerable victims of the despot’s pleasure. In this novel, an angry comment from the governor of Lan Zhou turns this stereotype around, suggesting that the emperor’s sexual appetite has clouded his rational faculties, thus casting the emperor himself, rather than Lun Fu, as the victim of his overactive desire: “Look at how stupid the mind of the emperor has become and his indulgence in what brings no benefit for he is preoccupied with a woman, ignoring the matters of his kingdom. He is not paying attention to the huge trouble coming its way from the Mongols.”

"أنظر كيف وصل ضعف العقل أميرنا االمبراطور وانهما كه فيما ال فائدة منه فهو مشغول بالنساء تاركا شؤون مملكته وال يلتفت

لما يداهمه من المصائب من أشقياء المغول."100

This manifestly insensitive, harmful portrayal of Asian masculinity is turned into an opportunity for female empowerment in Arabic culture. The negative portrayal of “eastern” culture that scholars have long critiqued in Orientalist writing gets put to a new purpose here, as a way of framing the controversial issue of female agency as an urgent necessity.

Conclusion: The Invisible European presence in Triangular Translation

What are we to make of the ambivalence of this novel—of the way it takes on damaging

Orientalist stereotypes yet deploys them for the purposes of progressive social change? How can we come to terms with the way this novel throws eastern culture under the bus in order to authorize the expanding agency of women in that culture? Both the contradictory depictions of powerful female characters and fundamentally flawed male characters would only have been acceptable in

Egyptian literary circles by setting the novel in China, using the defamiliarized setting and the

100 Jawdat, Ghadat al-Sin, 43. 87 manufactured Orientalist stereotypes to say things that otherwise could not have been said.

The progressive political position encoded in Salih Jawdat’s treatment of the emperor, along with his proto-feminist representation of the female protagonist, is packaged within literary stylistics whose invocation of traditional Arabic rhetorical traditions effectively dodges the possibility of criticism and censorship from conservative moralists and the British colonial government. To eschew these potential attacks, Jawdat employed a literary technique of saj‘, or traditional rhymed prose, which tends to emphasize apparently ideologically neutral scenes of beauty.101 Strikingly, the ethnographic insertions into the text are not rhymed, as though a modern addition to a work of otherwise classical style, but the preface and representations of Lun Fu position the rhyming in key parts of the narrative. Whereas other Ghadat novels—and literature more generally in the 1890s—had begun to embrace more simplified prose styles, moving towards vernacular speech and away from high rhetoric of earlier aesthetic writing, Jawdat uses the older styles to manage the tension between domestication and defamiliarization that his story creates.

Jawdat’s exception to the trend of modernizing literary language reflects the strategies at the heart of his novel, which allow him to deal with more controversial political topics than most Egyptian literature of the time was able to, thanks to the way he displaces his story to an unfamiliar land while still anchoring it in terms familiar to his readers. Elements like this found throughout his novel make Jawdat’s Ghadat al-Sin a powerful case study of what I have been calling triangular translation. At a linguistic level, we can see how the Chinese influence makes its way into Arabic

101For example, وقد تحركت األغصان لهذه اإلشارة وانفرجت الفروع عن فتاة هيفاء يأخذ باألبصار جمالها. ويسلب اللب داللها وكمالها. ذات قد رشيق. ومبسم من عقيق. كساها هللا حلة الحسن. ووهبها في فيها السلوى والمن. إذ تلفظت فإنما تلفظ الدر. وإذا تكلمت فكالمها جوهر. محروسة بعسى اللحاظ ورماح القدود. معوذة من شر حاسدها. بسحر منطقها وطلسم طرفها. وأشرفت برأسها من بين األغصان. فأشرق من سناها المكان. ثم التفتت إلى حبيبها وهي تبتسم وقالت بصوت أوهنة المحبة. .Jawdat, Ghadat al-Sin, 10 88 textual culture through the European source text, and, reciprocally, how the pressures of conservative political positions forced Jawdat to relocate issues of female agency and questioning absolute authority to a Chinese setting, all situated within an ethnographic frame that mediates

Chinese culture to Egyptian readers.

Translation is usually understood as a bi-directional practice that involves only two languages, and most scholars of the Nahda focus on translations between Arabic and one European language, usually either French or English. However, Ghadat al-Sin is an example of how translation in this context dealt with at least three languages: Arabic, Chinese, and French and repurposes its translation for a more cosmopolitan, transnational modernity. This text includes three linguistic parts: the Arabic translation and adaptation, the original European source, and a significant number of Chinese terms. Some of these terms such as city names are rendered accurately and “correctly.”

Others, including, for example, the names of the protagonists, are made-up names and would have no meaning in Chinese. The literary appropriation of translation within this expanded transitional system gives the translator a special agency, in that the translator have more space to rewrite and recreate the source text to serve their own purposes.

Spencer Scoville has recently argued that Arabic authors acquired “agency as mediators...working to write their culture into the discourse of modernity in their own terms.”102

The triangular nature of the translation that produced Ghadat al-Sin, however, differs from

Spencer’s account in that it includes an eastern “other,” further complicating the relationship between east and west. My analysis in this chapter has sought not simply to ask whether eastern cultures were fit to be incorporated into European modernity as an epistemological concept, but also to demonstrate how Nahdawi writers claimed for their own cultures the underlying political

102 Scoville, “Translating Orientalism into the Arabic ‘Nahda’,” 15. 89 rights claimed by modern European nation states. These rights, for Jawdat, are bound up in questions of a regional culture binding distinct nation-states together, and the fostering of ethnographic relations within the east, and not simply between individual eastern nations and western Europe.

Ghadat al-Sin testifies to the interest in China that existed among Arabic intellectuals, which only increases over the course of the early twentieth century. Specifically, the usage of Chinese female characters to engage in the Nahdawi social discourse on modern women and gender roles continues to find increasingly specific ways of intervening in the course of the Nahda movement, as we will see in the next chapter in the Nahdawi fascination with the Chinese Empress dowager.

In Chapter Two, I will read four Arabic biographies of Chinese Empress dowager published in the

1900s. These Arabic biographies, mostly translated from English sources, provide a distinctly eastern model of modern woman, yet simultaneously activate Orientalist tropes of the Chinese

“dragon lady.” Reading the Chinese Empress’s biographies alongside literary representations of the Egyptian Queen Shajar al-Durr and contemporary biographies of European female rulers such as Catherine the Great and Queen Victoria, I illustrate the controversies surrounding the figure of the “new woman.” The Orientalist tradition of ethnographic descriptions of China remains visible in the biography of the Chinese Empress Dowager, but uses that approach to describe her through the language of direct political authority, rather than the discourse of exemplary domestic womanhood English biographies used to come to terms with Queen Victoria’s leadership.

CHAPTER 2 From Monster to Queen Victoria: Arabic Biography and the Empress Dowager of China

Many issues of the journal al-Hilal beginning in the 1890s featured a group of important world political leaders on its front cover and included their biographies within its pages. Although most figures were male politicians, in one rare case it featured an illustration of a Chinese woman, the

Around the (أعظم الرجال) ”.Empress Dowager of China, Ci Xi, under the title: “The Greatest Men same time, al-Muqtataf, another influential Nahdawi journal, also included a biography of Ci Xi

The Sultana of China and Her سلطانة الصين ومشاكلها] ”entitled, “Sultanat al-Sin wa Mashakiluha

Problems]. As the author comments, referring to the stereotypical European view that eastern culture was inferior to the west in terms of women’s rights, “We seldom meet ... female geniuses... equal to ... their male counterparts. While the Far East displayed little regard for the status for its women, one of its women was ruling over the world’s largest nation – a nation of four hundred million inhabitants; her words decided life and death, wealth and poverty.”

"نوابغ الرجال قليل عددهم وأقل منهم نوابغ النساء لكن ... وبينا كان المشارقة يشكون من انحطاط شأن المرأة عندهم كانت احدى نسائهم تتس ّلط على أكبر أمم العالم على أمة ال يقل عددها عن اربع مئة مليون من النفوس و بين شفتيها الحياة والموت والغنى والفقر." 1 This chapter examines the interest Nahdawi authors showed in Ci Xi in the context of her representation in Arabic literary sources in fin-de-siècle Egypt. Turning from literary engagements with female agency through the overtly fictional Ghadat novel subgenre, I examine the role of female political sovereignty in the ostensibly non-fictional genre of biographical writing.

For the purposes of this chapter, I will analyze three biographical essays that appeared in al-

The امبراطورة الصين] Hilal and al-Muqtataf in the years 1900 to 1909 in detail: Imburaturat al-Sin

The Sultana of China and سلطانة الصين ومشاكلها] Sultana of China], Saltanat al-Sin wa Mashakiluha

1 Anonymous, “Saltanat al-Sin wa Mashakiluha [The Sultana of China and Her Problems],” 99. All translations in this chapter are mine. 92

The Sultana of China and امبراطورة الصين وسياستها] Her Problems], Imburaturat al-Sin wa Siyasatuha

Her Policies]. In this chapter, I address these three biographies as a window into Nahdawi interest in late Qing China, and use these texts the better to understand Arabic literary production on China during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. I contextualize these biographies with images of foreign queens such as Catherine the Great and Queen Victoria, as they are depicted in contemporary Arabic literary biographies. I pay special attention to how the Dowager Empress emerges as a unique female exemplar from the East who, by contrast to representations of other female monarchs worldwide, is rarely described by way of her domestic responsibilities as a female, and instead is characterized through her role as a political leader and lust for power. As I will argue, the forms of sovereignty that arise around the figure of the Dowager Empress were shaped by an effort to work against the culturally pervasive idea at the time, which still persists today, that European culture is superior in terms of women’s rights.

This chapter, like Chapter One above, continues to work alongside studies by Shuang Wen and Qingguo Xue that document Nahdawi opinions related to Europe and China. Unlike these and other scholars who have tended to approach Nahdawi texts on China or Japan from a historical perspective, I provide a literary analysis of the three Arabic biographies of the Empress Dowager of China, demonstrating an otherwise invisible transnational consciousness that flourished and structured the cultural imagination in Egypt. These biographies, which have not previously been scrutinized by academics, involved a complex translational writing process, which offers exemplary insight into what I am calling the triangular nature of cultural and linguistic translation characteristic of Nahdawi writing. These texts are mostly translated and also contain material directly lifted from European sources, allowing me to discuss how the authors negotiated the authority of the European source texts in ventriloquizing those voices. 93

Further complicating the power dynamics of this translation process is the fact that some of the authors of the source texts served in the British colonial forces. For example, the names quoted include Charles George Gordon, a British officer and administrator, and Henry Arthur Blake, the governor of Hong Kong. Different forms of authority meet and are mixed in the Arabic biographies of the Dowager Empress, creating a pastiche of power drawn from colonial military contexts, Orientalist epistemological mastery, and the images of sovereign rulers from around the world. By analyzing the conceptions of female authority that arise from this pastiche, I will lay bare the power dynamics involved in the triangular translation writing process that produced those conceptions. In what follows I will first provide an overview of some of the writings that manifest a European and Arab fascination with Ci Xi, then offer a reading of the three biographies from three different perspectives that place Ci Xi in relation to Catherine the Great, Queen

Victorian, and Shajar al-Durr in order to show how female power was a concept not only of transnational prominence in these years, but also constructed transnationally.

The Fascination with the Dowager Empress of China: European and Arab Contexts

The European fascination with Ci Xi as Chinese woman leader is perhaps partly connected to the period of her reign, which overlapped for over two decades with that of Queen Victoria. The

Dowager Empress held control of late Qing China from 1862 to 1908. As the female sovereign of

China, Ci Xi was the heroine of many exoticized fantasies in European-language Orientalist 94 writings, in which she was often referred to as the “dragon lady” and the “monster.”2 The Arabic biographies that I analyze below were drawn from European-language sources, which each translator acknowledges in introductions and prefaces to the Arabic biographies. The translators tend to associate the colonial offices held by several of the authors of the source texts as a sign of authoritative and reliable information. The translator of the Arabic biography appearing in

Al-Muqtataf, for instance, claims that the source material represents the most reliable

هو ) ”,compilation of data because “it is identical in its content to Sir Henry Blake’s account

referring to the British governor of Hong Kong.3 These ,(مطابق في جملته لما ذكره السر هنري بالك translations present a unique opportunity to explore how Nahdawis read, kept, and challenged

European sources to provide an Arabic-language perspective on this female ruler. They are a part of the genre that Marilyn Booth defines as “the famous woman biography” that became popular in

2 Bland, China Under the Empress Dowager, Being the History of the Life and Times of Tzu Hsi, Compiled from the State Papers and the Private Diary of the Comptroller of Her Household (Unspecified, 1910); Katharine A. Carl, With the Empress Dowager (New York: Century Co., 1907); Jung Chang, Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013); Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Suyin Han, La Chine: histoire d’un siècle 1843-1944 (Paris: Le Livre de Paris, 1989); Lydia He Liu, The Clash of Empires: The Invention of China in Modern World Making (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004); Ning Qiang, “Imperial Portraiture as Symbol of Political Legitimacy: A New Study of the ‘Portraits of Successive Emperors’,” Ars Orientalis 35 (2008); Laikwan Pang, The Distorting Mirror: Visual Modernity in China (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2007); Sterling Seagrave and Peggy Seagrave, Dragon lady: The Life and Legend of the Last Empress of China, (New York: Knopf, 1992); Philip W. Sergeant, The Great Empress Dowager of China (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co, 1911); Marina Warner, The Dragon Empress: Life and Times of Tz’u-hsi, 1835-1908, Empress Dowager of China (London: Vintage Digital, 2012); Peter Gue Zarrow, After Empire: The Conceptual Transformation of the Chinese State, 1885-1924 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012). 3 Anonymous, Imburaṭurat al-Sin wa Siyasatuha [The Sultana of China and Her Policies].” al- Muqtataf 34 (1909): 43. 95 the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.4 According to Booth, Nahdawi authors wrote biographies of famous women as exemplars for female readers to imitate. In this chapter, I will pick up Booth’s argument to explore how these three “famous woman” biographies of Ci Xi juxtapose representational modes surrounding female agency in different cultural contexts in these years. The imitative model Booth describes is at sharp odds with prevalent ways of depicting

Queen Victoria in European culture, in particular, in such a way as to neutralize rather than celebrate a woman at the top of the power structure.

In much the same way that Victoria’s reign in Britain catalyzed British interest in Ci Xi during the decades of overlap between these two female monarchs, the Arab fascination with Ci Xi flourished during the Nahda period from the late nineteenth century to the early twentieth, when

Egyptian culture similarly confronted questions about the relationship between gender and modernity. In 1902, for example, Jurji Zaydan, who was editor of al-Hilal at the time, included the empress’s previously published biography in his book, Tarajim Mashahir al-Sharq fi al-Qarn al-

Famous personalities from the east in the nineteenth تراجم مشاهير الشرق في القرن التاسع عشر] Tasi‘ ‘Ashr century].5 As the title indicates, this book introduced the life story of well-known figures from eastern regions ranging from countries like Afghanistan to Japan and China, contextualizing the lives of famous Arabs alongside the lives of prominent east Asian figures as well. It contained two volumes: the first focuses on politicians, such as the Khedive’s family, and the second is dedicated to literati and scientists, including al-Tahtawi and al-Bustani.

4 In May Her Likes Be Multiplied, Marilyn Booth explores biographies of famous women that were published in the women’s press in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Egypt. In her view, the representations of important women in biographies served as exemplars for female readers. She shows how these texts offered diverse and even contradictory ideas of an ideal womanhood, and possible roles of modern women. Marilyn Booth, May Her Likes Be Multiplied (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001): 289. 5 Jurji Zaydan. Tarajim Mashahir al-Sharq fi al-Qarn al-Tasiʻ ʻashar. [Famous personalities from the east in the 19th century] (Cairo: Matbaʻat al-Hilal, 1922). 96

It is important to note that among all the figures included in these two volumes, Ci Xi is the

-Muluk wa الملوك واالمراء] ”only woman and is listed under the category “Kings and Princes umara].6 Other names in that rubric include Mahmud II, the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire who announced the Decree of Tanzimat; Bashir Shihab II, the Amir who ruled Lebanon; Muhammad

Ahmad Mahdi, the leader who challenged British colonial rule in Sudan; and Nasser al-Din Shah, the King of Persia.7 Eight years after the publication of this first biography in Arabic, Arab writers were still interested in her. Another biography, Imburadura al-Sin wa Siyasatuhah [The Empress of China, her politics and policies] appeared shortly after her death in 1909. While this nine-page biography repeats some information from earlier sources, the introduction and conclusion were new at the time. The two-page introduction was translated from “The Rule of the Empress

Dowager,” an article published in 1909 in the English journal The Nineteenth Century and After and written by Sir Henry Blake, the governor of Hong Kong (1898-1903).8 Given that the Dowager

Empress is the only woman mentioned in Zaydan’s book on famous eastern personalities, and that this collection and her biographies treat her as a political sovereign, instead of a queen, it suggests that Nahdawi literati recognized her potential importance to discussions of gender.

The Arabic Nahdawi interest in the Empress Dowager of China demonstrates how conceptions of political agency, gender, and the relationship between the two formed in the context of Arab intellectuals’ literary interest in China in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. This chapter explores the tactics of translations that, in this sense, become politically and socially significant acts—the appropriations of European ideas about China that formed around

6 Zaydan, Tarajim Mashahir al-Sharq, 325. 7 These the other names include: Abdur Rahman Khan, the Emir of Afghanistan, Menelik II, the Emperor of Ethiopia and Ali bin Hamud, Sultan of Zanzibar. See Zaydan, Tarajim Mashahir al- Sharq, 325. 8 Henry Blake, “The Rule of the Empress Dowager,” The Nineteenth Century and After 64 (1908): 990-996. 97 comparisons between Ci Xi and Victoria, and the integration of British and Egyptian material into the image of Ci Xi being formed.

The Empress Dowager in Relief: A Comparison with Queen Victoria, Catherine the Great and Shajar al-Durr

In this section, I analyze the literary representation of the Empress Dowager in three Arabic biographies, in comparison with other “famous women biographies,” to borrow Marilyn Booth’s term. By reading these articles alongside the biographies of European queens, I argue below that the Arabic representations of the Empress Dowager of China paint a picture of her as a female politician whose lust for power refuses to conform to gendered models of conduct. I show how her depiction differs greatly from the Arabic-language biographies of Queen Victoria and Catherine the Great: Arabic biographies of Queen Victoria generally portray her as a devoted wife and mother and Catherine the Great’s Arabic biographies emphasize her domestic skills.9

We know that the Arabic accounts of the Empress Dowager’s life are lifted, translated, and adapted from European sources. In this way, it is particularly fascinating to read how her life story in the Arabic biographies comes strongly to resemble that of Shajar al-Durr, the Egyptian Sultana who helped to establish the Mamluk Dynasty. The Arabic biographies of the Empress Dowager, for example, depict a life transition whereby she started off as a slave and moved up to become an imperial concubine. Arabic literary representations of the Empress Dowager and Shajar al-Durr emphasize these women’s political roles as leaders and masculinized character traits--specifically, a lust for power--that got them there. It is relevant as well that both were blamed for the downfall of their respective nations, creating an oblique association between disrupted gender roles and

9 Booth, May Her Likes Be Multiplied, 171-172,198, 224. 98 political crisis, which became subject to multiple different interpretations through the act of translation.

By claiming that the Empress Dowager was initially a slave (or concubine), the authors of the

Arabic biographies add fabricated details to this false premise that she was ever a slave in order to cast her life as a more dramatic narrative arc fuelled by near superhuman determination and self- assurance. In their representations of Empress Dowager’s early years, the anonymous authors describe in al-Hilal how she persuaded her father to sell her so that he could be saved from destitution:

Ci’s father was losing his battle against poverty […] It is rumoured that the girl asked her father to sell her and he sold her to a tradesman who was fond of her intelligence and cleverness. وكان والد تسي يغالب الفقر والفقر يغالبه فلم ير له مخرجا منه اال بيع ابنته. ويقال أن فتاتنا هي التي اقترحت على والدها ان بيعها … فاشتراها تاجر اعجب بذكائها ونباهتها.10

This episode detailing how she convinced her father to sell her suggests that she is a virtuous daughter who was willing to sacrifice herself to save her family from poverty. More importantly, although no historical sources corroborate this story, the anecdote suggests that she was able to make her own life decisions from a very early age, an important decision of character that highlights her independence and self-empowering manners. 11 These traits, which her public persona acquired by virtue of her literary representation, were put to use when she became an empress.12

10 Anonymous, “’Imburaturat al-Sin [The Sultana of China].” al-Hilal 9 (1900-1901): 3. 11 Seagrave and Seagrave, Dragon Lady: the Life and Legend of the Last Empress of China; Chang, Empress Dowager Cixi: the Concubine Who Launched Modern China; Der Ling, Two Years in the Forbidden City (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Library, 1997). 12 Marilyn Booth discusses the prominence of the biography genre in Arabic culture at this time. Like the biographies of Ci Xi and Shajar al-Durr, many biographies in the Arabic tradition tend to attribute almost supernatural powers of mind and will even at unrealistically young ages to historical figures who prove especially central to a nation’s self-image. 99

The fabricated history about the young Empress being a slave serves to bolster the account, shared by all three Arabic authors, which represents the Empress Dowager as a woman who is ambitious, power-hungry, and good at exercising political strategies. In these three biographical essays, Ci Xi’s desire for power appears at an early age. The two Arabic biographies published in

1900, both conform to strikingly similar narrative templates that claim, although unsupported by any historical record, that the young Empress, after seeing an announcement from the

Emperor expressing his desire to marry, persuaded her master to allow her to present herself to him, in hope of becoming the emperor’s second wife. The author of the al-Hilal biography presents a vivid depiction of this story:

It is believed that Ci Xi was walking down the street when she read the Emperor’s advertisement. She turned to her master, who was astonished by her audacity, but Ci Xi convinced him and he decided to present her as his daughter.

قالوا : كانت ))تسي(( مارت في بعض الشوارع فقرأت منشور االمبراطور على بعض الجدران فوجدت سنها يساعدها على ذلك مع كونها منشوية. فخطر لها ان تعرض نفسها في جملة العارضات واكبرت ذلك في بادئ االمر ولكنها عولت على تجربة فاستشارت سيدها فاستغرب جرأتها ولكنها اقنعته فسلم وادعى انها ابنته لعله يصيب خيرا ابنجا حها.13

In relation to the official Chinese records from which the Arabic biographies drew their material, this account fabricates such events to cast her as very particular kind of literary character.

The imperial records of the Empress Dowager and her biographies claim that she was raised in an ordinary Manchu family where her father served as a low-ranking official.14 The recasting of her modest upbringing as a childhood of enslavement in the Arabic texts serves as a powerful illustration of the young woman’s ambition to become Empress and overcome life’s obstacles. It underlines that this young woman, of such a lowly category as a slave, not only would dare to compete to become the Emperor’s second wife, but also succeeded in convincing her master to

13 Anonymous, “Imburaturat al-Sin [The Sultana of China],” 4. 14 Seagrave and Seagrave, Dragon Lady, 5. 100 allow her to pretend to be his own daughter to participate in the competition. This episode demonstrates Ci Xi’s exceptional ambition as a characteristic of her persona from a young age, and thus reinforces her depiction in the Arabic texts that construct her as a power-hungry, and eventually vicious, woman.

Following the account of how she successfully went from being a slave to becoming an imperial concubine, the authors of all three Arabic biographies highlight her lust for political power in their accounts of her rise. The biographies depict the Empress Dowager as being dissatisfied with the titular position of Empress after the Emperor’s death. They also underline her dissatisfaction with the fact that the council created by the late Emperor remained in control of the country’s administration, rather than her direct control. She managed to diminish her political rivals and to control governance by collaborating with her ally, Prince Gong, who was the brother of her late husband, to have the council members executed, as the following quote describes,

[The Empress Dowager] was displeased to find that the council monopolized the administration of the country. […] She decided to conspire with Prince Gong to get rid of the council. She arrested the council members under the charge of neglecting certain fees pertaining to her husband’s funeral, sentenced them to death, and returned the ultimate power to her and her co-wife.

فلما رأت امه ان إدارة البالد كلها أصبحت في يد هذا المجلس لم يرضيها ذلك ... فتواطأَت معهُ على التخلص من هذا المجلس والقت القبض على أعضائه بحجة وإغفالهم بعض الرسوم في االحتفال بجنازة زوجها فحكم عليهم بالقتل وصارت مقاليد البالد في يدها ويد ضرتها.15

After taking ultimate control of the country, she started to worry about Prince Gong himself, in particular because his political influence was increasing: Ci Xi discharged him from his office, and although he obediently retired, the confusion his departure caused forced Ci Xi to reinstate him several weeks later. She did not, however, return all his powers to him, withholding that of prime minister in order to prevent any one person from consolidating too much influence. 16

15 Anonymous, “Saltanat al-Sin wa Mashakiluha,” 99. 16 Anonymous, “Saltanat al-Sin wa Mashakiluha,” 99. 101

This development suggests that Empress Dowager had a strong desire for ultimate domination and that she would not tolerate any perceived threats to her control, even if these came from one of her allies. Moreover, by narrating the story of her collaboration with Prince Gong and their subsequent falling out, the authors portray a female ruler successfully manipulating a powerful male politician. Her reemployment of the deposed Prince, however, implies that the Empress

Dowager, as a female ruler, still depended on the assistance of male politicians to rule the country.

Without the assistance of men, she would not have been able to return the country to order. As a counterpoint to the primary narrative of Ci Xi’s inevitable rise to power through force of will, this alternate narrative of a powerful woman taking advantage of assistance provided by men—and being unable to rule without them—also appears in Jurji Zaydan’s depiction of Shajar al-Durr. As we will see, this balance negotiated between female potency, on the one hand, and female reliance on male support, on the other hand, is a striking feature of many female biographies worldwide at the time; the political import of the fact that the Arabic biographies of Ci Xi and Shajar al-Durr strike the same balance in this regard will be one of my primary focuses in comparing the two.

In addition to describing how the young Empress Dowager went from her status as an imperial concubine to an empress who seized control of the country, the Arab authors also show how she consolidated her authority, fully establishing her image as an ultra-powerful woman. The first episode in this narrative arc is her power struggle with her daughter-in-law, and the second is her competition with her adopted son. In narrating the first event, the authors emphasize how Ci Xi feared losing her influence with the pregnancy of her daughter-in-law, because with the birth of her child, that child would become guardian of the heir to the throne. This worry over losing power led to a scheme, depicted as follows: “she devised a cunning plan with her co-wife and Prince

Gong to adopt a boy before the mother had her child, and in so doing rendering Aluti [her daughter- 102 in-law] powerless.”

"فرأت ))تسي (( انها فاقدة نفوذها في الحالين فاتفقت مع رصيفتها والبرنس كونغ على حيلة أخرى. وذلك انهم قبل ان تلد الحامل

تب ًّنوا والدا...فاصبحت ))الوتي(( في زاوية النسيان."17

Although different translators include different anecdotes, some of which contradict the chronological sequence of the other biographies, all three characterize her in terms of the same power-hungry traits. This characterization extends across her representation in multiple cultures—Chinese, European, Arabic—but it is only in the Arabic context, where female agency was an important topic in political discussions of nationalism, that her hunger for power receives any positive treatment.

The same biographer depicts the second incident, Ci Xi’s subsequent power struggle with her adopted son, with a focus on how the approaching enthronement of her adopted son made her once

وكانت تسي قد شعرت ان ) ”.again, “sense that her powers were receding and want to protect her rights

She asks the soon-to-be emperor to sign a decree granting her 18(النفوذ ذاهب منها فأرادت حفظ حقوقها( certain governmental authorities. However, the new emperor denies her these rights after he is enthroned, which causes a deep rift between the two thereafter. In the Arabic narrative of Empress

Dowager’s effort to secure her position as sovereign, it seems that the anxiety of losing power is the major cause for her political acts and movements. Her anxiety about possibly being deprived of dominance echoes previous representations of her as a woman who is greedy for power. The measures she takes to eliminate any potential rival construe Ci Xi as an authoritarian figure who would do anything to remain in power.

These Arab authors construct a romanticized literary representation of a power-hungry female

17 Anonymous, “Imburaturat al-Sin,” 6. 18 Anonymous, “Imburaturat al-Sin,” 7. 103 sovereign in Ci Xi. The recasting of the scale of hardship in her early life and her later political struggle serves to highlight her personal and political ambitions. Her political engagements illustrate how she seized every opportunity to climb to higher positions of power, and how she schemed against potential rivals to eliminate obstacles toward becoming the ultimate sovereign.

As a female ruler, she maintained a nuanced power dynamic with her male allies. On the one hand, she managed to manipulate male political figures while remaining wary of the potential threats they posed to her power. On the other hand, these narratives are at pains to show that she could not rule the country without their assistance.19

This distinctive picture of the Chinese Sultana is a direct contrast to the ways in which other

European queens such as Queen Victoria and Catherine the Great appear at the same time in similar biographical works. According to Marilyn Booth’s study of Arabic biographies of famous women published during the Nahda, the literary portrayals of Victoria and Catherine focus on how they devoted themselves to their domestic duties as mothers and wives, in spite of their significant national duties as female sovereigns. This emphasis on fulfilling domestic roles suggested to readers that women’s roles as maternal caretakers could not and should not be superseded by engagement in public life.20 Booth demonstrates her argument by considering Zaynab Fawwaz’s biographies of Catherine and Victoria published in Al-Durr al-Manthur fi Tabaqat Rabbat al-

Khudur [Scattered Pearls on the Generations of the Mistresses of Seclusion]. While emphasizing

Catherine’s role in promoting women’s education, Fawwaz also depicts her as an embroidery- lover. According to Fawwaz, “this queen’s determined efforts resulted in manifest progress that

19 This emphasis on her forced reliance on male assistance is significantly different from the Chinese Imperial records of Ci Xi’s reign. While she is shown to collaborate frequently with male political figures, the dramatic arc of her attempting to overrule them but ultimately having to rely on their help is a later addition produced in translation. 20 Booth, May Her Likes Be Multiplied, 198. 104 was the envy of other nations […] But nothing distracted her from occupying herself with the art of embroidery.”

" وكانت مع ما عليها من سمو األفكار واتساع المدارك ال تألو جهدا من اشتغالها بفن التطريز."21

The portrayal of Victoria follows a similar pattern, highlighting her domestic roles while describing her political and social roles at the same time. In particular, Fawwaz pays special attention to the Victoria’s marriage by illustrating in depth the love story between the Queen and

Prince Albert, introducing Albert as a man with great knowledge of science and art. In addition to her role as a wife, Fawwaz also focuses on how Victoria fulfilled her role as a mother, claiming that “Queen Victoria is famous in her great emphasis in educating her children in the discipline of religion and self-strengthening.”

والملكة ))الفكتوريا(( مشهورة في حسن تدينها وشدة اهتمامها بتربية أوالدها على مبادئ الديانة والتقوى.22

Similarly, in another biography of Victoria in Young Woman of the East, the biographer praises her because “the occupations of queen did not turn her away from the duties of wife and mother; rather, in her domestic life she was a model for girls, wives, and mothers, as she was in her political life a model for kings and queens.”23 In these biographies, neither Victoria nor Catherine are allowed political achievement without it being limited and contextualized by rigorously normative domestic roles.

This persistent limitation is different from the Arabic biographers of Ci Xi who emphasized the political engagement of the Empress Dowager. Domestic duties are not emphasized in the three

21 Zaynab Fawwaz. Al-Durr al-Manthur fi Tabaqat Rabbat al-Khudur (Beirut: Dar al-kutub al- ‘ilmiyah, 1999), 298. 22 Fawwaz. Al-Durr al-Manthur, 279. 23 Anonymous, “Fikturiya Malikat al-Inkiliz wa-Imbiraturat al-Hind,” Shahirat al-Nisa’, July 1922, 361-363, quoted in Marilyn Booth, May Her Likes Be Multiplied, 198. 105

Arabic biographies of the Empress Dowager of China at all. In fact, there is even little mention of her role as a mother and wife. In short, the image of the Chinese Sultana as an authoritative woman hungry for political power contrasts greatly with the representation of Queen Victoria and

Catherine the Great as contemporary female rulers whose devotion to both nation and family was accomplished by serving as national examples of what it meant to be a wife and mother.

While the Nahdawi authors depicted the Empress Dowager of China differently from the

European queens, the literary representation of the empress shares much with that of the Sultana of Egypt, Shajar al-Durr. Shajar al-Durr was one of only two Muslim women in Islamic history to bear the title of Sultana, the other being Sultana Radiyya, who ruled Dehli in the year 634.24 I will give a brief introduction of Shajar al-Durr in order to compare her representation in Nahdawi literary texts with that of the Empress Dowager of China.

According to historian David Duncan’s study in her early life, Shajar al-Durr served in

Caliph al-Musta‘sim’s harem as a slave of probably Turkish origin.25 She later entered Sultan

Ayuub’s harem and gave birth to a son, Khalil. She later married the Sultan and was named his favourite wife. She also played a crucial role in defeating the European forces of the Seventh

Crusade. Her biographers report that Shajar al-Durr concealed the death of her husband, which occurred in 1249 at the same time that European forces arrived in Egypt, and, with her allies, took firm control over military and political affairs, ensuring that the Mamluk army defeated the

Crusaders in the Battle of Mansura. After the Mamluks murdered the new Sultan, Shajar al-Durr took the throne as an Egyptian Sultana. The Caliph, however, objected to her sole rulership. As a solution, she married Aybek, a Mamluk general, and abdicated in favour of her new husband.

24 Fatima Mernissi, The Forgotten Queens of Islam. Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2003): 50. 25 David J. Duncan, “Scholarly Views of Shajarat Al-Durr: A Need for Consensus,” Arab Studies Quarterly 22, no. 1 (2000): 52. 106

With her husband, Shajar al-Durr effectively took control of Egypt for seven years. After discovering her husband’s intention to marry the daughter of the King of Mosul, however, she managed to murder him in her bath.26 This incident precipitated her fall from power when she was taken to the harem of the mother of the new Sultan, where she was beaten to death. Shajar al-

Durr’s extraordinary life trajectory, from a slave in the harem to becoming the female ruler of

Egypt who defeated the Crusaders, has made her the heroine of many literary productions and her life story is recounted by many.27 In the context of Nahdawi literature, the achievements of Shajar al-Durr have served as a model meant to give inspiration to Egyptians to build an independent nation separate from the influence of both the Ottoman Empire and European colonial forces.28

The sub-section below offers a discussion of the ways in which two contemporary biographical essays about Shajar al-Durr use remarkably similar ideas and tropes to those used to construct the life story of Ci Xi.

Nahdawi Depictions of Shajar al-Durr: Zaydan and Fawwaz

The two texts explored here are Zaynab Fawwaz’s Al-Durr al-manthur fi tabaqat rabbat al- khudur (1894) and Jurji Zaydan’s historical novel Shajar al-Durr [Trees of Pearls] (1914).29 Jurji

Zaydan’s literary engagement with both the biography of the Empress Dowager of China and the fictional depiction of Shajar al-Durr, as the editor of the former and the writer of the latter, makes the parallels in the literary image of these two figures even more interesting. Below, I will begin with Fawwaz’s biography of Shajar al-Durr, which builds her image as a powerful woman by

26 Duncan, “Scholarly Views of Shajarat Al-Durr,” 52. 27 For example, see Zaynab Fawwaz, Al-Durr al-Manthur and Jurji Zaydan, Tree of Pearls, Queen of Egypt. Translated by Samah Selim (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2012(. 28 Duncan “Scholarly Views of Shajarat Al-Durr,” 52. 29 Fawwaz, Al-Durr al-Manthur and Zaydan, Tree of Pearls. 107 focusing on her political achievements and emphasizing her competition with male politicians.30

In her biography, Fawwaz describes Shajar al-Durr as a woman who “possesses intelligence, determination, a writer, a reader, [who] has comprehensive knowledge of the situation of the country. She rose to a position that no woman before or after her had ever reached”.

"كانت ذات عقل وحزم , كاتبة , قارئة, لها معرفة تامة بأحوال الملك, وقد نالت من العز والرفعة ما لم تنله امرأة قبلها وال

بعدها."31

Fawwaz writes little about Shajar al-Durr’s personal life as a harem woman, her time as a slave, or how she became Sultan al-Salih’s favourite concubine. Rather, Fawwaz centers her narrative on the political role played by Shajar al-Durr, contending that her husband Sultan al-Salih consulted her on political affairs. Fawwaz further emphasises this side of the Sultana by listing Shajar al-

Durr’s major political achievements during her reign. In particular, Fawwaz illustrates how Shajar al-Durr managed to stabilize Egypt after her husband’s sudden death by hiding this information until his heir arrived to Egypt and by collaborating directly with Mamluk army generals. In so doing, Fawwaz highlights Shajar al-Durr’s powerful image by demonstrating that she successfully outmanoeuvred men in devising strategies and ruling the state.32

Jurji Zaydan’s depiction of Shajar al-Durr not only echoes Fawwaz’s representation of her as a strong female politician, but also takes this further and reframes her as a power-hungry woman.

Similar to Fawwaz, Zaydan mentions little of Shajar al-Durr’s path from slavery to becoming the favourite wife of Sultan al-Salih. He sets the plot at a historical moment when Sultan al-Salih has just passed away, the Egyptian army is still at war with the Crusaders, and al-Salih’s successor

30 Booth, May Her Likes Be Multiplied, 88. 31 Fawwaz, Al-Durr al-Manthur, 3. 32 Unlike other more fictional accounts, Fawwaz’s biographical entry on Shajar al-Durr does not so much emphasize her political ambition as a shaping force on cultural history, so much as celebrate her life as a model for modern women. 108

Turan has been assassinated by the Mamluks for his ill governance. Zaydan positions Shajar al-

Durr as the female sovereign of Egypt from the very beginning of his novel, and, similar to

Fawwaz’s depiction of her, introduces Shajar al-Durr as an exceptional woman who “had both the courage and the ambition of the greatest of men” and who “desired dominion no matter the cost.”33

Zaydan suggests that it is her unchallenged authority and administrative skills that helped her win the admiration and respect of Mamluk princes, including ‘Izz al-Din Aybak, her second husband. Zaydan’s treatment of Shajar al-Durr’s relationship with Aybak further reinforces that she had an insatiable thirst for power and rank. According to Zaydan, despite her affection for

Aybak, “she would not be fettered in her actions by the love of any man. Rank and power were her true heart’s desire and she would stop at nothing to acquire them.”34 In reading Zaydan’s portrayal of Shajar al-Durr’s relationship with powerful Mamluk commanders, I argue that Zaydan demonstrates Shajar al-Durr’s authority, ability and strength by ventriloquizing her male peers’ admiration.

Fawwaz’s biography of Shajar al-Durr slightly differs from Zaydan’s in that his suggests that

Shajar al-Durr did not enjoy absolute authority and still depended on powerful men to a certain degree. This is less obvious in Fawwaz’s text. This nuanced relationship to powerful men can be seen through Zaydan’s portrayal of the love affair between Shajar al-Durr and ‘Izz al-Din Aybak.

In Zaydan’s words, “The liaison suited Shajar al-Durr, for she well knew the impossibility of pursing her vast ambitions unaided. She was, after all, a woman, and could never hope to command an army.”35 As we can see, Zaydan describes the relationship as an alliance through which Shajar al-Durr could achieve her political goals. Despite her affection for ‘Izz al-Din, Zaydan points out

33 Zaydan. Tree of Pearls, Queen of Egypt, 5, 6. 34 Zaydan. Tree of Pearls, Queen of Egypt, 22. 35 Zaydan, Tree of Pearls, Queen of Egypt, 19. 109 that she was aware that her lover was “secretive and cunning” and that she did not trust him because she believed that men are untrustworthy.36 However, when she loses his assistance, she becomes helpless and, as a result, has to accept the Caliph’s decree forcing her to abdicate and to gift her favourite handmaid to the Caliph. This example from Zaydan’s writing depicts a complicated power relationship between Shajar al-Durr and her ally and husband ‘Izz al-Din Aybak. According to Zaydan, Shajar al-Durr received the devotion of a powerful man and manipulated her male peers for her own ends but also still partly depended on the assistance of powerful men, without whom she could not maintain her rule.

There are striking parallels between these Arabic literary representations of the Empress

Dowager and Shajar al-Durr. Firstly, the Arabic-language accounts of the Empress Dowager’s early life are similar to Shajar al-Durr’s life story as depicted here. They shared a slave background and both gained access to the palace as concubines; both women were promoted to the status of

Empress or Sultana after the birth of a male heir; and they both gained effective control through alliances with powerful male politicians. Second, even though Shajar al-Durr and the Empress

Dowager are portrayed as powerful women who prove more effective politically than men, there are nuances in the relationships between the female ruler and her male allies. These complicated relationships can be seen in Jurji Zaydan’s example of the love affair between Shajar al-Durr and

‘Izz al-Din Aybak, and the alliance between the Empress Dowager and Prince Gong. In this way, the Nahdawi representations of the Empress Dowager of China are narrated in a similar way to those of Shajar al-Durr, pointing to a narrative pattern that emerged around the cultural issue of female power in public affairs. The creative license these biographers and novelists took to shape both lives to parallel narrative arcs suggests an underlying interest in female sexual power and the

36 Zaydan, Tree of Pearls, Queen of Egypt, 18. 110 unique forms of self-advancement it afforded.

This comparison between Nahdawi representations of the Empress Dowager of China and

Shajar al-Durr is brought into further relief because it is distinct from representations of European queens, as the examples of Queen Victoria and Catherine the Great show. Instead, the Nahdawi literary imagination of the Empress Dowager as represented in these three biographies bears deep resemblance to that of Shajar al-Durr. Here, I am suggesting that whether this was an explicit or implicit choice, the likeness drawn between the Chinese Empress and the Egyptian Sultana Shajar al-Durr is too similar to be merely accidental and that these similarities can help us unravel some of the ways in which the Arabic imaginary surrounding China was understood and utilized. While

Ci Xi’s political ambition, as a woman, was regarded as the object of moral critique in Chinese and European biographical writing, only in the context of Arabic debates on the expansion of female access to the public sphere did the empress become a way for writers to express a proto- feminist vision of their culture.37

On the face of things, one might argue that these similar literary images indicate that Nadhawi authors understood the Chinese Empress Dowager as a medieval figure, projecting recent history into the distant past because they perceived China as an unchanging, ancient land. And while this is not necessarily a theory to discount entirely, I think that this assumption is overly simplified. It fails to consider that the historical image of Shajar al-Durr embodied new meanings in the Nahdawi context. Despite the fact that Shajar al-Durr was a thirteenth-century figure, her literary characterization is neither associated with the oppressive Mamluk rule nor is it with the undeveloped pre-modern past. Instead, the image of Shajar al-Durr during the Nahda comes to

37 Xu Che 徐徹, Ci Xi Da Zhuan 慈禧大传 [The Grand Biography of Cixi] (Shenyang: liaoshen chu ban she, 1994); Fawn Chung, “The Much Maligned Empress Dowager: A Revisionist Study of the Empress Dowager Tz’u-Hsi (1835-1908),” Modern Asian Studies 13, no. 2 (1979). 111 symbolize the nation-state at a time when Egyptian intellectuals were attempting to build an independent country, as Schregle argues in Die Sultan von Ägypten: Sagarat ad-Durr in der arabischen Geschichtsscheibung. 38 Schregle points out that Egyptian nationalist authors, including Ali Mubarak, Amir Ali and Zaynab Fawwaz, use the Sultana’s life story as an inspiration for Egypt to “forge a new destiny separated from both the Ottoman Empire and the European colonial powers.”39

Booth as has argued in May Her Likes to Be Multiplied that, in addition to being a nationalist symbol, Shajar al-Durr served as an “exemplary precedent” for female readers of biographies to imitate.40 In late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Egypt, the debates about the modern woman, or the so-called “new woman,” occupy a central position in Nahdawi social discourse.

According to Booth, female intellectuals including Fawwaz participated in the discussion of the gender question through promoting notions of ideal womanhood. Shajar al-Durr, as one of the two

Muslim female sovereigns, was considered an example for the “new woman”, and her many biographies offered a possible role for the modern woman as a politician. By thus contextualizing

Shajar al-Durr’s image, I contend that Ci Xi’s literary image in the Nahdawi context similarly is not necessarily associated with the backward medieval past. Just as Shajar al-Durr’s legacy as a female politician defeating the invading crusaders makes her a symbol for Egyptian independence and an advertisement of female empowerment in Nahdawi society, so too could Ci Xi’s image serve other purposes.

I thus suggest that Nahdawi writers reflected their understanding of Shajar al-Durr as an exemplary woman and as a symbol for Egyptian independence in their writing on the Empress

38 Götz Schregle, Die Sultan von Ägypten: Sagarat ad-Durr in der Arabischen Geschichtsscheibung Und Literatur (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1961): 123. 39 Schregle, Die Sultanin Von Ägypten, 123. 40 Booth, May Her Likes Be Multiplied, 289. 112

Dowager of China. The similarity that the Arab authors build between the Empress Dowager of

China and the Egyptian Sultana can be interpreted as an attempt to domesticate the literary image of the Empress Dowager in order to reappropriate the Orientalist discourse regarding China embedded in their European source texts. To explain how radically domesticated translations can resist Orientalist discourses, I build on Shamma’s argument in his book Translation and the

Manipulation of Difference: Arabic Literature in Nineteenth-century England. Shamma’s analysis of Wilfred Blunt’s translation of The Celebrated Romance of the Stealing of the Mare and the

Seven Golden Odes of Pagan from Arabic into English points out that Blunt employs domestication to emphasize the similarities between Arabic and European cultures. By constructing this resemblance between the two cultures, Blunt subverts the stereotypical depiction of Arab culture as “alien” to European readers, a domesticating strategy that Shamma argues makes

Blunt’s translation undermine imperialist discourse.41

Building on Shamma’s argument, I argue that in presenting the life story of the Empress

Dowager of China to Arab audiences as similar to that of an Egyptian Sultana, Nahdawi authors helped their readers encounter the female sovereign of China as a template for making sense of the

“new woman” debates in their own culture. This constructed familiarity subverted the Orientalist writing of China as an alien land, instead domesticates distant Chinese history to the Arabic context in order to create a new template for parsing questions of emergent gender equality.

Visual Representations of the Empress Dowager

It is not only through a comparison of the written work in the biographies that we can pull out the complexities of Orientalist stereotypes and resistance to them in Nahdawi depictions of Ci Xi.

41 Tarek Shamma, Translation and the Manipulation of Difference: Arabic Literature in Nineteenth-Century England (Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing, 2009), 70. 113

In this section, I will examine the three portraits of the Empress Dowager that accompany the

Arabic biographies, and analyze the Orientalist stereotypes contained in them. I argue that these illustrations retain the traces of the Orientalist caricatures characteristic of European sources, creating a racially hybrid physiognomic record of the transatlantic circuit through which these materials entered Nahdawi culture. These images resonate in two ways: the Orientalist attitudes towards Chinese culture, and the integration of those stereotypes into very different, more positive

Nahdawi attitudes about female empowerment.

42 43

42 Anonymous, “Tsy Hsy: Imburaṭurat al-Sin [The Sultana of China],” al-Hilal 9 (1900-1901):1, figure 1. 43 Édouard Desfossés, “La Chine: L’impératrice douairière: Tsu-Hsi,” Le monde illustré 13, no 2171 (1898): 1, figure 1. 114

The first illustration on the far left of the page above is a portrait of the Empress Dowager featured on the front page of the 1900 edition of al-Hilal, with the inscription “Ci Xi: The Empress of China.” I read this illustration as an Orientalist visual representation invoking the “dragon lady” stereotype.45 The term “dragon lady” refers to a stereotypical representation of East Asian woman as “wily, clever, and calculating; powerful but lacking empathy or maternal instinct.”46 In fact, the

Empress Dowager is the prototype of “Dragon Lady.” It is because of the many fabricated Oriental tales that depict her as a cold, domineering and powerful woman that people now associate the term “Dragon Lady” with strong Asian women.47

The Empress Dowager is positioned at the centre of the portrait. She sits upright on a throne with her hands folded. She looks directly, and sternly, to the front. The direct, assertiveness of her gaze speaks to her power. Her fierce and formal visage, particularly her eyes, carries the message

44 Empress Dowager Cixi, Photo, 1904. Palace Museum, Beijing. 45 For further discussion of the Empress Dowager portrayed as the Dragon Lady, see Seagrave and Seagrave, Dragon lady, 30. For more on Asian women being characterized as Dragon Ladies, see Sheridan Prasso, The Asian Mystique: Dragon Ladies, Geisha Girls, & Our Fantasies of the Exotic Orient, Asian Women, xiiii, 8, 29-33, 374-77. 46 Prasso, The Asian Mystique, 87. 47 Prasso, The Asian Mystique, 29. 115 that her character is one of coldness and strength with a domineering nature. The way her eyes, eyebrows, nose, and lips are illustrated suggests that the painter was trying to make a clear image of an Asian face associated with the image of a stern and fierce fighter. Her stance also recalls that of a fighter, defeminizing the image.

This portrait is similar to another illustration, reproduced next to the first above, published in

Le monde illustré (1898), which embodies the Orientalist understanding of the Empress Dowager as a dragon lady. The pallid face and set-lines of the mouth suggest a stillness that stylizes power and impassivity to suffering, similar to the effect of defeminization in al-Hilal. The facial visage, the posture, the patterned robe, and heavy crown of the Le monde illustré portrait are close approximations of the one appearing in al-Hilal. While the latter is a full-length portrait, the former is cut at the waist. Given that the Le monde illustré was published in 1898 and the al-Hilal issue in 1900, it is even possible that the al-Hilal editors directly reproduced the illustration from Le monde illustré. In any case, the two portraits visually rhyme with one another in a way that suggests either a relationship of influence or a shared function within the same cultural context.

However, if we compare these portraits with photographs of her, the contrasts between these portraits reflect two distinct and distinctly gendered understandings of Chinese culture: in both images on the top row above, she bears the hardened features and frozen, stylized pose of the threatening dragon lady, whereas in the image on the lower row, her face is more contoured, showing some age and softness, surrounded as well by flowers.48 The photograph on the far right is taken from 1903-1904. An ornate backdrop in the photograph is substituted for the white wall in the portraits. Its colors, design, and flowers spell out exoticism. In this respect, the photograph

48 This photograph is taken from Ci Xi’s diplomatic photo collections, taken in 1904, which would eventually find its way to the American President Theodore Roosevelt’s desk as a gift from the Chinese government. Lihui Dong, “The Way to Be Modern: Empress Dowager Cixi’s Portraits of the Late Qing Dynasty” (PhD Diss, University of Pittsburgh, 2010), 110. 116 aligns more with the portrait displayed in Le monde illustré, where the floor is painstakingly traced with carpet design and a throne. A dragon crawling beneath the throne serves to emphasise her cold visage and her strong personality. In all the images, the Empress Dowager wears a court robe and a necklace of beads. The pattern of the robe looks like non-European decorative patterns. The wider shape of the sleeves is also distinguishable as a Chinese style. These details of the gown imply that the robe, and thus the woman who wears it, come from a different land.

The Empress Dowager also wears a crown in all of these depictions. The crown in the two portraits is an accurate depiction, but it is a style from a different era. The crown in this picture does not fit the Manchu style crown that the Empress Dowager wears in her official portraiture; rather, it is a crown that had been used in Ming dynasty.49 This suggests that the painter perhaps imagined the Orient as an interchangeable set of symbols, telescoping cultural history into a generalized representation of a foreign culture. Perhaps the painter did not deem it important enough to take time to identify certain styles with a certain historical period and is less concerned with historical accuracy than depicting her in a certain way to Western audiences—and, later, to

Arab audiences in the Middle East—through translation. Along with the crown, the imperial throne, the court robe, and the necklace of beads can be interpreted as further symbolic elements that reveal Imperial power and the Empress’s authority. For example, the necklace of beads is similar to those worn by male officials as an indication of their rank. The Arabic title of this page, “The

-suggests that the editor of Al (اشهر الحوادث واعظم الرجال) ”,most famous events and the greatest men

Hilal is asserting that the Empress Dowager held authority superior to her male peers, reinforced by the sartorial depictions in this portrait as well.

49 Shaorong Yang, Traditional Chinese Clothing: Costumes, Adornments & Culture. (San Francisco: Long River Press, 2004): 7. 117

Another pair of images shows a different side of Orientalist representation of Empress Ci Xi in the Arabic press. This second illustration of the Empress Dowager can be read as a domesticated, exotic, and subdued image. I say subdued because of the position of her eyes looking down, reinforcing that she is feminine and delicate, invoking another type of Orientalist image. In this portrait, the Empress Dowager also appears younger in age than the previous portrait. Moreover, her face is slightly tilted to one side, looking down and off to the left. Though she is smiling, it is a reserved smile. Her soft facial expression, and particularly her less direct gaze, can be interpreted as implying submission and docility. If this conjures a set of traits drawn from Orientalist discourse, her visage also looks like that of a European woman of the era. Her tall nose bridge and deep-set eyes evoke the idealized image of white women of the era.

50 Anonymous, “’Imburaturat al-Sin [The Sultana of China].” al-Hilal 9 (1900-1901): 577, figure 1. 118

If we compare this portrait with photographs of the Empress Dowager once again, it is all the more obvious that this portrait does not reflect her actual appearance. This attempt at making the face of Ci Xi more “white” or European can be read as a way to domesticate the image of the

Empress Dowager of China. Despite her face being divested of her Asian, Chinese features, her dress and hair decorations appear to be Chinese. The young Ci Xi wears a casual robe and exquisite hair decorations on her head buns. Her long hair can be seen as an indication of femininity. Her robe can be recognized as a Chinese-style gown embroidered with patterns of flowers and phoenixes. These floral and phoenix patterns not only symbolize prosperity and honour, but also suggest feminine traits. In particular the phoenix pattern is an Imperial symbol for the Empress.

The floral pattern is also referenced in her hair decorations, indicating the feminine side of the

Empress Dowager. The portrait here thus uses Chinese elements for her robe and jewellery making them stand out as non-European, since their style and the phoenix pattern are elements used for

Chinese clothing in contrast with her European facial features. By creating an image of the

Empress Dowager of China as a woman having a European face and a Chinese gown, this portrait can be interpreted as a kind of exotic domesticating of the Empress Dowager of China. 119

51 52

A third illustration of the Empress Dowager (note 50), published in al-Muqtataf, depicts the

Empress Dowager wearing a tightly controlled facial expression. She is once again at the centre of the picture. Her body and her are positioned slightly at an angle. There is a transition from dark to light from the bottom up, and the shading makes her appear more realistic. The Empress Dowager once again looks very young in this picture. She has a narrower nose and less tall nose bridge in this portrait, which appears more Asian than the previous portrait and its clearly European nose.

Her eyes are fully open, yet narrower than the eyes in the previous image. Her eyebrows are defined and match the shape of her eyes. Her eyelids are also more defined. The narrow eyes fit the stereotypical representation of slim Asian eyes. Her exoticized eyes and nose make her visage look more Asian and plausibly Chinese than the second portrait above (referenced in footnote 49).

51 Anonymous, “Saltanat al-Sin wa Mashakiluha [The Sultana of China and her problems],” 98, figure 1. 52 Anonymous, ’Imburaturat al-Sin wa Siyasatuha [The Sultana of China and her policies],” 35, figure 1. 120

Her facial expression is ambiguous, as viewers cannot tell whether or not she is smiling. Her eyes slightly look off to the side as if she is looking at the viewers in a less direct and more passive way.

Her eyes look empty. Her indirect, empty gaze contrasts with her literary representation as a power- hungry woman. She wears a formal court hat, a necklace of bead and court robe, all of which symbolize imperial power. She wears a narrow piece of fabric that wrapped around her right arm that is not attached to her robe. This seems to be an invented decoration, as it does not fit the style actually used in the Chinese Imperial court at the time. Her clothing, which suggests a kind of imperial authority, contrasts with her less powerful facial expression. This sharp contrast once again serves to exoticize the visual image of the Empress Dowager of China. This illustration gives the viewer an impression that she is both passively feminine and in control of herself. The implication that a woman can be easily manipulated fits the Orientalist discourse of the Eastern woman as submissive.53

These three illustrations of the Empress Dowager, published to accompany the biographical essays about her in popular Arab journals during the Nahda, provide three different imaginative visual presentations of the female ruler of China to the Arab audiences. None of these portrayals capture the way that the Empress herself looked, as captured in the historical record by photographs.

All of these pictures, moreover, exoticize and racialize the Empress Dowager in different ways.

One is by depicting her as the powerful Asian Dragon Lady, another is by making her more passive but exotic looking and therefore weak and controlled. Though the images are contrasting, they all invoke differently exotic and othered images of Asian, particularly Chinese women. The racial hybridity works within certain premises of Orientalism in taking Asian culture and peoples as surfaces for European appropriation and inscription, yet also testifies to a by-product of Orientalist

53 Prasso, The Asian Mystique, 8-9,19, 22-25. 121 engagement with China beyond what can be regarded simply as Orientalism. By holding the record of several different layers of domestication into multiple different cultures into which literary and visual image of Ci Xi was translated, this collection of images testifies to the way acts of translation, transliteration, and pictorial reproduction may have been Orientalist tools but also produced contradictions, hybridities, and ambiguities that allowed these materials to assume new, potentially subversive meanings in Nahdawi contexts.

Ethnography and Biography

Within these biographies of Ci Xi, Arab authors also devote a large portion of their texts to introducing Chinese customs and histories to their Arabic-reading audiences. Through extracting ethnographic accounts from European sources, they transmit the Orientalist discourse underlying descriptions of exotic Chinese customs and imperial harem life, as well as Orientalist knowledge about China. In the following section, I will interpret how Arab authors introduce Chinese customs including “the harem” to Arab audiences as examples of how Nahdawis understood their own culture on a spectrum between east and west. The representation of Ci Xi centers on a tension between her fascinating exoticism and her uncanny parallels with Shajar al-Durr. This double- sided portraiture of the empress dowager allows us to track to the dynamic relationship that emerged between Nahdawi and Chinese culture through the medium of repurposed Orientalist stereotypes.

These Arabic biographies signal the otherness and supposed backwardness of Chinese society in the way that they construct their texts as ethnographic and introduce “Chinese customs” within them. The so-called customs written about in the biographies are mostly shown to be exotic and strange and many of them also could possibly be imaginary. These allegedly Chinese customs include foot binding of Chinese women, selling daughters for profit, gifting daughters to close 122 friends, and paying respect to the deceased by visiting his or her coffin.54 These accounts combine exaggerations of actual practices, such as foot binding, with invented claims like selling or gifting daughters. It is difficult to determine whether the authors even knew that these “facts” were fabrications or exaggerations, for they most likely selected their source texts from European newspapers.55 In this case, the European source texts enjoy an authority that determines what kind of information Arab audiences receive.

One example of how Arabic authors introduced “backward” Chinese customs is in the alleged selling of daughters. The author of “Imburaturat al-Sin [The Sultana of China]” introduces this act of selling daughters for financial profit as a common practice generally considered “morally acceptable” by the Chinese. The text claims that the Chinese believed that selling a daughter was beneficial for both the girl and her family, “since selling the daughter – especially if she were pretty

– guarantees she does not starve, as well as provides the family with money they can benefit from.”

"والصينيون... يرون في ذلك حكمة الن الفتاة اذا بيعت أمنت الجوع وخصوصا اذا كانت جميلة وينتفع أهلها بثمنها."56

The text suggests that Chinese society still had customs like a slave trade by showing that the

Chinese still considered their daughters as tradable commodities. In actual fact, the persistence of the European slave trade into the nineteenth century and the acceleration of European colonization

54 Anonymous, “Imburaturat al-Sin [The Sultana of China],” 3. Anonymous, “Imburaturat al-Sin wa Siyasatuha [The Sultana of China and Her Policies],” 36. 55 For example, the author of “Imburaturat al-Sin wa Siyasatuha [The Sultana of China and Her Policies]” refers directly to Sir Henry Blake. 56 Anonymous, “Imburaturat al-Sin [The Sultana of China],” 3. 123 during this era made this attitude towards China ironic at best.57 This alleged practice of trading daughters, which is viewed as an example of Eastern barbarity in Orientalist writings, implies that the Chinese are barbaric and far behind Western civilization. Ironically, while the Nahdawi author employs the Orientalist rhetoric to depict the exotic Chinese custom of selling daughters, the slave trade between Egypt and Sudan was simultaneously being emphasized in Orientalist travel literatures and British colonial discourse. For the British colonial officials, the slave trade in Egypt was an “example of barbarity and despotism” that signified Egypt’s inability to self-govern and control Sudan.58 In short, the Nahdawis adopted Orientalist discourse, similar to that being written about the Arab world by Europeans, in their writing about a “Far Eastern Other.” As I argue in the preceding and following chapters, these strategies of what Fawwaz Traboulsi calls “self- orientalizing” allowed Nahdawi writers both to displace what they regarded as reactionary social attitudes onto a stereotyped version of China, and to defamiliarize progressive political agendas by staging them in the guise of Chinese ethnography.59 The latter model certainly applies to the

57 Moreover, slavery was likely least practiced among the Chinese, in comparison to European and Arab cultures, as some Egyptian nationalists actually defended the slave buyers by distinguishing between Islamic slavery and New-World slavery, and viewing slavery as a part of Egypt’s mission to civilize the Sudanese. See Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism: Egypt, Great Britain, and the Mastery of the Sudan. This question of Islamic slavery has also been addressed in Juan Cole’s work, which offers a chronological account of the first year of French occupation in Egypt, and his sources include recently published French memoirs and letters, and Arabic chronicles. In discussing how Frenchmen conceived of Egyptian slavery, he points out that many French officers and soldiers bought slaves as mistresses or domestic servants during their stay in Egypt. Some of them, including Napoleon himself, defended Egyptian slavery by suggesting that it was different from the New World slavery and that slaves in Egypt were well treated by their masters. By underlining the sharp contrast between the French revolutionary idea of liberty and the common practice of slave purchasing in the French army in Egypt, Cole reveals a brutal aspect of the French invasion of Egypt. Juan Cole, Napoléon’s Egypt: Invading the Middle East (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 58 Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism, 2. 59 Fawwaz Traboulsi, “Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq (1804-87): The Quest for Another Modernity,” in Arabic Thought Beyond the Liberal Age: Towards an Intellectual History of the Nahda, ed. Jens Hanssen and Max Weiss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 179. 124 case of Arabic interest in the Chinese empress dowager, where Ci Xi’s fabled political ambition gets recuperated from the “dragon lady” stereotype to serve as an ethnographic basis for expanding female agency in Arabic culture too.

Another example of an “exotic Chinese custom” offered by these texts is gifting a daughter as a way to demonstrate friendship. This practice is mentioned in the Al-Muqtataf biography titled,

“Imburaturat al-Sin wa Siyasatuha [The Sultana of China and Her Policies].” This essay quotes directly from an English-language article written by Sir Henry Blake, the governor of Hong Kong.

The Arab authors shared Blake’s statement claiming that the Empress Dowager was gifted by her

هي عادة عند الصينيين تدل علي ) ”mother to a local ruler—a Chinese custom “that attests to friendship

In this case, the Arab author borrowed Blake’s assertion and accepted his statement 60.(شدة الصداقة as a fact without further question. In reality, the practice of giving one’s daughter to demonstrate friendship is notably absent in recent scholarly accounts of late nineteenth-century Chinese history, yet it seems that the Arab authors, in this case, viewed quotes from a European source written by a high-ranking colonial official as a sign of authoritative knowledge regarding China.61 Orientalist writing on China, which was meant to reinforce an image of Chinese society as exotic and backward, became incorporated into Nahdawi articles that, in aiming to introduce China to Arab audiences, cited and translated these Orientalist writings. The danger of including these texts is that it risked Arab audiences uncritically receiving this Orientalists discourse on the supposed

“barbaric” practices of the Oriental other.

In addition to positing the existence of bizarre Chinese customs, these three Arabic biographies share an Orientalist curiosity about the imperial harem, particularly the lives of the women in the

60 Anonymous, “Imburaturat al-Sin wa Siyasatuha [The Sultana of China and Her Policies],” 36. 61 John K. Fairbank and Kwang-Ching Liu, eds. The Cambridge History of China. Vol. 11 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980): 1-69. 125 harem. These three biographies all write about the imperial harem on multiple occasions and I will briefly summarize these discussions below. In the Al-Muqtataf biography that is adapted from

Blake’s newspaper article, the author presents a general introduction of an imperial harem, depicting it as a place full of women and eunuchs. The harem is strictly segregated from the outside world, as women living in it “are not seen by any men except for the emperor and the eunuchs

62.(ال يراه َّن احد من الرجال غير االمبراطور والخصيان المقامين على حراسته َّن ) ”responsible for protecting them

يزورهن االمبراطور احيانا ) ”The emperor frequents the harem to “choose for himself his preferred ones

In the biography of the Empress Dowager published in 1900 in al-Muqtataf 63.(ويختار منه َّن حظاياه the author describes the process of choosing the women for the imperial harem. According to this text, there are specific rituals:

all Manchurian daughters were summoned and appeared before her in groups of four, each girl holding paper specifying her name and age […] The Empress asked the girl several questions and filtered through them until she eventually decided upon one girl, which she chose to be her son’s wife. فاتي ببنات المنشو كلهن ومررن أمامها رباع رباع ومع كل فتاة ورقة فيها اسمها وسنها فاذا اعجبتها واحدة منهن سألتها بعض المسائل...ثم عرض عليها هؤالء الفتيات المختارات ثانية وثالثة وهي تغربل منهن الى ان قر قرارها على فتاة واحدة فاختارتها زوجة البنها.64 The description also includes details such as how many rounds these selections have, and the specific gifts given to the girls shortlisted for the next round.

The Al-Hilal biography pays attention to the relations between the Empress Dowager and the senior wife of the Emperor. The author seems to be impressed by how the young Empress Dowager was able to manage her relationship with this senior wife. As the author writes, “but it is strange that this girl, in spite of her young age…is able to receive the favour of her darra (co-wife) and to win the heart of other women in the palace.”

62 Anonymous, “Imburaturat al-Sin wa Siyasatuha [The Sultana of China and Her Policies],” 36. 63 Anonymous, “Imburaṭurat al-Sin wa Siyasatuha [The Sultana of China and Her Policies],” 36. 64 Anonymous, “Saltanat al-Sin wa Mashakiluha [The Sultana of China and Her Problems],” 99- 100 126

"ولكن الغريب ان هذه الفتاة مع صغر سنها... تمكنت... ان تجتذب قلب ضرتها وقلوب سائر اهل البالط."65

In reading the multiple accounts of Chinese harems in the biographies of the Empress Dowager,

I wish to suggest that Nahdawi authors had a curiosity about the Chinese imperial harem, which is similar to the interest of European Orientalists in Middle Eastern harems. Even through the accounts include many details of the Chinese imperial harem, the authors did not make moral judgements or associate the harem with the “immoral” oriental rulers.66 This Nahdawi depiction of Chinese harems differs from the Orientalist travel literature that represents the Middle Eastern harem as “a source of intrigue and mystery” and connects the harem with the “degraded” and

“backward” domestic practices of Middle Easterners.67 Specifically, Nahdawi authors use Arabic terms and idioms to wrest Chinese harems away from that mode of description. For example, in referring to the senior wife of the Chinese emperor, the author of “Imburaturat al-Sin [The Sultana

meaning the second (or third, etc.) co-wife in a ,(ضرة) ”of China]” uses the Arabic term “darra polygamous relationship. In another example, the author describes how the Empress Dowager and the darra reached an agreement, similar to how “Sarah and Hagar agreed with each other for the

The use of Arabic terms and idioms helped the Arabic 68(هذه أول مرة اتفقت فيها سارة وهاجر) ”.first time audience familiarize themselves with the Chinese imperial harem. Domesticating Orientalist projects of the Chinese harem does not merely draw Arabic readers into an Orientalist perspective on China, but in effect simultaneously de-Orientalizes those projections. The stylized and distorted understanding of Chinese culture reflected occasionally in these biographies serves to point Arabic readers to the issues of female empowerment that made the

65 Anonymous, “Imburaturat al-Sin [The Sultana of China],” 4. 66 Pollard, Nurturing the Nation: The Family Politics of Modernizing, Colonizing and Liberating Egypt 1805-1923, 59. 67 Pollard, Nurturing the Nation: The Family Politics of Modernizing, Colonizing and Liberating Egypt 1805-1923, 59. 68 Anonymous, “Imburaturat al-Sin [The Sultana of China],” 4. 127

Empress’s life story relevant to modern Egyptian readers.

Consequently, in reading the illustrations of the Empress Dowager and ethnographic accounts in these Arabic biographies, I argue that Nahdawis developed a “strategically Orientalized” discourse and consequently transmitted a representation of the exotic China and its female ruler to

Arabic audiences. The constructed similarity between Chinese and Arabic culture that emerges from these translations transforms the backwardness Orientalist writers ascribed to China, using those exotic representations of China as a cultural background that makes Ci Xi’s extraordinary acts of willpower and female agency necessary. By explaining the strikingly exotic practice of the harem in China in practical, logical terms, the translated biographies domesticate

Orientalized representations of China into a set of concerns surrounding female agency shared by Nahdawi intellectuals. In presenting the visual image of the Empress Dowager and in ethnographic details, Nahdawi gazed at the “Far East” China through a European lens, but registered that exoticism in a way that ultimately neutralised its negative connotation.

In understanding how and why Nahdawis used the Orientalised lens to observe China, I build on Shaden Tageldin’s discussion of how Nahdawis imagined themselves as part of Europe through seductive translation. In Tageldin’s reading of al-Tahdawi’s translational writing about France, she argues that the Arab writer was seduced by Orientalist scholarship and particularly Orientalists’ mastery of the Arabic language and literature.69 Al-Tahtawi then developed a theory of translation assuming a “kinship” of Arabic with French. Tageldin contends that this hypothesized equivalence between the colonized self and the colonizer other was seductive for the Egyptian intellectuals as this seductive equivalence lured the colonized self “into reimagining Egypt within a new French- defined universal,” into translating themselves and their culture into European terms.70 Tageldin

69 Tageldin, Disarming Words, 16. 70 Tageldin, Disarming Words, 149. 128 interprets the likeness that al-Tahtawi assumed between French and Arabic cultures as a seductive equivalence through which the colonized Self imagined itself as the colonized Other and ultimately lost its self-identity.

Redeploying Tageldin’s argument, I suggest that Nahdawis, who considered themselves as part of the Europe, subverted an Orientalist lens to observe China. China is to the Middle East as the Middle East is to Europe, which leads these Arab authors to transmute the Orientalist curiosity about Middle Eastern customs like the harem into a Middle Eastern curiosity about the exotic “Far

East.” As a result, in writing about Chinese customs, Nahdawis reproduced Orientalist language and transmitted an Orientalist representation of an exotic China to the Arabic audiences. Although

Nahdawis employed Orientalist discourse on multiple occasions, it seems that they developed their own strategically Orientalised discourse. More specifically, Arabic authors did not write about

China in an effort to juxtapose one culture to another, as we can see from Nahdawi descriptions of the Chinese imperial harem. By using the Arabic terms and idioms, the authors cultivated a likeness with China by adopting a European perspective, thus positioning Nahdawi culture on a spectrum between east and west. These biographers ventriloquized Orientalist voices through translation yet domesticated the Orientalized view of China, making visible the ties of commonality linking

Arabic intellectuals to both these cultural contexts at once.

Conclusion

As Wen-Chin Ouyang has argued regarding Chinese translations of Alf Layla wa Layla,

Western Orientalism impacted the way Chinese culture viewed the Islamic Middle East, operating as what she calls an “Orientalism of Proxy.”71 Inverting this thesis to read nineteenth-century

71 Ouyang, “The Arabian Nights in English and Chinese Translations: Differing Patterns of Cultural Encounter,” 378. 129

Nahdawi translations regarding China, I have, in effect, sought to ask how the “Orientalism by proxy” model relates to Nahdawi views of the “far east.”

In analyzing the three biographies of the Empress Dowager of China written in Arabic during the Nahda in this chapter, I have argued that the Nahdawi authors simultaneously cultivated a similarity and otherness between China and the Middle East. While Arab authors employ

Orientalized language and create an otherness, they also construct a similarity between the two female sovereigns. On the one hand, therefore Nahdawis constructed similar literary images of Ci

Xi and Shajar al-Durr to domesticate the Empress Dowager of China into an Arab context.

According to the literary presentation of the Empress Dowager, her life pattern is similar to that of

Shajar al-Durr, as both rose to power from slavery, becoming imperial concubines, and finally

Empresses after giving birth to a male heir. The Empress Dowager of China is powerful, ambitious, actively involved in political struggle and she exercises excellent governance skills, serving as a unique exemplary woman for female audience. On the other hand, the Arab authors used an

Orientalized language in presenting the visual images of the Empress Dowager and in writing about Chinese customs. She is pictured as a Dragon Lady, a passive European woman wearing a

Chinese costume, and a highly controlled woman, all fitting different Orientalist stereotypes of

Asian women. The descriptions of strange Chinese customs and segregated harems further reinforce that she is an exotic, Eastern Other. The simultaneous sameness and otherness indicates that the Nahdawis’ use of European sources on China did not merely serve as an “Orientalism by proxy.” The power dynamics of Wen-Chin Ouyang’s model are significantly modified by the creative agency Nahdawi translators employed in using the authoritative postures of European

Orientalism not only to forge associations between Chinese and Arabic culture, but to do so in service of political goals related to the discourse on the new woman. 130

During what I have called the triangular translation process, Nahdawi authors had to rely on

European sources to write about China. The views of the people and culture of the “Far East” thus were filtered to the Arab world through European lenses. Nahdawis were partly seduced by

Orientalist discourses from the European source texts, which adopted Orientalised language and imagery. However, these Arab authors also creatively translated and constructed a unique literary image of Empress Dowager of China, matching elements from early Islamic History. Therefore, the author leaves an opened conclusion:

the reader might believe this woman to be evil or a monster disguised as human...To the outsider, she is no different than Queen Victoria in her character and manners... Ci Xi had both impeccable intellect and insatiable greed, but God knows. وقد تخيل القارئ مما قدمناه ان هذه المرأة مفطورة على األذى اوانها وحش بصورة االنسان. ولكنها بالنظر الى العالم الخارجي ال يق ُل شيعاً في اخالقها وسجاياها عن الملكة فيكتوريا... والظاهر انها جمعت قوة العقل كثرة المطامع وهللا اعلم.72

Acknowledging the complexity of the character Ci Xi’s biographies have developed, this author brings in the European perspective, by way of Queen Victoria, not as a point of contrast with Ci

Xi, but rather to show that the exotic elements of her characterization perhaps exaggerated the difference between this power-hungry ruler and the “normal” European model. In essence, the appeal of exoticism appears to mean something different in different contexts. Whereas a large body of scholarship has identified the exoticism of European Orientalism with tactics of imperial domination, for Nahdawi translators these stylized images of Ci Xi and of China at large served to underscore instead elements of early Islamic history. The similarities between the literary styles used to capture the lives of Ci Xi and of Shajar al-Durr complicate the binary between domination and resistance: although translators resisted and modified Orientalist tropes in some places, in other places they borrowed them to understand Chinese culture in a way that could clarify their own culture. By viewing significant aspects of Arab and Chinese culture through an adopted lens

72 Anonymous, “’Imburaturat al-Sin [The Sultana of China],” 9. 131 of European Orientalism, these biographies allowed translators to reveal the structural parallels between issues of gender, sovereignty, and national identity facing both regions.

In the next chapter, Chapter Three, I will continue to explore the triangularization of cultural encounter between China and the Arab world by turning to Nahdawi translations of the

Chinese constitutional revolution. Following the era of Ci Xi’s reign, as the imperial model of government began to give way to popular pressure in favour of a constitutional system, the function of exoticism in Nahdawi representations of Chinese culture also began to shift, as I show in the following chapter. The exoticism of the Chinese imaginary I have explored in this chapter is but one way in which Nadhawi authors captured their differences from China; a different strategy tended to organize comparative political discussions of constitutional reform, where the Chinese revolution allowed Nahdawi commentators to imagine possible futures for the Arabic world, rejecting some and drawing inspiration from others.

By contrast to the domesticating effect of the biographies of the empress dowager, when it comes to the topic of constitutionalism, racialized portrayals of China prevailed, serving to distance Egypt’s modernity project from China’s. As the constitutional revolution in China captured the attention of Arabic political commentators, one of the most prominent roles of China in Nahdawi culture was within comparative political theory. The structural parallels between

Egyptian and Chinese society that emerge from Ci Xi’s biographies contrast with a different strategy which tended to organize comparative political discussions of constitutional reform, where the Chinese revolution allowed Nahdawi commentators to imagine possible futures for the

Arabic world, rejecting some and drawing inspiration from others.

132

CHAPTER 3 Translating the Chinese Constitutional Revolution in Arabic Literary Journals

By 1911, three years after the death of the Empress Dowager in 1908, China was experiencing a revolutionary movement that marked a turning point in the nation’s history. As I will discuss, this revolutionary energy pulled Nahdawi attention away from China’s relationship to historical figures like Shajar al-Durr, and redirected it instead towards the political future, as the possibility of Chinese cultural self-fashioning sparked both inspiration and anxiety. Through a series of uprisings that forced the emperor’s abdication, China’s government changed from an empire to a republic following this revolution that provided a model for nations worldwide. The revolution very quickly gained prominence in the Arab world, where Nahdawi reformers who deeply believed in constitutionalism enthusiastically followed its progress. They wrote extensively about the

Chinese revolution, al-Hilal referring to it as “the shift of 400 million souls from tyrannical [rule]

and other (وعبارة أخرى انتقال ٤٠٠٠٠٠٠٠٠ نفس من الحكم االستبدادي الى الدستوري) ”,to constitutional rule publications used similarly grandiose phrasing. 1 By specifying this large number and by transforming population statistics into “souls,” the author exhibits a way of speaking about China that was prevalent in this era: as a place where hypothetical political transformations and social experiments could be connected to real-world consequences that affected the lives of real people.

For many Nahdawi political commentators, as the anonymous writer of the article, “China and its

Revolution” repeatedly asserted, the Chinese revolution was “the most important event in the

as it was a potential catalyst for a larger (اهم حوادث الصيف الماضي او اهم حوادث الشرق كله) entire East,”2

Eastern constitutional movement along with the Ottoman and Persian constitutional revolutions.

1 Anonymous. “Al-Sin: al-Inqilab al-Siyasi al-Sini ʿala al-Abwab [China: The Approaching Chinese Coup d’État],” al-Hilal, vol. 20 (1911-1912): 163. 2Anonymous, “Al-Sin wa Thawratuha [China and its revolution],” al-Muqtaṭaf, vol. 39 (1911): 521. 133

Witnessing a “fever spread to China from its neighbour Japan, or perhaps […] the two

وكأن هذه العدوى امتدت الى ) ”,constitutional Eastern governments of the Ottomans and the Persians

Nahdawi ,(الصين من جارتها اليابان او لعلها قلدت بها الحكومتين الشرقتين العثمانية والفارسية في انقالبهما منذ بضع سنوات writers saw the possibility of constitutional rule in Egypt and thus inaugurated a new mode of engagement with China that used its political turmoil as a way of gaming out possible futures for

Egyptian reform.3

This chapter investigates English and Arabic journal articles on the Chinese revolution, which took place between 1911 and 1916. More specifically, I will analyze three pieces: “Recent Events and Present Policies in China” (1912) by the British historian of China John Otway Percy Bland,

“Some Problems of Government in Europe and Asia” (1913) by the British colonial official Lord

لورد كرومر ] ”Cromer, and the anonymous Arabic translation of the latter, “Lord Cromer on China

,These three texts were published in direct conversation with one another other 4.(1913) [عن الصين beginning with Bland’s book that attempts to provide a scholarly analysis of the revolution in

China. Cromer’s article reviews Bland’s book, endorsing in particular Bland’s description of the

“yellow peril,” or the threat to Europe posed by Asia. Cromer’s article was later then translated into Arabic and published in al-Muqtataf in 1913, with no translator’s name attached to it.

My analysis of these texts shows how the translation of Cromer’s essay reflects Nahdawi understandings of the Chinese constitutional revolution, and how this project of knowledge production positioned itself in relation to European racism towards China. The process of triangular translation allowed the unnamed Arabic translator to change not only the language but also the argument of the English source text. Cromer’s racist discourse pertaining to China, India,

3 Anonymous, “Al-Sin wa Thawratuha [China and its revolution],” 521. 4 Anonymous, “Lord Cromer ‘an al-Sin [Lord Cromer on China],” al-Muqtataf, vol. 42 (1913): 522-525. I will refer to this anonymous translator using the pronoun, “they.” 134 and other “Eastern” countries is largely excised from the translation, but where it is retained, it is reoriented to the tastes of an Egyptian, Arabic-reading audience. By displacing damaging

Orientalist stereotypes solely onto east Asia, the translator works to promote Egyptian constitutionalism among his readers by leveraging Egypt’s potential to claim the sovereignty that

Cromer’s racist discourse denies to China. Instead of reproducing the colonialist discourse of the original European texts, this Nahdawi translator tailored Cromer’s words for their own ends and implicitly invoked his assumed expertise as a former colonial governor to advocate for constitutionalism to an Arabic-reading public.5

My argument centers on the agency of Nahdawi translators in invoking this authority, modifying Shaden Tageldin’s claim that Egyptian Nahdawi writers were seduced by Orientalist writing.6 Moreover, I argue that Nahdawis did not simply imagine themselves as a part of Europe in the way that Tageldin suggests when describing the “seductive translation” through which

Arabic authors were drawn to western source texts because the European mastery of eastern languages appeared to indicate equality between colonizer and colonized.7 To the contrary, I wish to think about this tug Egyptian translators felt towards Europe as a condition for agency and cultural self-fashioning, in which the act of translation meant positioning Egyptian culture as an indeterminate point moving around on a spectrum stretching between East and West. The

Nahdawis’ struggle for self-identification is reflected in their contradictory understandings of

5 Reynolds has suggested that what he calls “prismatic” translations illustrate the multiple possible meanings or connotations texts can have when translated into different languages. The translators I am interested in here seem intent on exploiting, by contrast, the way any given act of translation limits the possible meanings of a texts and creates opportunities for modifying and omitting connotations the text would hold in its original language. Matthew Reynold. Translation : A Very Short Introduction. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 201 6 Tageldin, Disarming Words, 10. 7 Tageldin, Disarming Words, 10. 135

China, as both a place where similarities to Egypt could be observed, but also a place where aspects of Egyptian culture could be displaced and disowned. For instance, while Nahdawi writers tended to admire the Chinese popular desire for a constitution, they also tended to ridicule the social unrest through which that desire was expressed. China is presented alternately as an image of possibilities and even aspirations for Egypt’s future, yet also a cautionary tale of how political missteps could prove European Orientalist racism right.

In what follows in this chapter, I first discuss how Cromer built upon Bland’s texts and borrowed certain concepts, developing them into a somewhat different argument about China from

Bland’s, an argument communicated via a colonialist discourse of racial superiority. I then perform a close reading of Cromer’s text and its Arabic translation, focusing on how the Arabic translator changed or deleted some of Cromer’s colonialist and racist language while keeping other parts. By investigating these translation choices and what this selection process might suggest, I argue that

Nahdawi writing about China negotiated Arab relationships with a non-European other—a nuance within Nahdawi culture that proves essential to working out from under the sway of European colonialism.

The Genealogy of Bland’s Text

The first section of this chapter traces the genealogy of the three texts examined here, examining Bland’s previous literary engagement with China and Cromer’s selective use of

Bland’s work. The author of The Recent Events and Present Policies in China (1912), John Otway

Percy (J.O.P.) Bland (1865-1945), was a British writer and journalist. Fluent in Chinese, Bland lived in China from 1883 to 1910. He began working as the secretary to a British official, and then as an assistant to the Shanghai Municipal Council. In addition, he had a career in journalism and 136 worked as a correspondent for The Times in Shanghai and later in Beijing. After returning to Britain, he worked as a freelance writer and commentator, mainly writing about Chinese politics and history. Bland was actively engaged in Britain’s development of a China policy through his journalism. He took a position against imperial rule in China, however, he also opposed the establishment of republican self-governance following the dissolution of imperial rule. While cautioning against the entanglements of colonial rule, he advocated an aggressive policy in China that would exploit the region’s resources without taking on the responsibilities of governance.8

Bland was one of the authors largely responsible for shaping Western audiences’ perception of the Empress Dowager Ci Xi, discussed in Chapter Two above, through the two books that he co-authored with Sir Edmund Backhouse, China under the Empress Dowager (1910) and Annals and memoirs of the court of Peking (1914).9 He and his co-author present her as an oversexualized woman and draw upon the “dragon lady” stereotype in their depictions of her. For approximately fifty years, these two books were considered the major, authoritative sources on late imperial

Chinese history worldwide. They were also highly influential in constructing Western understandings of late imperial China.10 In the 1970s, however, scholars demonstrated that these two books were forgeries and “a blend of Western fantasy and Chinese pornography.”11 According to Hugh Trevor-Roper, the primary source of these two books was an allegedly secret diary of a

Manchu official. Trevor-Roper, however, has proved that this diary was invented by Backhouse.12

8 Seagrave, Dragon Lady, 9. 9 E. Backhouse and J. O. P. Bland, China Under the Empress Dowager (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Co, 1910); E. Backhouse and J. O. P. Bland, Annals & Memoirs of the Court of Peking (from the 16th to the 20th century) (London: W. Heinemenn, 1914). For more on the influence of China under the Empress Dowager on English and Chinese scholars, see Seagrave, Dragon Lady, 443-444. 10 Seagrave, Dragon Lady, 443. 11 Seagrave, Dragon Lady, 9. 12 Hugh Trevor-Roper, Hermit of Peking: The Hidden Life of Sir Edmund Backhouse (New York: Fromm International Publishing Cooperation, 1986), 13-14. 137

In addition to relying on this invented text, Bland and Backhouse intentionally incorporated elements of the Chinese classical pornographic fiction genre and inserted a long chapter on a presumably fabricated sexual relationship and illegitimate child of the Empress Dowager and her chief eunuch, which is not corroborated in other sources.13

Upon the publication of these two books, Bland gained a reputation as an expert in Chinese affairs. His subsequent book, The Recent Events and Present Policies in China, published in 1912, migrated from the biographical genre towards future-oriented policy discussions. According to the preface, prior to the book’s publication, several of its chapters appeared in eminent British journals including The Nineteenth Century and After, The Spectator, The Edinburgh Review, The National

Review and The Times.14 The Recent Events gained sufficient prominence to be selected for a review in The Nineteenth Century and After by Lord Cromer, cementing Bland’s status as a popular expert.15 Where Bland rose to this status from relatively obscure beginnings as a journalist, Lord

Cromer came to occupy much the same sort of position from a different route, as he began his literary production and other public writing after he retired from his position as the agent and consul-general of Egypt.16 According to Roger Owen, Cromer devoted time to establishing his reputation as “a man of letters” after retirement and published a significant number of essays and reviews in journals, particularly The Spectator.17 As Cromer and Bland began to publish in the same literary circles, it appears that Cromer must have encountered and admired Bland’s review of The Recent Events.

13 Seagrave, Dragon Lady, 15. 14 Bland, Recent Events and Present Policies in China, v. 15 Evelyn Baring, “Some Problems of Government in Europe and Asia.” The Nineteenth Century and After 73, no. 431 (1913): 1168. 16 Roger Owen, Lord Cromer: Victorian Imperialist, Edwardian Proconsul (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 381. 17 Owen, Lord Cromer, 381. 138

Reading Bland’s book and Cromer’s review of it together demonstrates how colonial discourse built upon itself, selectively citing and borrowing from existing authorities to construct a concept of the colonized culture designed to authorize certain political conclusions. Bland and

Cromer both supported the same conclusion that China would not achieve constitutional rule and that its revolution would fail. Nevertheless, they each articulated this argument differently. Bland, to demonstrate this point, attempted to provide a nuanced analysis by listing all the problems complicating the current constitutional revolution, such as the lack of a middle class in China that could stabilize the process in the long term.18 This detailed level of argumentation is absent in

Cromer’s text. Cromer, in contrast to Bland, based his argument largely on an assumption of

Chinese racial inferiority. To be sure, Bland’s writing does nothing to challenge such a theory of racial inferiority, but it is not articulated as clearly and directly as it is in Cromer’s work.

Cromer’s strategies become visible in the specific quotes he selects from Bland’s text to expand upon. For instance, in Cromer’s discussion of Tang Shaoyi, a leader of the Chinese constitutional revolution, he suggests that despite Tang’s extended period of education in the

United States, he was not able to understand and assimilate to Western civilization. Bland attributes

Tang’s failures of cultural assimilation to his Confucianism, which supposedly makes him too adherent to ancestral morals and practices to inhabit a modern social order.19 Cromer, however, goes further in his discussion of Tang and in fact uses Tang’s example as an insight into all Chinese students studying abroad. Without mentioning that he is drawing upon a comment about a specific person, Cromer uses Bland’s description as an anecdote to assert that no matter how long Chinese students study in prestigious Western universities, they will always return to their ancestral

18 Bland, The Recent Events, 421. 19 Bland, The Recent Events, 220. 139 practices after six months back in China.20

Shortly after Cromer’s review of Bland’s book was published in The Nineteenth Century and

لورد كرومر عن ) ”After, his essay was translated into Arabic under the title “Lord Cromer on China

appearing in al-Muqtataf in 1913. The anonymous Arabic translator, however, developed (الصين surprising conclusions from this dubious source material--conclusions opposed to those advanced by Bland and Cromer, as I discuss in the sections below.

Strategically Packaging Cromer’s Text

This section examines how the unnamed Arabic translator of Cromer’s article strategically presented the translation as an article written in Arabic by Cromer, in spite of the fact that he did not speak Arabic.21 In particular, I will discuss some specific strategies this translator used to translate the piece and investigate why they attributed direct authorship to Cromer, rendering their own actions as translator invisible. I propose that the Arabic translator served as a gatekeeper between these two linguistic worlds by taking advantage of the fact that Cromer did not speak or write in Arabic and that most Arab readers were unlikely to read the original text in English. The fact that Cromer did not speak Arabic afforded the Arabic translator considerable license to construe alternate meanings under the auspices of Cromer’s name without risking accusations of misrepresenting the original text. I also unpack the telling ironies involved in the fact that the

Nahdawi translator used Cromer’s name specifically to promote a political message of constitutionalism.

As a choice of article for translation, it is important to note that Cromer’s review must have been picked at least partly because of the weight of Cromer’s name and authority. Cromer’s article

20 Baring, “Some Problems of Government in Europe and Asia,” 1165. 21 Owen, Lord Cromer, 279. 140 is not the only essay about China in the journal The Nineteenth Century and After; there were other pieces in the previous issue that discussed the political situation and constitutional revolution of

China, including an article by Bland.22 But the power of Cromer’s name as the former colonial ruler of Egypt imbues this translation with a distinct authority. By attributing any political message inscribed in this piece to Cromer himself, rather than the translator, the translated article effectively escaped British government scrutiny leading to censorship. As a strategy for attracting a broader readership and advocating for constitutionalism, it likewise proved an effective translational move.

Though translated texts typically acknowledge the fact of translation as well as the identity of the translator, during the Nahda in a periodical like al-Muqtataf, it was an acceptable practice to keep translators’ names anonymous. 23 This common practice, however, also manifested as a deliberate choice to deemphasize the translator’s authorship and views, rendering undetectable the translator and any particular goal they had in mind. One indication that this strategy was in operation here is that the title of the piece was also changed, further emphasizing Cromer’s name.

The original English text is entitled “Some Problems of Government in Europe and Asia: China.”

In Arabic, however, the title has been changed to “Lord Cromer on China.” This new title not only links Cromer more directly and prominently to the text, but also makes it more difficult for an

Arabic reader to trace the Arabic text back to its origin and find Cromer’s original article in English.

Moreover, “Lord Cromer on China” concludes with his name spelled out, transliterated in Arabic letters, as it is in the title. This move formally replicates the signature, making the text read as though it had been signed by him. It was a common practice in al-Muqtataf for well-known authors to add their own name at the end of their articles. In contrast, in this journal, it is rare for an article

22 The Nineteenth Century and After 71, no. 7 (1912). Bland’s article appears on pages 1017-1028. 23 Selim, “The People’s Entertainments: Translation, Popular Fiction, and the Nahdah in Egypt,” 50. 141 that is translated from a foreign language to include the name of the original author at any point in the translation. This inclusion of Cromer’s name, therefore, suggests that the translator actively packaged the translation to suit their own purposes.

The Arabic translator’s choice to present the translation under the colonizer’s name is significant. This case study encourages us to rethink Tageldin’s argument that widespread translation of European texts into Arabic represented a kind of seduction through which Nahdawis were drawn into the power and ideology of their British and French colonizers.24 In Tageldin’s reading of Napoleon’s proclamation to the Egyptians, she demonstrates that Napoleon intentionally imitated the language of the Qur’an and appropriated Islamic concepts of justice in the Arabic translation of his proclamation. 25 She argues that Napoleon’s proclamation in this respect presented the French colonizers as equal to the colonized Egyptians. This seductive translation, as she calls it, misled the Nahdawis into imagining an “illusionary equality between themselves and Europeans.”26

While Tageldin contends that Egyptian intellectuals were “seduced” by European colonizers’ mastery of the Arabic language and literature, I suggest that they also often acknowledged and even took advantage of unequal power dynamics between themselves and their colonizers. 27

Through translation, Nahdawis were able to appropriate the colonizer’s power to empower themselves. In other words, in this case where the Arabic translator presented a text as if it were written by the colonizer, it was not because they created an illusionary equality between the colonized and the colonizers. On the contrary, this move can be read as a strategic choice. The translator used Cromer’s legacy to validate their own political project by presenting it as Cromer’s

24 Tageldin, Disarming Words, 10. 25 Tageldin, Disarming Words, 43-44. 26 Tageldin, Disarming Words, 58. 27 Tageldin, Disarming Words, 16. 142 original text in Arabic. Indeed, the Arabic translator does not appear to have been seduced in any way by Cromer’s proficiency-level in the Arabic language, which was limited to a few words in

Arabic he shouted at Egyptian ball boys when he played tennis, according to Owen.28 Rather, this translational strategy makes strategic use of Cromer’s limited knowledge of Arabic, as Cromer would not be able to read the Arabic version of his work, thus allowing the translator to selectively interpret this text and promote his or her own position within an Arabic political debate, discussed in the following section.

From an “Exotic Epidemic” to an Inspiring Eastern Revolutionary Moment

In this section, by specifically comparing the introduction of the two texts, I discuss how the

Arabic translator reversed the tone of Cromer’s original essay. I am reading the translation here with the notion that every decision to delete, insert, or change elements of the original English text in Arabic translation has the potential to reveal a political motivation or effect. With this in mind,

I demonstrate how this Nahdawi translator exercised their agency in the translation process.

Cromer’s original introduction takes a dismissive tone toward Eastern constitutional movements. In introducing the constitutional revolutions in Turkey, Persia, and China, Cromer states that, “the Eastern world is at present strewn with the débris of paper constitutions.”29 He presents a figurative image of the “débris of paper,” suggesting that these constitutional rules are impractical and unwanted; they are not useful, and in fact the imagery he uses likens the actual paper on which they are written to garbage. Cromer further predicts that these garbage-like constitutional rules will soon be discarded and “are, or are probably about to be, derelict.”30 His

28 Owen, Lord Cromer: Victorian Imperialist, Edwardian Proconsul, 279. 29 Baring, “Some Problems of Government in Europe and Asia,” 1161. 30 Baring, “Some Problems of Government in Europe and Asia,” 1161. 143 dismissive tone suggests that there will never be constitutional governments in Eastern countries.

In addition to using negative terms such as “débris” and “derelict,” Cromer further describes the revolutions in Turkey, Persia, and China as “the epidemic, which is of an exotic character.”31

“Epidemic” and “exotic” suggest a colonial superiority, othering the Eastern constitutional revolutions and making them seem distant through a racialized language of disease and difference.

By representing Eastern revolutions as an “epidemic,” Cromer suggests that constitutional revolutions in Eastern countries are essentially harmful; he likens their rapid spread and increase not to other kinds of popular movements but rather to a contagion. By linking the alliterative words

“epidemic” and “exotic,” he reinforces the danger of these revolutions, disproportionally emphasizing their potential threat. In using such racialized and Orientalist language, his portrayal of Eastern revolutions casts the intellectual and governmental efforts of Turkish, Persian, and

Chinese populations as little more than a disease that more astute European observers can recognize as such.

Following the introduction, Cromer further suggests that these revolutions are laughable. With heavy sarcasm, he presents three anecdotes about the Italian, Ottoman, and Chinese revolutions.

He begins with the mildest criticism of the Italians, the European Others, and becomes progressively more mocking. In the first anecdote, Cromer presents an image of a radical revolutionary supporter during “the most frenzied period of Garibaldian worship” in Italy, which emphasizes a longstanding stereotype of Italian populations as overly passionate.32 According to

Cromer, when his friend asked the revolutionary for breakfast, this man, “who was in a wild state of excitement,” replied to his friend, “Breakfast! What breakfast! You only need freedom!”33

31 Baring, “Some Problems of Government in Europe and Asia,” 1161. 32 Baring, “Some Problems of Government in Europe and Asia,” 1161. 33 Baring, “Some Problems of Government in Europe and Asia,” 1161. 144

He takes the idea that fanatical revolutionaries do not really understand constitutionalism further in his second story, in which he describes how Muslim inhabitants of an Albanian village responded to Ottoman constitutionalism. According to him, they had no idea what constitutionalism was and expressed great excitement at the news of the Young Turk revolution.

Believing that the constitution would enable them to kill non-Muslim inhabitants, they “asked when the massacre was to begin.”34 The stereotype that Cromer presents here conveys the idea not only that Muslims are violent and fanatic, but similar to Italians, ignorant as well.

Cromer’s sarcastic tone reaches its apex in his portrayal of the Chinese revolutionary moment.

He emphasizes that the Chinese do not understand either constitutionalism or republicanism, as

“the word ‘republic’ meant no more to the people at large than the blessed word ‘Mesopotamia.’”35

Cromer then describes how the Chinese “wept for joy at the coming of Liberty, Equality, and

Fraternity.”36 The scene that he depicts is one of exaggeration: Chinese people embrace each other publicly, and their responses are overly emotional. Cromer emphasizes in this scene that the

Chinese citizens do not actually know what they are so happy about. He then includes the slogan of the French revolution, “Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity,” which is often seen as the symbol of the French civilizing mission. By contrasting Chinese people’s fanatical happiness with their illiteracy regarding constitutionalism, especially the French constitutional slogan, he further emphasizes the image of the Chinese as ignorant and uncivilized. He concludes that, “These ebullitions provoke laughter. Sed facilis cuivis rigidi censura cachinni.” 37 He criticizes the emotionality of these revolutions and the lack of rationality or even capacity for logic among the people involved. He uses a Latin phrase to reaffirm the detached, knowing perspective of

34 Baring, “Some Problems of Government in Europe and Asia,” 1161. 35 Baring, “Some Problems of Government in Europe and Asia,” 1161. 36 Baring, “Some Problems of Government in Europe and Asia,” 1161. 37 Baring, “Some Problems of Government in Europe and Asia,” 1161. 145

Europeans observing this scene and to assert his epistemological authority and superiority, not only toward the purportedly “inferior” groups that he ridicules, but also in relation to his English reading audience, to whom he is demonstrating his education and erudition.

Cromer starts the section by suggesting that the British are responsible for “luring Young Turks,

Chinamen, and other Easterners into the political wilderness.” 38 By stating that they are responsible, he suggests that the British are also superior, implying that British politicians enlightened ignorant Easterners by preaching constitutionalism. While indicating their superiority over these “natives,” Cromer also shows that he thinks the British politicians who preach constitutionalism are naive. He mocks British politicians who claim that every country should follow the British model in order to be prosperous. To confirm his points, Cromer narrates an anecdote in which a British politician observes that Egyptian peasants do not follow the British model of stacking corn. He therefore concludes that Egypt cannot thrive because Egyptians do not use the British system. Through his anecdote, Cromer implies that British politicians are overly idealistic and do not understand the customs of locals. In mocking British politicians who seem thus naive and idealistic, Cromer implies that promoting the British model of constitutionalism will not help revive Eastern countries. He uses the Orientalist phrase “character of a nation,” which essentializes people by nationality, meaning that each nation has its own unchangeable brand of subjectivity, with the natural premise that European characters are superior to those of

“Orientals.”39

Cromer further mocks how people in Eastern countries blindly embraced constitutionalism by using racist and Orientalist language. For example, he claims that British politicians’ preaching of

38 Baring, “Some Problems of Government in Europe and Asia,” 1162. 39 Lydia Liu, Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity- China, 1900-1937 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 60. 146 constitutionalism “appeals with irresistible force to the untrained Eastern habit of thought.”40

Cromer’s Orientalist language here suggests that “Eastern” minds must be trained to conduct critical thinking, and implies that without this training they simply accept constitutionalism without understanding or critically analyzing it.41 He further provides an example of how T’ang, a Chinese republican leader, believes that constitutional government has the magical power to save his nation. Cromer describes T’ang as “poor” and “self-deluded.” These two words reflect

Cromer’s contemptuous attitude toward the Chinese constitutional revolution, suggesting that

Tang’s wish to establish constitutional rule is merely an illusion and his efforts would be in vain.

Moreover, Cromer extends his comments to other Eastern countries, stating that T’ang’s thought is shared “by countless Ahmeds, Ibrahims, and Rizas in the bazars of Constantinople, Cairo, and

Tehran.”42 By referring to the Young Turks, Egyptian Nahdawis, and Iranian revolutionaries as

“Ahmeds, Ibrahims, and Rizas in the bazar” he makes plain the racist implications of his dismissive and condescending tone.43 By using imagined stereotypical nicknames of Turks, Egyptians, and

Iranians, and invoking the stock image of a crowded bazar—tropes of Orientalist literature—he suggests a chaotic and anonymous place populated by racialized Others. By linking these two images together, he creates a generalized and negative picture of Middle Easterners who exist as essentially interchangeable types.

Cromer’s colonial language, however, does not appear in the Arabic translation. By choosing to change, or not to incorporate, Cromer’s negative, racist, Orientalist language, the translator of the text into Arabic gives it a more positive tone. The language used is less mocking of people from the “East.” Despite this, however, an editorial introduction to the translated article points out

40 Baring, “Some Problems of Government in Europe and Asia,” 1162. 41 Baring, “Some Problems of Government in Europe and Asia,” 1162. 42 Baring, “Some Problems of Government in Europe and Asia,” 1162. 43 Baring, “Some Problems of Government in Europe and Asia,” 1162. 147

Cromer’s negative attitude toward the Chinese constitutional revolution. This introductory note states that, “he [Cromer] leans towards a negative [attitude] rather than positive [attitude].”

" لكنه اميل فيها الى التشاؤم منه الى التفاؤل."44

This introductory comment on the text indicates how Nahdawi translators were able to critically analyze the original text and decide what to translate and how, demonstrating their agency during the translation, adaptation, and publication process. The Arabic translator could thus choose not to translate negative words including “débris” and “derelict.” By doing so, the Arabic text removes

Cromer’s original message about the Chinese constitutional revolution being impractical and worth little more than the scraps of paper it is written on. Furthermore, the term “exotic” that

Cromer uses to describe the outbreak of Ottoman, Persian, and Chinese revolutions is not found in the Arabic translation. Instead, the Arabic translator states that “the paper constitution had spread in Eastern nations and it is feared that they will become stumbling blocks in the path of reform.”

"لقد انتشرت اآلن في البالد الشرقية أوراق الدستور فصارت او يخشى ان تصير معاثر في سبل اإلصالح."45

The Arabic translation thus acknowledges the difficulty in practicing constitutional rule in China, but does not imbue it with racialized and Orientalist stereotypes—the translated text appears to encourage work on the problems facing constitutionalism, rather than defining it as a categorical impossibility.

Moreover, the anonymous translator addresses the idea of difficulty in constitutional reform without suggesting the idea of colonial superiority that Cromer presents in the original. The word

“reform” is added, which is absent from the original. The term “reform” suggests the idea of promise and improvement, transforming the message in the original text about Eastern constitutional revolutions as being dangerous and doomed to failure. While the translator retains

44 Anonymous, “Lord Cromer ‘an al-Sin [Lord Cromer on China],” 522. 45 Anonymous, “Lord Cromer ‘an al-Sin [Lord Cromer on China],” 522. 148

Cromer’s idea that these revolutions are contagious, they use a neutral, and even positive word to

which is used to describe paradise in the ,(مبثوثة) convey the meaning of contagion: mabthutha

Qur’an. According to the Qur’an, “in an elevated garden, wherein they will hear no unsuitable speech, within it is a flowing spring, within it are couches raised high, and cups put in place, and cushions lined up, and carpets spread around.”

"في جنة عالية ال تسمع فيها لغية فيها عين جارية فيها سرر مرفوعة وأكواب موضوعة وغارق مصفوفة وزرابي مبثوثة."46

By choosing a word that is used to describe paradise to refer to the constitutional revolution, the original text is manipulated to say something diametrically opposed to its intent. Unlike Cromer’s original text that suggests that Eastern revolutions are harmful, dangerous, and disease-like, the

Arabic translation suggests that they will spread like light across Eastern countries and bring benefits.

The Arabic translator further changes Cromer’s mocking tone by shortening his anecdotes, as well as deleting and censoring racist language in order to present the Chinese constitutional revolution more positively. In the first few paragraphs of the article, the translator changes the way that Italian, Ottoman, and Chinese people are presented. The Chinese general public are portrayed as being enthusiastic about the advent of constitutionalism; while the source text portrays them in a fanatic state of happiness without understanding what they are happy about, the Arabic translation excludes the section in which Cromer claims that “the word ‘republic’ meant no more to the people at large than the blessed word ‘Mesopotamia.’”47 In addition, the Arabic translator adds that, “the general public and specialists alike sing its praises and attached great hope to it

[constitutional rule].”

46 Qur’an 88: 10-16. 47 Baring, “Some Problems of Government in Europe and Asia,” 1161. 149

"اذا أعطي الدستور لبالد قابله االهلون أوال بالتهليل واالبتهاج. وتغني يمدحه عامتهم وخاصتهم وع لقوا عليه آماال كبارا."48

By removing the racist language that questions whether the Chinese people are capable of understanding constitutionalism, the Arabic translation suggests that the Chinese were celebrating the coming of constitutionalism in a way that connected their enthusiasm to specific features of the reform that gave them cause for hope. Moreover, the Arabic translation excludes Cromer’s comment on the Chinese leader T’ang describing as “poor” and “self-deluded.”49 By doing so, the

Arabic translator leaves room for readers to maintain the dignity and legitimacy of the Chinese revolution and its leader, unlike Cromer, who clearly belittles both. Furthermore, the Arabic translator shortens the anecdote about Italians and their excessive passion during their revolution.

The story about the Muslim inhabitants believing that constitutionalism permits them to kill non-

Muslims is not mentioned at all.

"وقد قال مؤلف هذا الكتاب ان تانغ زعيم الجمهوريين في الصين يعتقد ان الدستور فعالً سحرياً في النفوس فينيل األمم الحكمة

والقوة والمنعة."50

The Arabic translator thus challenges the stereotypical idea that all Muslims are violent people. By making these changes, the Arabic translator completely reverses Cromer’s original idea that the

Eastern constitutional revolution is laughable and unlikely to happen.

The Arabic translator removes other racist remarks about the Eastern world, more particularly about the Middle East and Egypt. While the source text describes the Eastern revolutions as

“political wilderness,” the Arabic translator deletes this negative description altogether.51

كذا حدث في إيطاليا زمن غاريبلدي و كذا حدث في تركيا وايران والصين. وقد قال مؤلف هذا الكتاب ان الناس يعانقوا في

48 Anonymous, “Lord Cromer ‘an al-Sin [Lord Cromer on China],” 522. 49 Anonymous, “Lord Cromer ‘an al-Sin [Lord Cromer on China],” 522. 50 Anonymous, “Lord Cromer ‘an al-Sin [Lord Cromer on China],” 522. 51 Baring, “Some Problems of Government in Europe and Asia,” 1161. 150

الصين وهم يبكون فرحا قائلين قد نلنا الحرية والمساواة واالخاء.52

The Orientalist trope about the Eastern mind being untrained is also removed in the Arabic translation. The Nahdawi translator clearly noted Cromer’s racist tone, filled with a sense of superiority over “Easterners.” The removal of his negative language, indeed, clearly signals the

Arabic translator’s recognition of that language, as well as an attempt to resist the racial superiority articulated by the source text. In addition, the Arabic translator deletes the references to Arabs,

وما يقوله تانغ يقوله كثيرون في ) ”.Iranians, and Turks as “Ahmeds, Ibrahims, and Rizas in the bazars

The unnamed Nadhawi translator re-writes Cromer’s racist narrative 53 (.القسطنطينية والقاهرة وطهران about people in the region by virtue of these exclusions. They simultaneously keep important information and repackage it so that it would align with their political aspirations. The process of rejection goes hand in hand with appropriation and thus, partial acceptance of the Orientalist discourse: recapitulation with a difference.

In addition to removing the negative words and replacing them with more positive terms, the

Arabic translator also changes Cromer’s racist and colonial discourse into a critical analysis. In one example, Cromer attacks the Chinese people’s character; they are dishonest and therefore unable to effectively manage the financial administration: “this fundamental quality of honesty is not to be found through the length and breadth of China, whether in the ranks of the old Mandarins or in those of the young Republicans.”54 Cromer’s statement clearly embodies the Orientalist language of the negative national character of an inferior race. However, in the Arabic translation, the translators change Cromer’s sentences to read as follows: “Therefore, it is necessary to reform the financial administration of the country, before anything else, so that financiers would have trust

52 Anonymous, “Lord Cromer ‘an al-Sin [Lord Cromer on China],” 522. 53 Anonymous, “Lord Cromer ‘an al-Sin [Lord Cromer on China],” 522. 54 Baring, “Some Problems of Government in Europe and Asia,” 1164. 151 it. This trust is non-existent now in China, as the men of the republic are like those of the previous monarchy, who cannot take government money without embezzling from it.”

"فال بد اذا اصالح إدارة البالد المالية قبل كل شيء حتى يكون للماليين ثقة فيها. وهذه الثقة معدومة اآلن من بالد الصين

فان رجال الحكومة الجمهورية فيها هم مثل رجال الحكومة الملكية السالفة ال يستطيعون ان يسلموا أموال الحكومة غير ان

يختلسوا جانبا منها."55

Unlike Cromer’s language, which emphasizes the Chinese character as dishonest, the Arabic translation deletes this idea and presents an alternate one: corruption, an avoidable problem, is the main reason for a weak financial system. They further insert the idea that financial administration can be improved by reform, in contrast to Cromer’s idea that this problem is unchangeable and is inherently part of the Chinese character.

The Arabic translator also alters the conclusion of Cromer’s text, changing its original conclusion by reversing his suggestion that the Chinese revolution is impossible. In the source text,

Cromer concludes that achieving constitutional rule in China is “a vain dream, possible only for those who ignore the inherent character of the Chinese people.”56 Cromer’s conclusion employs classic Orientalist rhetoric. He emphasizes the backward, barbaric character of the Chinese people as proof of China’s inability to achieve constitutional rule. The Arabic translator, however, deletes the above phrase in the translation and alters Cromer’s concluding sentence. Cromer claims that constitutionalism is troublesome and problematic, “serving merely to increase and perpetuate instability.”57 In addition to suggesting the impossibility of practising constitutionalism in China,

Cromer adds an additional negative critique here. He implies that China’s political situation is already unstable. By stating that constitutionalism would only bring further political uncertainty,

55 Anonymous, “Lord Cromer ‘an al-Sin [Lord Cromer on China],” 524. 56 Baring, “Some Problems of Government in Europe and Asia,” 1167. 57 Baring, “Some Problems of Government in Europe and Asia,” 1167. 152 he emphasizes that constitutional rule is harmful. Instead of translating Cromer’s original conclusion, the Arabic translator concludes that, “the representatives from the people call for nothing except one of the factors that will cause its [illegitimate tyranny’s] removal.”

"وما ادعاء أصحابها النيابة عن الشعب اال عامل من العوامل التي ستسبب زوالها الحكومة االستبدادية."58

The Arabic translation suggests, therefore, that the Chinese people are asking for the removal of the current government, which is constitutional in name but tyrannical in reality. As we can see, the Arabic translation emphasizes the idea that the Chinese people are working toward the removal of an illegitimate government and attempting to achieve true constitutional rule. As we saw in the previous example in which the translator insists on the possibility of reform, the translator here indicates that the Chinese people are capable of change and that constitutional rule is achievable once the current problems are solved. Cromer’s original idea that constitutional government is harmful in certain parts of the world is completely absent in the conclusion of the Arabic text.

More importantly, the Arabic translator replaces Cromer’s original text with a message of their own, using the case of China as an inspiring example that could ultimately promote constitutionalism in Egypt.59 This alternative conclusion suggests the translator’s strategic use of the original text. They recognize the authority of the English source text, in this case, an article written by the previous colonial governor of Egypt. The Arabic translator uses the legitimacy of

Cromer’s text, but inverts its message to advocate a new position: it is both possible and beneficial to achieve constitutional rule. Because the Chinese are on their path toward constitutionalism, it

58 Anonymous, “Lord Cromer ‘an al-Sin [Lord Cromer on China],” 525. 59 For more on the history of Constitutionalism in the Middle East, see Hasan Kayalı, Arabs and Young Turks: Ottomanism, Arabism, and Islamism in the Ottoman Empire, 1908-1918 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Campos, Ottoman Brothers: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Early Twentieth-century Palestine; Elizabeth Thompson, Justice Interrupted: The Struggle for Constitutional Government in the Middle East (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2013). 153 becomes viable for the Egyptians to follow the same model.

Maintaining Racist and Orientalist Tropes Towards Eastern Others: China and India

While the Arabic translator removes the racist language used to depict Middle Easterners as violent and ignorant, they still retain some racist tropes related to “Eastern” others. In this section,

I examine the Orientalist tropes and racist language that the translator retains in the Arabic translation to understand the logic whereby they delete the racist tropes about Egypt but simultaneously keep the racist language that surrounds China and India. Cromer depicts China and

India both, for example, as overpopulated and poor. Additionally, for him the “Chinese mind” is limited by and entrenched in Confucianism. I suggest that some of the racist and Orientalist tropes about China and India deployed by Cromer must have resonated with Nahdawis. In maintaining such derogatory language and thought in the Arabic translation, the Nahdawi translator situates

Arab readers in a position of power—potentially inferior to the Europeans, but assuredly superior to “Eastern” others like Chinese and Indians. In the discussion that follows, I aim to reveal the complexities in Nahdawis’ understanding of themselves in relation to this “Eastern other.”

The Arabic translator includes Cromer’s Orientalist rhetoric on “overpopulation” in China and

India while changing phrases that might imply the same connotation for Egypt. Cromer attempts to use population figures to explain the cause for China’s poverty and unstable political situation.

According to him, “the main disease is economic” and it is “incapable of being cured by the most approved constitutional formulae.”60 By referring to this problem once again as a disease, Cromer exhibits a sense of colonial superiority toward the “East.” Additionally, Cromer emphasizes the

Orientalist idea that China cannot be cured by constitutional rule because of its intrinsic

60 Baring, “Some Problems of Government in Europe and Asia,” 1163. 154 backwardness. This backwardness, to him, is also the cause of the overpopulation problem. In

Cromer’s words, “polygamy, aided by excessive philo-progenitiveness, the result of ancestor- worship, has produced a highly congested population.”61 He links polygamy to “ancestor-worship,” which is a fabricated connection. In mentioning “ancestor-worship,” Cromer again emphasizes the idea that the Chinese are overly tied to the traditions of their ancestors, implying that they are not capable of having agency and that their minds and habits are unchangeable.

Cromer’s words reflect the Orientalist rhetoric that posits “Eastern” domestic practices as backward and uncivilized, stereotypes that were then used to demonstrate these countries’ supposed inability to progress, and thus further justify their colonial occupation. In contrast, while the Arabic translator retains this aspect of Cromer’s original text, they use a less common word,

to refer to polygamy. While this term has various meanings, the most common ,(ضرار) darar meaning is “harm,” not polygamy. A reader with a solid foundation in the Arabic language would understand these multiple meanings; however, polygamy would likely not be the first meaning that comes to the reader’s mind. In this example, the translator exhibits their agency by choosing a term that makes Cromer’s polygamy reference vague, thus skirting the fact that Egyptians participated in the practice that is here being designated harmful. This example indicates that the translator was negotiating with British colonial discourse, retaining the authority of the voice while, in effect, changing its words. While Cromer’s colonial discourse conceived polygamy in Egypt as backward, and used this to justify the British occupation of Egypt, the Nahdawi translator perhaps did not wish to represent Arab culture as backward to Arabic readers and thus downplayed the specific reference to polygamy.62

The Arabic translator also changes or removes other terms that might remind the reader of

61 Baring, “Some Problems of Government in Europe and Asia,” 1163. 62 Pollard, Nurturing the Nation, 78. 155 similarly so-called backward practices in Egypt. For example, the translator eliminates Cromer’s mention of child marriage and “reckless over-breeding.” 63 Here, it is important to note that polygamy, marriage at a young age, and—at least by Cromer’s standards—“over-population” existed in Egypt at that time.64 Like China, Egypt was represented in British Orientalist literature as a site of barbarity, and had similarly been conceived as unable to self-govern. In fact, it was

Lord Cromer himself who was largely responsible for articulating and perpetuating this Orientalist and colonial discourse about Egypt. By emphasizing such Orientalist tropes in relation to China but removing the same rhetoric in ways that reference Egypt, the Arabic translator constructs a boundary between Egyptians and Eastern Others. This boundary suggests that Egyptians and Arabs may be inferior to Europeans and should institute reforms, but that they still remain superior to others defined as “Eastern.” The superiority that the Nahdawi translator constructs toward China is drawn directly from the racist language of the English source text, and they acknowledge its authority in this way.

In addition to suggesting that China is overpopulated, the Arabic translator also addresses the

same, and perhaps even larger, problem in relation to India. Cromer states that “the same difficulty,

though perhaps in a less acute form, exists in India.” 65 According to Cromer, India’s

overpopulation problem cannot not be remedied, similarly to that of China. In the case of India,

however, Cromer states that, “philanthropy,” by which he means missionary groups and

charitable organizations, “enhance[s] the evil.”66 Cromer uses especially harsh logic to resolve

this: he states that wars, famine, and cholera might help reduce the population. Cromer concludes

63 Baring, “Some Problems of Government in Europe and Asia,” 1163. 64 For a discussion of how Nahdawis compared the population issue between China and India, see El Shakry, The Great Social Laboratory: Subjects of Knowledge in Colonial and Postcolonial Egypt, 146, 60, 82. 65 Baring, “Some Problems of Government in Europe and Asia,” 1163. 66 Baring, “Some Problems of Government in Europe and Asia,” 1163. 156

that this crisis of population is the greatest obstacle to “governing the teeming masses in the

East.”67 Cromer acknowledges that that his point is cruel and controversial, but asserts that it is

necessary to address it, nevertheles. Cromer’s analysis of India shows little sympathy for the

colonized Indians and their suffering, and clearly conveys colonial superiority. While the Arabic

translator tones down Cromer’s racist language in most cases, it is notable that in relation to India

they not only maintains the entire section, but also even exaggerates Cromer’s message. For

implying ,(فا ش )”example, the Arabic translator changes “a less acute form” into “spreading out

that the India’s “population problem” is even worse than in China.68 In so doing, the Nahdawi

translator once again distances themselves and Arabs generally from an “Eastern” Other. They

reinvent common colonial, racist tropes in a way that situates Arabs as superior and in a position

of power compared to these Others.

Translating “The Yellow Peril” into Arabic

While the Arabic translator modifies a significant amount of the racist language Cromer uses about China, they include what is arguably the most racist concept presented in Cromer’s text, which would echo for long afterward: the notion of the Yellow Peril. It is worthwhile to mention that the concept of the Yellow Peril is also discussed extensively in Bland’s text. In fact, Bland devotes an entire chapter to discussing this concept, published also as an article in The Nineteenth

Century and After. Bland criticizes how British politicians have constructed an imaginary image of Yellow Peril as a way to call for national unity. According to him, China is not and will not be a military threat to Europe because of its weak and disorganized military force. Moreover, China’s lack of a significant middle class makes it impossible for the Chinese to achieve constitutional

67 Baring, “Some Problems of Government in Europe and Asia,” 1163. 68 Baring, “Some Problems of Government in Europe and Asia,” 1163. 157 governance. The real Yellow Peril, Bland points out, is cheap Chinese labour.69 He attributes the problem of cheap Chinese labour to racial difference, claiming that Chinese immigrants are willing to take jobs that white people would not accept.70 This would make China an economic threat and

China, Bland predicts, will gradually come to surpass countries with primarily white populations.

In reviewing Bland’s text, Cromer skips his criticism of how British politicians intentionally exaggerate their presentation of China as a military threat. Cromer nevertheless maintains Bland’s point that the “real Yellow Peril” is cheap Chinese labour. Cromer uses the concept of the Yellow

Peril to justify his racist and colonialist discourse and is not overly concerned with researching the contemporary situation in China. He presents a generalized picture of China as an overpopulated nation full of poor people, without acknowledging the existence of different classes. He refers to

Chinese labourers as “carpenters and bricklayers” of which China “has a large surplus” and

“should be glad to be rid.”71 According to Cromer, then, all Chinese labourers are people who perform menial work with no engagement of their intellectual abilities.

This presentation of Chinese labourers as less-than-human creatures refuses to acknowledge the intrinsic value of these people. He suggests that they can and should be exterminated removed.

Even more problematically, he indicates that exterminating these people would be a source of considerable benefit to the colonial government. He goes on to explain why the Yellow Peril should be a cause for alarm. Cromer claims that “a large influx of Chinamen” has come to the United

States and Europe to steal economic opportunities from locals.72 More specifically, Americans and

Europeans are “scared of the prospect of competing with Chinese cheap labour.”73 Here, Cromer

69 Bland, Recent Events and Present Policies in China, 422. 70 Bland, Recent Events and Present Policies in China, 422. 71 Baring, “Some Problems of Government in Europe and Asia,” 1164. 72 Baring, “Some Problems of Government in Europe and Asia,” 1164. 73 Baring, “Some Problems of Government in Europe and Asia,” 1164. 158 implies that because Chinese labourers are inferior to Americans and Europeans, they are therefore more willing to take on greater workloads for a lower rate. Additionally, Cromer criticizes the

American and European governments for their hypocritical decision to exclude what he describes as “Chinese carpenters and bricklayers.” He points out that while Americans and Europeans pretend to be philanthropic, they still resort to self-preservation when facing a large number of

Chinese immigrants who arrive in their countries.

The Arabic translator maintains Cromer’s concept of the Yellow Peril, thus conveying his willingness to leave intact racist messages regarding the Chinese as cheap labour.74 I would here like to call attention to the fact that the Arabic translator chose to maintain what are likely the most shocking ideas about China in the whole piece. There are several ways to think through the translation decision here. First, it is possible that the idea that Chinese cheap labour was dangerous and threatening might have resonated with the Arabic translator and their audience. Including this idea might thus have seemed self-evident rather than a stereotyped and problematic assumption.

Second, it is also plausible that Cromer’s text and its authoritative tone carried weight with the

Arabic translator, who regarded his views on China as valid because he was a British colonial officer. Whereas this translator was able to intervene in the problematic assumptions about Egypt, they may have been unable to have a similarly informed opinion and thus ability to temper his racist language and message about the Chinese. While without documentation we do not know the motivations or intentions of the translator, it seems clear that Arabic-reading audiences ingested a negative and uninformed message about China through this triangular translation process that was only reinforced by the more neutral tone used in the discussion and depiction of Egypt.

While Cromer exhibits British colonial superiority throughout his entire text, in one rare case,

74 Anonymous, “Lord Cromer ‘an al-Sin [Lord Cromer on China],” 523. The Arabic translator (literally: the true yellow danger) الخطر األصفر الحقيقي translates “Yellow Peril” as 159 he does go so far as to offer a minimal critique of the governments of the United States and Europe, related to their hypocritical behaviour towards Chinese immigrant labourers. As Cromer observes, while the US and European governments have forced China to accept and protect their missionaries, they have closed their respective borders towards immigrant Chinese labourers and turned away a significant number of those who had previously immigrated. According to Cromer, the act of expelling Chinese immigrants from the United States and Europe contradicts their

“philanthropic” promises.75 The Arabic translator deletes this criticism—perhaps as a strategic choice to escape censorship. The 1881 Press Law, a censorship law, was enforced in Egypt in 1909.

Any author whose writings were considered “inflammatory” by the British colonial government could be punished with a fine, imprisonment, or the withdrawal of their press license.76 In 1913, when this article was published in Egypt, the press law was strictly enforced. Although Cromer’s criticism does not mention Britain specifically, Britain was also known as a common destination for Chinese immigrant labourers. The Arabic translator would have been careful in any direct critique of Britain, but could use Cromer’s text to promote constitutionalism while at the same time managing to escape censorship.77 The removal of Cromer’s criticism of the US and Europe thus once again demonstrates how the Arabic translator is strategic about which parts to translate and which parts not. They acknowledge the superior power of the United States and Europe, and consequently are careful when dealing with content that might be accused of causing anti-

American or anti-European sentiment.

In addition to these changes, the Arabic translator also removed Cromer’s discussion about

Christian missionaries, particularly a reference to Jesus. More specifically, Cromer uses the

75 Baring, “Some Problems of Government in Europe and Asia,” 1163. 76 Ziad Fahmy, Ordinary Egyptians: Creating the Modern Nation through Popular Culture. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 103. 77 Fahmy, Ordinary Egyptians, 103. 160 passage including Pilate’s testing of Christ to justify Christian missionaries’ presence in China. In this passage, when Jesus states that he is the “witness of truth,” Pilate questions this by asking

Jesus “what is truth”?78 Cromer suggests that truth is difficult to define and that it depends on circumstances.79 As many others have done, Cromer uses religion to justify the missionaries’ presence in China. He suggests that it is unclear whether the United States’ and Europe’s acts of forcing China to accept their missionaries while simultaneously expelling the Chinese labourers is unjust or not. As Cromer implies, the threat of Chinese cheap labour made this expulsion necessary.

Cromer’s discussion of missionaries and the Biblical figure Pilate is deleted in the Arabic translation. This removal is especially significant. While it is possible that the translator is simply not interested in this section because of the reference to Christianity, I suggest that the deletion reflects more than just a disinterest in Christianity. In fact, the chief editor and a significant number of writers at al-Muqtataf were Christian.80 It is more likely that the translator noticed Cromer’s intention of using this reference to advocate for missionary activities in China. It is also possible that Cromer’s discussion reminded the translator of problematic missionary activities in Egypt, particularly numerous scandals involving forcing Egyptian orphans to convert to Christianity through physical punishment.81 They possibly were reminded of conflicts between missionaries and local people, particularly nationalists. By choosing not to translate these portions of the text, the Arabic translator resists Cromer’s justification of the missionary presence in China and in

Egypt, further expressing their agency.

78 John 18:38 (New Revised Standard Version). 79 Baring, “Some Problems of Government in Europe and Asia,” 1164. 80 Ami Ayalon, The Press in the Arab Middle East: A History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 37. 81 Baron, The Orphan Scandal: Christian Missionaries and the Rise of the Muslim Brotherhood, 133. 161

Translating Confucianism into Arabic

While there are both changes and deletions in the translation of the concept of the Yellow Peril, in concluding my argument here, I focus on significant parts of the translation related to

Confucianism that are retained. In particular, I will examine how the Arabic translator employs

Cromer’s logic to represent the Chinese as controlled by Confucianism, and thus unable to assimilate to European civilization. I will argue that during the translation process the translator demonstrates their agency through maintaining and even reinforcing Cromer’s racist tropes to represent the Chinese as inherently inferior, thus further positioning Nahdawis as superior. Cromer suggests that the Chinese mind is accustomed to Confucianism, and therefore unable to incorporate any other ideas, particularly those coming from European civilization.

Cromer presents Confucianism as directly opposed to European civilization and deeply rooted in the minds of Chinese people. Therefore, they are fundamentally incapable of assimilating to or even understanding the European civilization that Cromer and even the translator recognize as superior and central. To further explain his points, Cromer uses a trope of darkness, suggesting that China is a land that needs to be enlightened. Confucianism, Cromer implies, is the fundamental reason for this darkness. It is significant that in discussing Confucianism, Cromer quotes Bland’s text in its entirety as here he is willing to speak at length: having already established the idea that

Confucianism benights its followers, Cromer is happy to offer comprehensive evidence of the prevalence of Confucianism in China. Cromer emphasizes that Confucianism has limited the

Chinese ability to civilize themselves. He seeks to prove this with the example of Chinese students studying abroad in America and Europe. According to Cromer, Chinese students studying at

Harvard or Oxford, “after ten years of cosmopolitan experience in London or Washington, will 162 revert in six months to the ancestral type of morals and manners.”82 Cromer uses Harvard and

Oxford as symbols of Western Civilization and suggests that the Chinese people are inherently tied to Confucianism and therefore unable to fully understand Western ideas. Additionally, Cromer believes that the Chinese mind does not possess the ability to practice logical and scientific thinking.83

The aforementioned content is maintained in the Arabic translation and is even highlighted through the presentation of the text, particularly in the font. In the source text, Cromer’s quotations of Bland’s text about Confucianism are presented in a smaller font to differentiate them from

Cromer’s own thoughts. In the Arabic translation, however, the published text displays these quotations in the same font size, with no other distinction between them. In doing so, the Arabic text minimizes the differentiation. By presenting Cromer’s negative ideas on Confucianism in a larger font than how it is displayed in the source text, the Arabic text visually reinforces Cromer’s message, positing a single authoritative, objective source of data that is not tied to any distinct or potentially partial voices.

Additionally, Cromer’s text not only quotes British scholars including Bland, but also a short paragraph from a Japanese prince. The Arabic translation, however, deletes Cromer’s quotation of this Japanese prince while maintaining those from British scholars. The translator’s deliberate choice might suggest that European sources had more authority for Nahdawis like this translator and their readership. It is likely that the Arabic translator read both Bland’s and Cromer’s articles published in the same issue of the journal The Nineteenth Century and After. The translator possibly recognized Bland as an expert in Chinese affairs and considered his texts to be well researched.

82 Baring, “Some Problems of Government in Europe and Asia,” 1165. 83 Baring, “Some Problems of Government in Europe and Asia,” 1165. 163

While the Arab translator preserves and highlights Cromer’s discussion on Confucianism, it is worth mentioning that the latter perpetuates the same kinds of ideas about Islam and Arab society.

As Owen points out, Cromer made “deeply offensive” points about Islam in in his writings.84 In his book Modern Egypt, Cromer emphasizes the fundamental inferiority of Islamic religion and society, where he asserts that “Islam as a social system had been a complete failure.”85 This inferiority, according to Cromer, can be demonstrated in the Oriental mind. He states that, unlike the Europeans who were born to be rational and logical, the Oriental mind “like his picturesque streets, is eminently wanting in symmetry. His reasoning is of the most slipshod description.”86

Cromer conceived of the “Egyptian Oriental mind” in opposition to the “European mind.” By emphasizing that this so-called Oriental mind lacks reasoning and logic, Cromer proposes that it is intrinsically deficient and thus an obstacle to progress.87

It is significant to notice that the Nahdawis use the same racialized trope as Cromer to set themselves apart from and superior to the Chinese. I suggest that this is a choice used to construct

Arab racial superiority and engage in an Othering process. In this example, although the translator identifies that Cromer uses Confucianism to demonstrate the inferiority of Chinese society, they do not challenge Cromer’s assumption and instead use the same trope to reinforce it. This might suggest that the Arabic translator acknowledges and uses the status of Cromer’s position and writings to perpetuate this assumption. Moreover, while the Nahdawis were commonly the target of the same racial logic that Cromer claimed, they negotiate their position by twisting the European racist discourse so that it would displace itself from the Arabic world onto China. In order to

84 Owen, Lord Cromer, 72. 85 Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam, 152. 86 Evelyn Baring Cromer, Modern Egypt. (New York: Macmillan, 1916), 779. 87 Jennifer Kernaghan, “Lord Cromer as Orientalist and Social Engineer in Egypt, 1882-1907” (Master’s Thesis, The University of British Columbia, 1993), 8. 164 achieve this goal, the Arab translator selects Cromer’s discussion on Confucianism and reinforces this assumed backwardness of Chinese society to in turn distance them from the Nahdawis.

Furthermore, it is possible that while discussing the problems of Chinese students who study abroad, the Nahdawi translator is reflecting obliquely on a similar issue that may have arisen in relation to Egyptian students receiving higher education in the West. In this case, by emphasizing

Cromer’s remark that the Chinese students were unable to fully accept and assimilate to Western civilization, the Arabic translator frames Chinese students as a cautionary tale to Egyptian students.

The connotation, however, still necessitates an othering process by implying that Egyptian students should not follow the negative example of Chinese students.

Conclusion

The Arabic translation of Cromer’s article, “Lord Cromer on China,” significantly departs from existing models of understanding the appropriation of colonial discourse by colonized cultures. According to Tageldin’s notion of “seductive translation,”88 for instance, the European colonizer translated himself into Arabic to lure Egyptian intellectuals into admiring the colonizer’s culture. 89 When translating dominant languages like French into Arabic, according to this argument, Egyptian intellectuals lost their subjectivity and consequently had little agency in the translation process. My case study of triangular translation of China into Arabic through the work of Cromer and Bland, however, modifies and challenges Tageldin’s conclusions. In writing about the Chinese constitutional revolution, Nahdawi authors and translators had to rely on European sources such as Bland’s book and Cromer’s article. This does not mean that Nahdawi writers functioned as passive translators, with no agency. Rather, the triangular translation process allowed

88 Tageldin, Disarming Words, 10. 89 Tageldin, Disarming Words, 72. 165

Nahdawi translators to construct their own understanding of Arabs and Egyptians, their own understanding of China for the Arabic readership, and their own understanding of the political ideology that they were promoting through translation.

I am arguing here therefore that Nahdawis employed multiple strategies to depict themselves as superior to their fellow “Eastern countries,” in relation and in opposition to Cromer’s writing about them from a colonial, Orientalist perspective. The unnamed Nahdawi translator of this article simultaneously used Cromer’s name to validate their own interpretation of constitutionalism and to filter out Cromer’s negative comments about the possibility of the Chinese constitutional revolution. Moreover, while Nahdwis recognized that they were perceived by the Europeans as inferior Orientals; they negotiated their position by displaying a superiority over China—an

Eastern Other. Nahdawi writers were not colonizers with the political and economic power to govern and rule other people. By preserving and even highlighting notorious racist tropes of China such as the Yellow Peril, however, this translator, like other Nahdawi writers, was a participant in the literary practice of racist and Orientalist writing when it came to presenting “their” version of the Eastern Other. This participation in British colonial idioms was motivated by the desire to use those idioms to attain national self-sovereignty through constitutionalism, which could only become thinkable by deflecting British racial attitudes away from Egyptian culture. This project of consolidating the nation-state into a model based roughly on the concept of the nation underpinning British political theory, however, was counterbalanced by a simultaneous Nahdawi project of imagining Arabic identity as a transnational phenomenon, tied more to global Islam than to distinct nationalities. Intellectuals who advocated this alternate project also advanced a very different projection of China, working against the forms of racialized difference that emerged from writing like “Lord Cromer on China.” As I discuss in the following and final substantive chapter 166 of this dissertation, the arrival of several delegations of Chinese Muslim students in Cairo was responsible for an image of China that took its large Muslim population as a kind of metonym for the nation as a whole, facilitating direct literary co-authorship between Chinese and Arabic writers that aimed to imagine transnational Islamic solidarity between the two cultures.

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CHAPTER 4 Za’ir al-Sin: Translating a Chinese Anti-colonial Struggle for a Nahdawi Context

As the turmoil of the constitutional revolution in China was eclipsed by the colonial struggles

China faced during the Japanese invasion in the late 1930s, the dominant image of China circulating within Nahdawi literature underwent a significant transformation. In place of the racialized forms of difference that emerged in Nahdawi representations of the Chinese revolution, images of solidarity between the two countries began to form, especially with the arrival of Chinese

Muslim scholars in Egypt who collaborated directly with Nahdawi authors. The power of Islam to imaginatively unite the two cultures invigorated Arabic interest in China and served as a potent literary tool for engaging with issues of transnational anti-colonialism. This situation began to emerge with the arrival of the first delegation of Chinese Hui Muslim students in Egypt.1 Chinese intellectuals, particularly Chinese Muslim scholars, were now able to directly communicate and collaborate with Nahdawis and participate in Nahdawi literary production about China. They did so by publishing articles in Arabic journals, translating works from Chinese to Arabic, and vice versa. After the second Sino-Japanese war broke out in 1937, these Chinese Muslim scholars, many of whom also served in diplomatic missions designed to generate international support for the

Chinese cause, translated the Chinese anti-colonial struggle into a Nahdawi context by bringing

Arabic literary forms to bear on Chinese culture and translating Arabic texts for a Chinese readership.2

1 Hui is an ethnic group in China whose members practice Islam. While the Hui people, with an estimated population of 10,580,000, are more concentrated in north western China, Hui communities exist across the country. For more on the history of Hui Muslim ethnic group, see Jonathan Neaman Lipman, Familiar Strangers: a History of Muslims in Northwest China, (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997); Fahmy, Ordinary Egyptians : Creating the Modern Nation Through Popular Culture. 2 For more on the history of Chinese Hui Muslim students who studied in Egypt during 1930s, see Chen, “Islamic Modernism in China: Chinese Muslim Elites, Guomindang Nation-Building, and 168

This chapter will illustrate how this Chinese-Arabic cultural encounter was accomplished through the medium of literary production. In what follows, I examine a one-act Arabic play

The Roar of China] co-authored by Ma Tianying, a male Chinese ; زئير الصين] entitled Za’ir al-Sin

Muslim diplomat, and Munira Sayyim Shah, a female Egyptian Muslim playwright. Published in the Egyptian literary journal al-Riwaya in 1939, Za’ir al-Sin was written during Ma’s visit to Egypt as a member of the Chinese Islamic Near East Delegation.3 According to Ma’s introduction to the play, it is an adaptation of actual historical events, told through the perspective of a group of Hui

Chinese Muslims and their resistance to the Japanese invasion of a mosque in Jining.4

This chapter is devoted to an analysis of Ma’s co-authored play. As a partnership between a

Chinese and an Egyptian author, it is a unique case of Nahdawi literary writing on China. Unlike the texts discussed in previous chapters, all of which are, in one way or another, translations of

Chinese culture by Nahdawi authors that were mediated through European languages, this play was created through a direct partnership between a Chinese and an Egyptian author and, as far as we know, was written directly in Arabic. In this chapter, I will examine how these two playwrights strategically “translated” the Chinese anti-colonial resistance experience into Arabic. Lawrence

Venuti has recently argued that translation serves as a place where we can examine the

the Limits of the Global Umma, 1900-1960”; “Re-Orientation: The Chinese Azharites between Umma and Third World, 1938–55.”; “‘Just Like Old Friends’: The Significance of Southeast Asia to Modern Chinese Islam”; and “Islam’s Loneliest Cosmopolitan: Badr Al-Din Hai Weiliang, the Lucknow–Cairo Connection, and the Circumscription of Islamic Transnationalism.” See also, Wen, “Mediated Imaginations: Chinese-Arab Connections in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries” and Hill, “Translating Iconoclasm: Sino-Muslim Azharites and south-south Translations”; and “Reading Distance: Port Louis, Cairo, Beijing.” 3 For more on the history of Chinese Near Eastern Delegation, see John Chen, “Islamic Modernism in China” and Yufeng Mao, “A Muslim Vision for the Chinese Nation: Chinese Pilgrimage Missions to Mecca during World War II, ” The Journal of Asian Studies 70, no. 2 (2011). See also Kelly Hammond, “The Conundrum of Collaboration: Japanese Involvement with Muslim in North China, 1931-1945” (PhD diss, Georgetown University, 2015). 4 Munira Sayyim Shah and Ibrahim T. J. Ma, Za’ir al-Sin [The Roar of China], Al-Riwaya (Egypt), 1 May 1939, 415-421. 169

“fundamentally ethical attitudes towards a foreign text and culture,” as it is a simultaneous process of domesticating and foreignizing imported linguistic material.5 Building on this understanding of translation as a meeting point of cultures as well as of languages, I will show how Ma and Shah present the Chinese anti-colonial struggle as relatable to Egyptians by appropriating Egyptian revolutionary discourse and situating China as a part of the Muslim umma, while simultaneously refining a distinctly Chinese identity that forms within this transnational point of contact. Wen-

Chin Ouyang discusses the complex role Islam serves in Hui culture, as the basis for both the

Hui ethnic identity and its relationship to the rest of the Muslim world. Ouyang analyzes the role of the Qur’an in representations of Hui culture, arguing that its conspicuous absence raises questions about the fundamental nature of identity and what draws a group of people into a coherent community.6 As I will argue, the display of Islamic imagery on stage and the recitation of verses from the Qur’an in Zair al-Sin serves the same role Ouyang outlines. But instead of posing questions about the relationship of the Hui ethnic group to mainstream China, Ma and

Shah invoke Islamic faith to think about the transnational identity that can form between China and the Arab world on the basis of their shared faith.

In order to develop this argument, in what follows I investigate how Chinese participation in

Nahdawi literary production represented a major shift in the transnational agency of Chinese voices, which had previously sought to establish Chinese identity largely through isolation rather than through interaction with more global discourses.7 While recent scholars such as Lydia Liu have usefully disentangled China’s history from residual imperialist narratives of its backwards isolationism in the late nineteenth century, the practice I examine in this chapter of actively

5 Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility, 19. 6 Wen-chin Ouyang, “The Qur’an and Identity in Contemporary Chinese Fiction,” Journal of Qur’anic Studies 16, no. 3 (2014): 62–83. 7 See Lydia He Liu, The Clash of Empires: The Invention of China in Modern World Making. 170 seeking out cultural collaboration with Nahdawi intellectuals represents a notable difference from China's earlier history. Major events in recent Chinese history such as the nativist Boxer

Rebellion and the closing of diplomatic doors as a consequence of European aggression in the

Second Opium War were indicative of an era in Chinese culture that, perhaps justifiably, understood its national identity under threat from foreign influence.8 As historians have noted, the second Sino-Japanese War made China an unwilling participant in European politics and WWII's imbalance of global power, yet delegations of Hui scholars sent to Egypt offer a window into the way China in these years more actively sought international engagement with the postcolonial world.

This play is an example of some of the shifting dynamics in relations between intellectuals in

China and the Arab world. As Chinese intellectuals became increasingly mobile and more actively transnational in their intellectual engagements, they worked more directly with their counterparts in the Arab world. This led to works, like this play, which sought out contact between Chinese and

Arab topics, themes, and audiences independent of European mediation. This in a sense completes the triangle of textual exchange theorized in this dissertation as triangular translation. In what follows, I will first introduce the literary engagement of Chinese Muslim intellectuals with

Egyptian culture during their study and stay in Egypt, exploring how their presence in Egypt facilitated literary exchanges and textual circulation between China and Nahdawi intellectuals.

Using Za’ir al-Sin as a case study, I will then test the limitations of the concept of translation as a dynamic between domestication and foreignization put forward by Venuti and Shamma, examining how the playwrights simultaneously domesticated and foreignized the Chinese anti-colonial struggle for their Arabic-speaking audience.

8 John K. Fairbank and Kwang-Ching Liu, The Cambridge History of China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980): 163. 171

My analysis highlights the role of the female characters and the effect of an emergency on previously rigid gender roles. The community that forms within the play draws on the communal form of Muslim worship and its power to bridge regional differences within a Chinese context.

Moreover, I will explore how the playwrights engage theological debates at the core of Islam to express conflicts between generations and the ethics of violence. By representing colonial aggressions against the Chinese as an assault on the Hui’s community’s freedom to practice Islam, the play aims to create transnational solidarity across the Muslim umma. I will analyze the play’s strategies for creating sanctified spaces and ethico-theological questions that use Islam to transcend the constraints of the Chinese setting in order to speak to a wider audience throughout the umma.

Bridging the Eastern Worlds: Chinese Muslim Scholars in Cairo

In order to set this play in its very particular context, I begin here with an examination of the under-studied historical moment when Chinese Muslim intellectuals and Nahdawis established sustained contact with one another. This cultural connection that formed in the late 1930s represents an important moment in religious and cultural exchange, and one that is heavily invested in developing literary and intellectual relationships. Thus, while the Chinese delegation was in

Egypt, reciprocal literary influences were developed and extended. These relations were solidified primarily in Cairo in the 1930s, particularly among the Chinese scholars who studied in the prestigious Islamic religious institution, al-Azhar.9 The literary publications, personal relationships, and translations that emerged from this setting, I argue, constitute a critical chapter in both

9 For more on the history of al-Azhar, see Bayard Dodge, Al-Azhar : a Millennium of Muslim Learning (Washington, D.C: Middle East Institute, 1961); Patel, The Arab Nahdah : the Making of the Intellectual and Humanist Movement. 172

Nahdawi and Chinese Muslim cultural history. Thanks to the connections formed at this intersection of cultures, the Sino-Japanese war came to influence Muslim self-understanding not only in the Chinese Hui community but in the Arabic world as well. Anti-colonial resistance emerges from this moment as a primary vehicle through which ancient Islamic concepts of martyrdom were materialized and grounded in contemporary politics.

The Chinese delegations to Egypt began in the year 1931, when thirty-five Chinese Muslim students were sent to study at al-Azhar.10 Upon returning home, they became significant figures in Chinese society as scholars, founders of Arabic departments at universities, diplomats, and prolific translators and writers. Funded by King Farouk of Egypt, six such delegations of students were sent to Egypt between 1931 and 1946.11 Their arrival drew the attention of the Egyptian press with al-Ahram, one of the most widely-circulated Egyptian newspapers, publishing a series of reports following the students’ activities and featuring their pictures on the front page. In one article, reporters asked the students many questions about the importance of a Muslim university like al-

Azhar for Chinese Muslims. They were also asked about the educational level of Muslims in China.

The students replied that Chinese Muslims believed that al-Azhar was the world center of Islamic culture, which was the reason the Chinese Muslim community chose to send students there to study

Arabic and Islam. They said that after their return to China, they planned to contribute to the higher education of Chinese Muslims, especially since Chinese government schools did not teach religion.12

10 For more on the Chinese Azharites’ journey to Egypt, see Na Zhong’s memoir Na Zhong 纳忠， Zheng Cheng: Cong Kunming Dao Kailuo [The Journey: From Kunming to Cairo] (Beijing: Huawen chubanshe), 2017. 11 Chen, “Islamic Modernism in China”, 321. .al-Ahram, Jan. 22, 1933, 253 [مع مندوبي الصين] ”,With the Chinese Delegation“ 12 173

Al-Ahram coverage of the second group of Chinese students sent to al-Azhar, including a photo of and the head of the ,[الشيخ احمدي الظواهري] a meeting between the Sheikh ‘Ahmadi al-zuwahari second Chinese Azharite students’ delegation.13

13 “In the Presence,” al-Ahram, Jan. 22, 1933, 264. The introduction to the photo is translated as follows: “In the presence of his majesty, the leader of Islam in China, the community organization for Islamic development, the Azhar and the Muslims of China, the greeting of Muslims of China to his eminence the great teacher.” 174

14.[مع مندوبي الصين] ”This article is entitled “With the representatives of China

15[البعثة الصينية االزهرية] ”The Chinese Azharite delegation“

16[هدايا مسلمي الصين لجالل الملك] ”The gift of the Chinese Muslims to his majesty of King“

.al-Ahram, Jan. 22, 1933, 253 [مع مندوبي الصين] ”,With the Chinese Delegation“ 14 .al-Ahram, Jan. 1, 1933, 1 [البعثة الصينية االزهرية] ”,The Chinese Azharite delegation“ 15 ,al-Ahram [هدايا مسلمي الصين لجالل الملك] ”,The gift of the Chinese Muslims to his majesty of King“ 16 Jan. 3, 1933, 21. 175

“An introduction of three delegation members”17

The Chinese Azharite students in Cairo not only were curiosities for the newspapers but they also attracted the attention of Nadhawi intellectuals, whose interest in transnational relations with other Muslim communities was motivated by an emergent model of nationalism in Egypt.18 As

John Chen points out, the rise of a “New Effendiya” class contributed to this transition from a previous, more secular and European-oriented nationalism to a more Islamic and Eastern-oriented nationalism.19 Rather than seeking to mimic the nationhood of their European colonizers, Egyptian intellectuals were primed to engage with Chinese Muslim scholars in order to make the Muslim umma a model for their nation-state.

The overwhelmingly positive reception of these Chinese delegations in Egypt was ensured by

17 “An introduction of three delegation members,” al-Ahram, Jan. 23, 1933, 273. 18 Chen, “Islamic Modernism in China,” 331. 19 Chen, “Islamic Modernism in China,” 331. For more on the Egyptian Effidiya class, see Jacob, Working out Egypt : Effendi Masculinity and Subject Formation in Colonial Modernity, 1870- 1940. 176

Egyptian intellectuals who wished to use this cultural contact to advocate for an Islamist notion of nationalism.20 In particular, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, which advocated an Islamic and

Easternist nationalism within Egypt, was eager to claim China as part of the umma because of its large Muslim population.21 This interest helped the Chinese Azharites make personal connections with Nahdawi writers and publish articles in Arabic journals. For example, Ma Jian, one of the

Chinese Azharites, befriended Rashid Rida, the founder the Egyptian journal al-Manar, to which

Ma Jian became a frequent contributor.22 Another Azharite, Pang Shiqian, who served as a lecturer at al-Azhar and as a “consultant on Eastern affairs” for King Farouq I, established a personal friendship with Hasan Bana, the founder of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood.23 He later took

Bana’s advice to publish a book in Arabic titled China and Islam, which he dedicated to King

Farouq I.24 The literary output that emerged from these collaborations, as I will show, testified to the power of Islam to bridge geographically distant cultures and to assimilate the distinct socio- political conflicts facing each culture to a shared set of concerns facing Muslims worldwide.

Further examples of literary production by these delegations are extensive. For example, Ma

Jian went on to translate the Analects of Confucius into Arabic and published it in the Egyptian journal al-Fath.25 Hai Weiliang wrote multiple articles for al-Fath and al-Jami’a al-Islamiyya, a daily magazine published in Jaffa. Other Chinese Azharite graduates such as Ma Junwu, Na Xun,

20 Chen, “Islamic Modernism in China,” 331, 322. Chen discusses that Hassan al-Bana arguably used Chinese Muslim students and their articles on Islam and China to endorse his pan-Islamic ideologies. Meanwhile, Bana’s idea resonates with Chinese Muslim Azharites. The head of the Chinese Azharite Student delegation, Pang Shiqian, joined the Brotherhood’s Islamic World Outreach Division. 21 Chen, “Islamic Modernism in China,” 332. 22 Chen, “Islamic Modernism in China,” 339. 23 Chen, “Islamic Modernism in China,” 344. 24 Chen, “Islamic Modernism in China,” 344. 25 Li Zhenzhong 李振中, Ma Jian Zhuan [The Biography of Ma Jian] (Yinchuan: Ningxia renmin chubanshe, 2016), 64-76. 177 and Ma Jigao published poetry, original short stories, and translations of Chinese short stories in the Egyptian journals al-Thaqafa and al-Risala.26 In addition to writing and translating Chinese into Arabic, they also translated many Arabic historical and literary works into Chinese and published works in influential Chinese journals founded by members of the Hui Muslim community.27 Ma Jian, who came to al-Azhar determined to translate the Qur’an into Chinese, fulfilled this mission and published his Chinese translation in 1946.28 As part of an enthusiastic group of prolific translators, he also translated Muhammad ‘Abudu’s Risalat al-tawhid [The theology of unity] alongside other Chinese Azharites such as Na Zhong who translated Ahmed

Amin’s book series on Arabs and Islam, titled The Dawn of Islam, The Forenoon of Islam and The

High Noon of Islam, into Chinese.29 Na Xun, who had an academic interest in Arabic literature, translated Alf Layla wa Layla into Chinese, while Ibn Battuta’s medieval narrative Rihla was translated by Ma Jinpeng, and Taha Hussayn’s canonical work al-Ayyam was translated by Ma

Junwu.30 The Chinese scholars sought out foundational texts of Arabic literature and culture, and generated a large body of translated material that has escaped scholarly attention altogether. By making the literary history of Islam available to the Chinese Muslim population, this school of translators aimed to foster a Chinese Muslim identity that was intertwined with Arabic cultures of faith.

The Chinese Azharites and Hui Muslim diplomats visiting Egypt directly shaped the Nahdawi

26 Suo Xinxiang 锁昕翔, Na Xun Ping Zhuan [The Biography of Na Xun], 131. 27 Li Zhenzhong 李振中, Ma Jian Zhuan [The Biography of Ma Jian], 88-89. 28 More on Ma Jian’s translation of Qur’an, see Li Zhenzhong 李振中, Ma Jian Zhuan [The Biography of Ma Jian], 64-75. 29 Li Zhenzhong 李振中, Ma Jian Zhuan [The Biography of Ma Jian], 35-39. 30 Chen, “Islamic Modernism in China,” 319. For more on Na Xun’s translation of Alf Layla wa Layla, see Suo Xinxiang 锁昕翔, Na Xun Ping Zhuan [The Biography of Na Xun], 172. 178 literary image of China, marking perhaps the first time that Chinese writers actively sought to establish an identity for their country and themselves within world literature. Thanks to their proficiency in Arabic, and their personal connections with the Nahdawis, the Chinese Muslims living in Egypt were able to negotiate and manage racial, cultural and linguistic differences that existed at that time between the Nahdawis and Chinese populations. The European texts that, for decades, had mediated all contact between these two cultures captured these differences as stereotypes, but the direct contact facilitated by Chinese Muslim intellectuals began to undermine the power of those stereotypes. Through an emphasis on their shared Islamic culture and experiences with colonialism, Za’ir al-Sin reinforced the connection and solidarity between

Nahdawi writers and Chinese intellectuals. In particular, the play in both its authorship and its story usefully gestures towards the emergence of a new generation of educated and cosmopolitan

Chinese Muslim scholars.

Ma Tianying, the Chinese co-author of Za’ir al-Sin, was a newcomer to this community of translators when he arrived in Egypt in 1938. He was a member of the same Hui ethnic group of

Chinese Azharites already studying Arabic in Egypt, but was of a different educational background.

Unlike the others, Ma Tianying had studied previously in France and came to Egypt as a member of the Chinese Islamic Near Eastern Delegation, a diplomatic delegation formed in 1938 and commissioned by the Chinese government to advocate for the Chinese cause during the Sino-

Japanese War.31 As a member of the Hui ethnic group, the largest Muslim population in China,

Ma’s writing career was shaped by the nuances of having dual cultural identities. The Chinese

Islamic Near Eastern Delegation aimed to advocate for the Chinese cause in Middle Eastern countries in the name of the Chinese Muslim community. Its members were strategically chosen

31 Chen, “Islamic Modernism in China,” 254. 179 based on their Hui Muslim identity and their ability to speak the major languages spoken in the

Middle East such as French, English, Turkish, and Arabic.32 Upon their arrival in Cairo in March

1938, members of the Chinese Near Eastern Delegation established contact with the Chinese

Azharites who were already living and studying in Egypt, in order to promote the Chinese anti- colonial struggle among Arabic-speaking audiences.33 Publishing pro-Chinese articles and literary works was an important part of the Delegation’s propaganda effort, and their members published a significant number of Arabic articles and literary works in the Egyptian press, such as The Woman,

Egyptians, The Pyramids, and Egyptian Mail.34 While the relationship of Za’ir al-Sin to these propaganda publications is complex and hard to define, it does contain unmistakable elements of pro-Chinese war-time ideology. It was published in the literary journal al-Riwaya and appears to have been written primarily to raise awareness about the Chinese anti-colonial struggle.

Choosing to Write in a Revolutionary Genre

The form of the play was well-suited to raise public awareness in Egypt for the Chinese

32 Chen, “Islamic Modernism in China,” 252-254; Mao, “A Muslim Vision for the Chinese Nation: Chinese Pilgrimage Missions to Mecca during World War II,” 382. Wang Zengshan, the head of the delegation, graduated from the University of Istanbul and had a native/near-native proficiency in Turkish. Ma Tianying, who served as the vice president of the delegation, was fluent in French and English. In Cairo, the Chinese Islamic Near Eastern Delegation recruited Wang Shiming, a Chinese Azharite, as an interpreter, before visiting the rest of the Middle East. Wang was chosen for his proficiency in Arabic and was the only member of the delegation who could speak Arabic fluently. 33 The Chinese Azharite students were responsible for translating the pro-China war material drafted by the Delegation members into Arabic, printing and disseminating these materials. Utilizing their personal connections, they also introduced the delegation members to Egyptian politicians and intellectuals, accompanying them on visits to renowned Egyptian figures, and providing interpretation assistance. For example, the Chinese Islamic Near East Delegation members were referred to King Farouq I by the Chinese Azharites, and managed to meet him in 1938. See Suo Xinxiang 锁昕翔, Na Xun Ping Zhuan [The Biography of Na Xun], 152-154. 34 Suo Xinxiang 锁昕翔, Na Xun Ping Zhuan [The Biography of Na Xun], 154. 180 anti-colonial cause. As Ma Tianying and Munira Sayyim Shah intended their play to advocate for

Chinese anti-colonial resistance, the theatrical genre allowed these two playwrights to tap into the growing revolutionary sentiment among the Egyptian public. This section of the chapter explores the socio-political valences of theatre in the Nahdawi context. I argue in what follows that theatre was a particularly effective formal vehicle to work through questions about what it meant for two communities of very different cultures to share the Islamic faith. I look at how the playwrights negotiated between theatre’s relatively controversial status in conservative Islamic teachings and its power to address a wide, popular audience. I suggest that the choice of theatre to spread nationalist, anti-colonial ideology in Egypt and China helps reveal the agency that the playwrights understood themselves to be wielding in bringing these two cultures together. As a genre associated with both popular energy and progressive politics, the theatre represented a way of assembling a public and advocating an ideology; by collaborating, Ma Tianying and Munirah Sayyim Shah brought these functions of theatre together to generate pro-Chinese sentiment among the Arab public.

It is important to note that the play, as a literary genre, served significant social functions in the Nahdawi context, and the development of a theatrical tradition in Egypt in some ways symbolized progress and cultural modernization for Arab intellectuals.35 When introducing this new genre to Arab audiences, Nahdawi intellectuals, including the early playwright Marun al-

Naqqash (1817-1855), contended that in Europe, where it was popular, the play had more functions than simply entertaining an audience.36 Farah Antun argued that what Egypt needed

35 Ilham Khuri-Makdisi, The Eastern Mediterranean and the Making of Global Radicalism, 1860-1914, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 92; Fahmy, Ordinary Egyptians : creating the modern nation through popular culture; Badawi, Modern Arabic Literature. 36 Khuri-Makdisi, The Eastern Mediterranean and the making of global radicalism, 1860-1914, 63. 181

or plays about matters of social debate, emphasizing ,(روايات اجتماعية) were riwayat al-ijtima‘iyya that theatre needed to mirror the problems of contemporary society.37 Another playwright,

Mahmud Taymur, similarly held that a play should present current problems so that the audience could draw lessons from it.38 According to Salim al-Naqqash, in Europe the play not only helped spectators understand their moral shortcomings, but it also triggered their “love for the homeland.”39 In the Arab context, as Ilham Khuri-Makdisi has shown, the play genre was conceptualized as a vehicle to improve an audience’s moral consciousness and patriotism, and was seen as beneficial to the process of civilization within a society.40 Many playwrights understood the beneficial function of theatre to come from its ability to reflect social issues to a broad audience. Unlike prose fiction and poetry whose circulation was more limited and whose contents were more subject to censorship, the theatre proved to be the genre most well-suited to the nationalist movement in its ability to assemble a large and diverse audience in the streets where plays were often performed, generating shared reactions to events depicted on stage.

In practice, Nahdawi playwrights writing in Arabic realized the ambition to reflect contemporary social issues by covering topics related to revolutions throughout modern history, thinly veiling contemporary political debates beneath historical dramas. The performative nature of the play made it an effective tool to disseminate political ideologies. Starting in the early twentieth century, themes in Arabic plays became more politicized, covering topics such as the

French Revolution, the Young Turk revolution, and the 1919 Egyptian revolution; radical leftist

37 Badawi, Modern Arabic Literature, 343. 38 Badawi, Modern Arabic Literature, 349. 39 Khuri-Makdisi, The Eastern Mediterranean and the Making of Global Radicalism, 1860-1914, 65. 40 Khuri-Makdisi, The Eastern Mediterranean and the Making of Global Radicalism, 1860-1914, 66. 182 thought became a popular theme in Nahdawi playwriting. 41 As Makdisi points out, the play enabled spectators to engage with revolutionary themes by imagining themselves as a part of the revolutionary crowd, roughly equivalent to the assembled audience, and experiencing seemingly real revolutionary moments as events onstage provoked audience reactions.42 Noticing that the play genre could effectively lead spectators to internalize revolutionary messages, Nahdawi intellectuals created scripts to spread nascent Egyptian nationalist and anti-colonial ideologies.43

According to Ziad Fahmy, such plays were actively used and widely circulated in the 1919

Egyptian revolution.44

Around the time of Za’ir al-Sin’s composition, works opposing the British occupation were becoming popular in Nahdawi playwriting, in spite of the fact that Egyptian theatre was becoming increasingly defined by competition between theatrical genres devoted to avant-garde experimentalism and more commercially-driven shows intended simply to entertain. 45 While proponents of the avant-garde believed that the play, as a literary genre, should reflect serious social concerns and be written in modern standard Arabic, the rise of purely commercial Nahdawi theatre positioned the play as an entertaining stage performance and used Egyptian colloquialisms in order to make it appealing to the audience.46 Despite this debate among Nahdawi playwrights, anti-colonial messages tended to appear in both high literary and commercial plays. For example,

41 Khuri-Makdisi, The Eastern Mediterranean and the Making of Global Radicalism, 1860-1914, 82; Fahmy, Ordinary Egyptians : Creating the Modern Nation Through Popular Culture, 158- 62. See also, Salma Zohadi, “Egyptian Theater and Its Impact on Society: History, Deterioration, And Path for Rehabilitation” (MA thesis, Columbia University, 2016), 6-7. 42 Khuri-Makdisi, The Eastern Mediterranean and the Making of Global Radicalism, 1860-1914, 81-83. 43 Fahmy, Ordinary Egyptians : Creating the Modern Nation Through Popular Culture, 158-62. 44 Fahmy, Ordinary Egyptians : Creating the Modern Nation Through Popular Culture, 162. 45 Badawi, Modern Arabic Literature, 5-6. 46 Badawi, Modern Arabic Literature, 6. 183

represents the ,(الضيف الثقيل) Tawfiq Hakim’s first play, the avant-garde The Unwelcome Guest

British colonial government through the allegory of a guest, where Egypt is a lawyer who hosts this guest in his house, but who is himself not present. The guest, while occupying the house, pretends to be the Egyptian lawyer and even receives money from his clients.47 In this way, Hakim mounts a critique of the British colonial government’s exploitation of Egyptian resources by allegorizing it as a system of fraud. Plays less artful than Hakim’s in hiding political critique behind allegories inevitably provoked censorship from the colonial government. Shortly after the

Dinshaway incident, when British soldiers hunting birds that belonged to Egyptian villagers were attacked and sustained minor but highly-publicized casualties, a play by the title of Hadithat

Dinshaway (The Dinshaway incident) was created, but was soon banned by the Egyptian interior ministry.48

Throughout the 1919 Egyptian revolution, commercial plays openly encouraged popular enthusiasm for the anti-colonial cause, while high literary productions attempted serious intellectual engagement with matters of public concern. In particular, due to the popularity of vaudeville musical theatre in Egypt, Egyptian vaudevillian troops performed plays in the streets that reflected the events of the revolution in order to promote an anti-colonial agenda and to emphasize Egyptian national identity.49 By holding these plays in the streets, assembling excited crowds of audience-members, vaudeville-inspired productions allowed the public themselves to perform scenes of mass assembly reminiscent of the revolutionary events portrayed on stage.

This context ensured that Za’ir al-Sin would be well-received by Egyptian audiences. Its authors were well aware of the function of the play genre, and they noted that it was the most

47 Badawi, Modern Arabic Literature, 9. 48 Fahmy, Ordinary Egyptians : Creating the Modern Nation Through Popular Culture, 94. 49 Fahmy, Ordinary Egyptians : Creating the Modern Nation Through Popular Culture, 159-60. 184 effective way to advocate the anti-colonial cause.50 By writing in a genre associated with the

Egyptian revolutionary experience, the playwrights were effectively able both to educate the

Egyptian audiences about the existence of Chinese Muslims and to breathe affective energy into their anti-colonial resistance. Combining features of both high-literary pieces and mass-market productions, their choice of genre was strategic in their aim to build solidarity with their audience, as the play simulated a revolutionary experience. This combination of styles employed by Za’ir al-Sin reflects the combined cultural and educational backgrounds of the two playwrights. Ma

Tianying was trained in literature and theatre in France, receiving an education in aesthetic traditions that allowed him to draw on techniques associated with more serious-minded plays, such as direct address and pathos, to draw parallels between the Chinese and Egyptian colonial situations. Conversely, Munira Sayyim Shah’s embedded participation in the Egyptian theatre scene allowed their collaboration to combine these elements with scenes evoking the revolutionary excitement found in street performance.

The unusual complexities of this collaboration were not only cultural, but linguistic as well.

Although Ma Tianying would have known enough Arabic to say prayers and maybe have some basic conversation, it is highly unlikely he would have been able to interact fluently with native

Arabic speakers.51 Indeed, his limited knowledge of Arabic was such that the Chinese Islamic Near

Eastern Delegation even had to pick up the Chinese Azharite Wang Shiming in Cairo as a translator before visiting the rest of the Middle East.52 He was, however, fluent in English and French, as

50The playwrights include the following words in the introduction: “The playwright here describes one small scene of Chinese Muslim civilian resistance against the invaders. The story portrayed in this play is based on real events, and so is worthy of readers’ attention.” Munira Sayyim Shah and Ibrahim T.J. Ma, Za’ir al-Sin [The Roar of China], al-Riwaya (Egypt), 1 May 1939, 415. 51 Ma Tianying’s CV indicated that he never studied Arabic formally. John Chen, email message to author, January 14, 2019. 52 John Chen, “Islamic Modernism in China,” 255-256 185 indicated by his curriculum vitae from The Ma Tianying Papers in Kuala Lumpur.53 He first studied at the Collège Français in Beijing and then in France where he majored in Literature and Theater either at the Sorbonne or the University of Paris VIII, License de Lettres. As Munira Sayyim Shah did not speak Chinese but was, in the custom of upper-class Egyptians at the time, fluent in French, the collaboration that produced Za’ir al-Sin would have taken place neither in Chinese nor in

Arabic, but rather in French as an intermediary language that allowed the two to speak together in order to realize their shared desire to express the common links of Chinese and Egyptian people through Islam.

Domesticating the Chinese anti-Colonial Struggle for an Arabic-speaking Audience

Za’ir al-Sin explores what it means that two cultures that, quite literally could not speak to one another, could still share Islam as a dominant priority among large sections of each population.

Although Chinese and Egyptian playwrights were in this instance working together directly, a

European language still provided the common language in which their exploration was attempted.

Thus, the triangular nature of the communication circuits between Chinese and Arab intellectuals, which helped form a transnational Muslim identity in the early twentieth century, remained operative. We can see the consciousness of this identity develop from infancy into agency in Za’ir al-Sin, which translates the Chinese anti-colonial resistance during WWII into a Nahdawi context by figuring the Japanese aggression towards China as an attack on the liberty of a Hui community to practice Islam.

In what follows, I discuss how Za’ir al-Sin presents the struggle of Chinese people in terms that can simultaneously apply to the struggles of the Egyptian population. I investigate how the

53 John Chen, “Islamic Modernism in China,” 255-256. 186 playwrights strategically translated the Chinese anti-colonial resistance through what Venuti and

Shamma refer to as the domesticating function of translation, a theoretical paradigm that ultimately has to be adjusted somewhat in order to account for the way translation between these two cultures affected the literary output of both. 54 For Venuti, translations that emphasize the irreducible foreignness of a text from another culture “can be a form of resistance against ethnocentrism and racism, cultural narcissism and imperialism, in the interested of democratic geopolitical relations.” 55 Shamma, conversely, argues that such foreignizing translations fail to challenge ethnocentrism and racism; rather, they emphasize the difference between Europe and the Arab world, casting the latter as “bizarre,” “abnormal,” and “inferior.”56 The underlying assumption that both critics share is that translation into Arabic represents a meeting point between domestic and foreign cultures, working with a bounded notion of the nation-state as the model for culture.

By contrast to both Venuti and Shamma, and as I have argued throughout this dissertation, I wish to consider the way translation from multiple cultural traditions was integral to the literary and cultural output of the Nahda. On the one hand, I argue that the playwrights, through domestication, portrayed the conflicts facing Chinese society in such a way as to render them familiar to Arabic-speaking audiences who were able to decode them as political messages resonant with their own anti-colonial resistance. On the other hand, I explore the way this flow of ideas from China into Egypt simultaneously worked in the other direction, too—in the play,

Chinese identity is actually shaped by this effort to assimilate the struggles of postcolonial China to the struggles of the Arabic world, as the modes of resistance demanded by the political situation of China get worked through in relation to the tenets of Islam. My analysis centers on unpacking

54 Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility : a History of Translation, 19. 55 Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility : a History of Translation, 16. 56 Shamma, Translation and the Manipulation of Difference : Arabic Literature in Nineteenth- century England, 5. 187 how the sense of a Muslim umma is formed in this play, arguing that the playwrights create cultural hybridity in three ways: their set design, exploring Chinese resistance as martyrdom, and asserting women’s powerful roles as resistance.

Domesticating the Stage/Arabizing the Stage

Although, as I have suggested, Za’ir al-Sin situates itself within the context of Egyptian theatrical culture, it diverges from the conventions of most Egyptian drama by including an introduction at the very beginning of the play in order to orient the audience as to how to read the text. This inclusion of a written introduction stands out as an unusual feature for a performance genre, suggesting that the playwrights intended their script more for circulation in print rather than performance on stage. The print format that the playwrights appear to be using and their choice to publish the script in a widely circulated and distinguished literary journal indicate that they intended their work as a literary text aimed at different Arabic-reading publics separated geographically, rather than as a performance that is tied to a particular place. The question of whether a play should be perceived as a literary genre or a theatrical performance on stage was an active debate in the Nahdawi context.57 Whereas some playwrights and reviewers felt that theatre was intended for the masses even beyond a reading public, others turned to print circulation to achieve more lasting form for their ideas. By siding with the proponents of print format, Ma

Tianging and Munira Sayyim Shah wrote their play to be read in order to exert more guidance and control over how their readers would interpret and react to the events they depict.

The primary point of the introduction is to guide Arabic-speaking audiences, reshaping their understanding of China by emphasizing the existence of a Chinese Muslim community and

57 Muhammad Mustafa Badawi, Modern Arabic Drama in Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 6. 188 portraying China as a peaceful actor whose resistance has been made necessary by outside aggression. By emphasizing that the Chinese people prefer “bearing hardships without

the playwrights imply how urgent the situation must be if ,(تحمل للسكار دون ان يشكو) ”complaining

China has been driven to use force.58 What will ultimately emerge from the play itself is a portrayal of this anti-colonial resistance that is fully justified within an ethics oriented to Arabic audiences.

The playwrights emphasize that their play is based on actual historical events, indicating that the action it describes took place in the early days of Jining’s fall into Japanese hands on April 4th,

By adding the exact date of the Japanese 59.[أول أيام سقوط تسينينج في يد اليابانيين )4 ابريل سنة 1938( ] 1939 invasion, the playwrights place the readers as intimately as possible within the actual lived experience of Chinese Muslim community and the Chinese people as a whole. By setting the play in Jining, a Chinese city that had a large Muslim community, the playwrights use a Hui community as a metonym for China as a whole, casting the Chinese Muslim experience as a representative of the experiences of the entire Chinese population.

What the play depicts as necessary in order for China to defeat its occupiers, then, is the resolution to a theological debate about the legitimacy of violence under Islam, as though “Chinese

is what (مقاومة السكان المدنيين المسلمين في الصين للمعتدين) ”Muslim civilian resistance against the invaders will decide the fate of the nation.60 The mosque as the setting of the play is especially important in this regard, since, in keeping with the strict technical conventions of a one-act play espoused by the high-literary circles from which Ma Tianying came, the setting never changes to keep the unity of place. The mosque as a setting focuses the violence of the Japanese invasion onto a symbol of

Muslim faith rather than a symbol of China itself. Due to the significance of a mosque in Islamic

58 Munira Sayyim Shah and Ibrahim T.J. Ma, Za’ir al-Sin [The Roar of China], 415. 59 Shah and Ma, Za’ir al-Sin, 415. 60 Shah and Ma, Za’ir al-Sin ,415. 189 culture, the Japanese army’s attack takes on a greater symbolic meaning. It is particularly significant that a mosque is a place that provides asylum, refuge, and protection to Muslims in need of help. By describing the Japanese force occupying a mosque, the playwrights present the

Japanese army as the enemy of the entire Muslim umma, thereby connecting the Arabic-reading audiences to the colonial experiences of Chinese people. As a sanctified space in Muslim culture, the mosque also provides a special kind of space on stage, where the inner furnishings and practices of prayer replicate the interior space of mosques anywhere in the world, transcending the constraints of the play’s Chinese setting in order to attach the emotional struggles the Chinese community express in the Mosque to the struggles of Muslim worshippers worldwide.

Throughout the play, the stage directions continue to reference certain features of the set design whose Arabic iconography reinforces the task of cultural bridging the playwrights set out to accomplish. The authors even go so far as to specify that the wall is painted green and decorated with Arabic inscriptions forming a white crescent, setting the entire play against the backdrop of two of the key visual motifs of Islam.61 The plot also depends on the hidden, double use of a painting with Arabic drawings and writings that conceals a secret room.

A very clean and large hall, which is a marvel of grandiose construction. The walls are painted green and decorated with Arabic inscriptions forming white crescents. There is a door on each side of the hall. Beside the left door there is a painting with Arabic drawings and writings. The painting hangs there to hide a bolted exit. There is a pulpit and small paintings with Arabic script in the hall, its floors are covered with expensive carpets made in Sintyang. The hall is divided into two sections by a mobile wooden barrier. المشهد: وجهة قاعة كبرى. نظيفة جداً. آية في فخامة البناء. حوائطها مدهونة باللون األخضر ومزينة بنقوش باللغة العربية على شكل أهلة بيضاء. وإلى جانبي القاعة بابان.و بجوار الباب األيسر لوحة مزينة بالرسوم والخطوط العربية. وقد علقت في هذا المكان إلخفاء مخرج مغلق. وفي القاعة منبر ولوحات صغيرة محالة بالخطوط العربية، وأرضها مفروشة باالبسطة الثمينة، من صناعة سينتيانج، والقاعة منقسمة قسمين بحاجز خشبي متنقل )بارافان(.62

61 “Hilal,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition, Encyclopaedia of Islam (Brill). 62 Shah and Ma, Za’ir al-Sin, 415. 190

These visual elements all contribute to making a space on stage that can encompass both the

Chinese and Arab cultures, converting the anti-colonial experience into a struggle that affects the entire Muslim umma. This allows for the readers of the play to feel that the experiences of Chinese characters are related to their own experiences, that this struggle is their own struggle.

This emphasis on the Arabic symbolism intrinsic to Islam is counterbalanced in the stage directions with equal attention to elements of Chinese design. The hall is divided into two sections by a mobile wooden barrier, a Chinese decoration. The stage directions also indicate that “its floors

(أرضها مفروشة باالبسطة الثمينة، من صناعة سينتيانج) ”,are covered with expensive carpets made in Xinjiang a seemingly random detail, entirely extraneous to what an actual performance of the play could represent to an audience.63 Its inclusion in the stage direction seems motivated by the fact that

Xinjiang was a Muslim-majority province in China, giving the carpet a dual cultural heritage, in that carpet as an indoor decoration is bound up with Muslim rituals of prayer, yet this particular carpet is also specified as being of Chinese manufacture.64 Unlike other set decorations, it cannot be classified as either Arabic or Chinese, and instead brings those two categories together and synthesizes them as inextricably linked. In this way, the inclusion of a carpet in the stage direction creates a familiarity for Arabic audiences but also reminds them of how China contains and can produce the symbols that lie at the heart of Islam.

Chinese Resistance as Martyrdom

In order to realize the symbolic synthesis of Chinese and Arab Muslim culture, as exemplified in the rugs, the playwrights work to find a single answer to two seemingly unrelated debates: on the one hand, theological questions surrounding the legitimacy of violence under Islam

63 Shah and Ma, Za’ir al-Sin, 415. 64 “Bisat,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition, Encyclopaedia of Islam (Brill). 191 and, on the other hand, political questions of how China’s response to Japanese aggression would position the country within the global power struggle of World War II. In this section, I argue that

Za’ir al-Sin strategically deploys Islam for the purpose of advocating for the Chinese political struggle. I will provide a close reading of the text and discuss how the playwrights intentionally linked the idea of national resistance to Islamic concepts. I first analyze how the play presents the debate over whether to negotiate peacefully with the Japanese or to resist them militarily as a question that requires characters to work through Islamic theological debates surrounding the justification of violence. In the play, it is ultimately a message from God that causes the Chinese community to resist the occupiers, so that the theological debate about violence is how the playwrights answer the political question of how to respond to the Japanese occupation. Thus, the acts of political heroism that arise in the play bear the unmistakable traces of acts of martyrdom in an Islamic context, where acts of resistance become the mediating point between an individual’s actions and the suffering of the collective to which that individual belongs. As a result, the collectivizing power of prayer turns political, in that it brings together the individual characters into the community whose coordination is necessary for any one individual to enact meaningful resistance. By positioning a young female character at the center of the Chinese Muslim community represented on stage, the playwrights use martyrdom not only to work through the question of the justification of violence under Islam, but also to cloak progressive female empowerment in the language of traditional Islamic theology.

At the beginning of the plot, all the characters take refuge from the Japanese forces in a dark corner of the city’s mosque. This crisis causes the entire Muslim community to come together, and through their interactions allows readers to understand better how the community is organized.

The shaykhs represent the older generation and are in a position of power, holding the authority of 192 decision-making on behalf of the community. In contrast, the playwrights use the characters of

Munjatan Yang and Insha Yang to stand in for the younger generation, who are powerless at the beginning of the play and forced to hide in a locked, secret room, unable to escape. Outside the mosque, the rainfall, canon-fire, gunshots, dark lights, and the sound of Japanese iron boots generate a terrifying atmosphere and foreshadow impending danger.

The opening scene includes multiple elements that are especially significant when read in a larger Islamic context. The precipitating incident is the Japanese army entering the city, reinforcing the gravity of this historical moment. Upon hearing the news that the Japanese army

contributing to a mood (مرتعدا) ”,has entered the city, Wajih Yang one of the shaykhs, is “shivering of urgency.65 Wajih Li responds to this atmosphere of terror by performing an Islamic ritual du‘a, or what the Encyclopedia of Islam calls “a prayer of request,” which, by contrast to more ritualistic prayers, tends to express a value system grounded in individual or communal suffering.66 Wajih

Li, “raising his hands to the sky,” addresses God and cries, “Oh Allah, we entrust you with our fates. We have chosen a path that does not allow us to carry weapons. We can defend neither our mosque nor the lives of thousands of our brothers and sisters. Oh Allah, we ask for your assistance.”

"الوجيه لي )رافعاً يديه إلى السماء( اللهم إليك نسلم أمورنا، لقد قطعنا سنة ال تسمح لنا بحمل السالح، للدفاع عن المسجد، وعن حياة اآلالف من إخواننا. هللا نسألك معونتك."67

The stage directions here specifically depict a character conducting an Islamic ritual, in instructing the actor to raise his hands in the motion of someone praying. This demonstrates that the playwrights are not simply translating the events of one region into the language of another, but are indeed assuming active agency in redefining the threat posed by the Japanese as a threat

65 Shah and Ma, Za’ir al-Sin, 416. 66 “Dua,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, (Brill). 67 Shah and Ma, Za’ir al-Sin, 416. 193 specifically to the community’s ability to continue practicing Islam. Based on the influential eleventh-century writings of Avicenna, du‘a is generally understood to establish an intimate connection between God and a Muslim believer.68 It is, furthermore, a prayer usually conducted when misfortune comes to a Muslim, and it converts the personal misfortune of the individual conducting the prayer into a request to God for the wellbeing of the larger Muslim community.69

By opening the play with a character driven to perform the du‘a out of desperation, the play emphasizes the necessity for this community to seek answers from God about how to deal with a threat to their religion. The communal orientation of the du‘a is echoed on a formal level by the characters’ use of the word “we” as a direct address to God that draws the characters on stage together and even incorporates the audience into that community. The use of “we” also reflects an

Islamic notion of brotherhood and sisterhood, calling for the Arabic audience’s attention to the suffering of their Chinese Muslim co-religionists, strategically emphasizing the collective, communal nature of Muslim praxis in a play that seeks to expand notions of Muslim community in order to unite the Chinese Muslim population with Egyptian audiences.

By creating this momentary community between characters and readers, Za’ir al-Sin frames the invasion as a crisis for Islamic faith just as much as it is a political crisis in China. When

Wajih Li asks for assistance from God, he is also engaging with the central Islamic debate about whether violence can be justified. The two positions of this debate are mapped onto the older and younger generations of the characters hiding in the mosque. Inside the mosque, the sheikhs and the youths debate how to face the rapidly approaching Japanese army. Wajih Li represents an exclusively peaceful perspective, interpreting Islam as prohibiting the use of weapons, even for

68 “Dua,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, (Brill). 69 “Dua,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, (Brill). 194 self-defence.70 As a result of this perspective, the shaykhs are initially inclined to negotiate with the Japanese army in person.71 Meanwhile, the younger generation, represented in this instance specifically by Munjatan Yang, the daughter of one of the shaykhs, are against this idea, reminding

who “only (إنهم أناس ال رحمة في قلوبهم) ”their elders that the Japanese are “people with merciless hearts

The younger generation’s 72 (ال يعرفون إال فلسفة الدم) ”.understand the philosophy of blood interpretation suggests that military resistance is preferable, and offers an alternate vision of

Islamic law that raises the issue of martyrdom.

In this intergenerational debate, it is notable that a female character, Munjatan Yang, insists that they should be fighting with the Japanese invaders. She introduces the concept of martyrdom into the play in order to justify the need for national resistance. Munjatan Yang reframes non- resistance as “dishonour” and a “shame on the Chinese youth.” She says that, “I want to defend myself and attack them in the name of my nation, religion and honour.”

"أريد الدفاع عن نفسي والهجوم عليهم باسم أمتى وديني وشرفي."73

In this passage, the key components of martyrdom are inserted as the motivation behind the political actions Munjatan advocates. As Malek Abissab and Rula Abisaab have explained, martyrdom represents Islam’s most sustained meditation on the relationship between peace and violence, believers and non-believers, and individual actions and communal welfare. 74 The classical act of martyrdom is structurally located during or after a battle that marks the boundary between what is internal to a Muslim community and what is external to it, when an individual

70 Shah and Ma, Za’ir al-Sin, 417. 71 Shah and Ma, Za’ir al-Sin, 417. 72 Shah and Ma, Za’ir al-Sin, 416-417. 73 Shah and Ma, Za’ir al-Sin, 417. 74 For more on resistance to occupation and martyrdom, see Rula Jurdi Abisaab and Malek Hassan Abisaab, The Shi‘ites of Lebanon: Modernism, Communism, and Hizbullah’s Islamists (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2014), 173-78, 85, 213-14. 195 resolves to endure injustice on behalf of his or her community.75 As an act that can only occur when an individual’s self-interest has dissolved entirely into the interests of a collective, it is understood to be the most honourable way to end this life, a way that assures a reward from God in the next life.76 A martyr’s death, therefore, is not only an individual honour, but also redeems a collective honour for his or her community, bringing glory and purity to the entire community and particularly to his or her family.77

Through such crises that activate questions of martyrdom, the play pushes against barriers between the genders and uses the crisis as an opportunity to empower female characters. Through

Munjatan Yang’s words, the play uses Islamic notions of martyrdom and honour to justify Chinese anti-colonial resistance. Depicting the Japanese army as an unjust force invading a Muslim community, the playwrights equate the war against the Japanese to martyrdom. This military resistance thus transcends a personal cause; it is for the nation, and for the entire Muslim community. In this way, the playwrights make the Sino-Japanese war relatable to their Arab audience, thus successfully serving the diplomatic mission of advocating for the Chinese cause to a transnational readership.

In order to frame the resistance as a form of martyrdom, the play’s characters exhaust every possible alternative to violence available to them. For this reason, it seems, the play begins with the older generation of shaykhs having locked the more rebellious younger generations in the secret room behind the painting in the mosque, so that the only people performing actions for the first half of the play are the older characters intent on peace at all costs.78 The shaykhs decide to

75 “Shahid,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition, Encyclopaedia of Islam (Brill). Abisaab and Abisaab, The Shi‘ites of Lebanon : Modernism, Communism, and Hizbullah’s Islamists, 137, 49, 51,56. 76 “Shahid,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition (Brill) 77 “Shahid,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition (Brill) 78 Shah and Ma, Za’ir al-Sin, 416. 196 meet the Japanese army, thinking that the invaders will respect their old age, treat them with mercy, and consider the mosque a holy, religious space. The staging of their exit from the mosque is in many ways an inverted restaging of the play’s opening scene. In both instances, the Japanese army is approaching, and the stage directions indicate that characters hear a Japanese anthem:

“Resistance…Resistance…The day for victory and glory is upon us.”

"المقاومة...المقاومة...اقترب يوم االنتصار والمجد."79

Whereas in the opening scene the younger generation huddles together in the mosque out of fear upon hearing the anthem, in this scene, the shaykhs join together to exit the mosque in bravery and joy. The transition from the Chinese community’s victimhood at the opening of the play to their eventual resistance and martyrdom occurs by degrees; the shaykhs’ attempt to reason with the invaders represents the community’s first step out of the position of passive terror.

The stage directions indicate that the characters on stage fall silent and one of the sheikhs

Over the course of (يضرب األرض بقدمه متحمسا غاضبا) stomps the ground with his feet in anger.”80“ this scene, his anger is transformed into happiness in a process that uses Islamic martyrdom to resolve the conflicts internal to the play’s Muslim community. This transition occurs in the

لقد آن ) ”performative moment when Muezzin Ma says that “it’s time for martyrdom, my brothers

:and recites a verse by al-Mutanabbi, one of the most renowned Arabic poets (أوان االستشهاد يا اخواني

“The exalted honour is not safe from harm; until blood is shed and trickles down its sides.”

"ال يسلم الشرف الرفيع من األذى, حتى يراق على جوانبه الدم"81 In reality, because of the limited Arabic language training available in China in the 1930s, it would have been unlikely that a Chinese sheikh would recite a Classical Arabic poem. The use of al-

79 Shah and Ma, Za’ir al-Sin, 417-18. 80 Shah and Ma, Za’ir al-Sin, 418. 81 Shah and Ma, Za’ir al-Sin, 418. This is a verse from al-Tayyib al-Mutanabi’s poem Lahwa al- .(لهوى النفوس سريرة ال تعلم) Nufus Sarirat la Tuʿlam 197

Mutanabbi’s verse therefore shows the trace of a significant authorial intervention to modify the conventions of reality, representing what Shamma might call an act of radical domestication, or the filtration of a text’s ideas through the language, values, and aesthetic tendencies of another culture.

Through the interpolated passage from al-Mutanabbi, the playwrights not only invite their

Arab readers to identify with this Muslim community and the struggle facing China as a whole, but also incorporate this Hui community into a shared history with the larger Muslim world:

Muazzin Ma invokes a literary heritage with his recitation that his community ostensibly shares with the Arabic audiences of the play. In this way, the playwrights build solidarity between the

Arab world and China by positing a shared historical past, illustrated in their common access to the same literary tradition, linking the two regions. By using a classical poem from an ancient

Islamic text to voice the need for blood to be shed, it is as though the sheikhs have found that the resistance advocated by the radical younger generation has a source in Islamic culture. The shaykhs who had previously considered submitting to the Japanese have now taken on the language of blood and resistance from the younger generation. The conflicts between the generations—and the

Islamic debates over violence that those conflicts dramatize—ultimately move toward a resolution when the older shaykhs articulate the need for peaceful resistance and martyrdom.

For these characters who set out to meet the invaders in an act of sacrifice, the Japanese army in this scene has been transformed into an opportunity for enriching their faith and receiving a message from God. The theological debate encoded in Muezzin Ma’s monologue performs this

فالدم هو الطريق الوحيد للحياة ) ”,transformation. Understanding blood as “the only path to immortality

Muezzin Ma states that peace in this world is achieved by drowning their blood.82 He (األبدية الخالدة

82 Shah and Ma, Za’ir al-Sin, 418. 198 further says that “we sought justice and we found it. Look, it is here materializing in front of us.

Allahu Akbar. Allahu Akbar.”

"أليس من واجبنا أن نشيد صرح السالم في هذا العالم الغارق في الدماء ؟ لقد نشدنا الحق فوجدناه. أنظر، إنه شاخص امامنا. هللا أكبر. هللا أكبر."83.

Muezzin Ma’s speech borrows the language of blood and violence from the younger generation, but recasts it as a form of sacrifice that resolves the tension surrounding acts of violence under

Islamic tenets. By martyring themselves for their community, the shaykhs allow their blood to be spilled first, creating a strong justification for resisting the Japanese that aligns more closely with

Islam’s message of peace.

When Muezzin Ma’s anger is converted to happiness, it is not only an emotional transformation for himself, but it is also a transformation of his anger as an individual into a joyful

ارتسم السرور على ) affect that is distinctly communal as “everyone’s face glows with happiness.”84

Throughout Muezzin Ma’s monologue, the playwrights have used “we” as a collective (جميع الوجوه inclusion to situate the audiences within the experiences of this community.85 Upon Muezzin Ma’s declaration of “allahu akbar,” the detailed stage directions cease to describe the actions of individual characters and instead begin to choreograph collective movements that apply to everyone on stage as a whole.86 Together, “the four Imams raise their hands in front of their chests

Even the spoken (وقد رفع األربعة أيديهم مبسوطة إلى السماء أمام صدورهم) with their palms facing the sky.”87 dialogue turns to the inclusive language of “our duties,” “we sought,” and “in front of us.”88 The four Imams recite, “Praise be to Allah, Lord of all the worlds, The Compassionate, The merciful.

83 Shah and Ma, Za’ir al-Sin, 418. 84 Shah and Ma, Za’ir al-Sin, 418. 85 Shah and Ma, Za’ir al-Sin, 418. 86 Shah and Ma, Za’ir al-Sin, 418. 87 Shah and Ma, Za’ir al-Sin, 418. 88 Shah and Ma, Za’ir al-Sin, 418. 199

Oh God bless and guide the steps of all those who call of peace, Amen.”

" الحمد هلل رب العالمين الرحمن الرحيم. اللهم سدد خطوات جميع محبي السالم، آمين."89

This collectivization of action on stage triggers a return to the ritual of the du‘a as a way of formalizing the scene’s inclusive language and transpersonal affect. The collective du‘a scene creates an opportunity for the Chinese Muslim characters to perform Islam in front of their audience. The play has achieved the synthesis that it sought, bringing the Chinese struggle under the umbrella of Islamic culture so fully that resistance to the Japanese can voice itself as “Allahu

Akbar.”90

Gender and Women’s Resistance

These strategic acts of inclusion, however, generate additional social effects within the world of the play. The violence done to the Chinese community and the urgency of the crisis disrupt settled hierarchies, particularly those related to gender. This section examines how the Japanese invasion creates room for the expansion of female agency within the play, and argues that the rise of martyrdom in this play speaks to questions of gender politics in Egyptian public discourse. I will first provide a close reading of how a female character, Munjatan Yang, drives the plot, introduces the idea of martyrdom, and takes up arms to fight against the Japanese soldiers. The inclusion of women in the Chinese resistance, I go on to argue, mirrors and clarifies the strategies of inclusion the playwrights use to draw their Arabic readers to the Chinese cause. Then, by situating this play in a historical context, I will analyze the significance of an Egyptian female author writing about the military resistance of Chinese Muslim women. Egypt in the 1930s witnessed a heated discussion on the role of educated and elite women in the anti-colonial struggle

89 Shah and Ma, Za’ir al-Sin, 418. 90 Shah and Ma, Za’ir al-Sin, 418. 200 against the British government.91 I argue that by presenting a woman taking military action in anti- colonial resistance, the playwrights project a possibility of militant woman in Egypt’s own anti- colonial resistance, speaking directly to the concerns of their readership while effectively dodging controversy by means of the foreign setting.

The character arc of Munjatan Yang, a young female character, is essentially the process of transforming her rebellious energy into martyrdom, redirecting her resistance toward the Japanese rather than the older generation of sheikhs. While all the youth are locked in the dark room, it is the female character, Manjatan Yang, who insists on coming out to rebel against the older male

دعنا نخرج. ) ”sheikhs. Her statement “Let us out! We want to discuss an important matter with you

claims the right to participate in the debates that will decide the future of her (نريد أن نحدثك في أمر مهم community.92 As the plot develops, she protests against being kept passive and in the dark, crying,

“What dishonour! Shame on the Chinese youth!”

"يا للعار! واخجاله من الشباب الصيني!"93

Her intolerance of the darkness is not the literal fear of the dark that gender stereotypes might lead us to expect, but rather a refusal of being kept in the dark, in the sense of a position of ignorance, where she cannot fight for what she cares about. Here, it is also the female character who introduces the important message that anti-colonial resistance is a path to martyrdom. Munjatan

Yang provides moral direction to her community by defining resistance as the only honourable course of action. By analyzing Munjatan’s personal interactions throughout the play, we can see how the gendered emotional care that other characters instinctively feel for her allows her to occupy that position of moral guidance. When the playwrights pause the action of the plot to allow

91 On women’s awakening in Egypt and the peasant women, see Judith E. Tucker, Women in Nineteenth-century Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). 92 Shah and Ma, Za’ir al-Sin, 416. 93 Shah and Ma, Za’ir al-Sin, 416. 201 the male characters to agree with her message before they too take up arms, her agency is endorsed as beneficial for the community.94 Right from the beginning of the play, she has the power to attract and hold the attention of other members of her community and bring them into agreement when they are otherwise paralyzed or divided by fear of the Japanese approaching.

The playwrights make a clear authorial choice in delaying the confrontation with the

Japanese in order to show that the male characters acknowledge in depth that she was right, underlining her unusual degree of power, thus making the community’s resolution to fight arise specifically from Munjatan’s moral guidance. After her statement that resistance is the only tolerable path, her brother says “Yes sister, you were right in saying that the Japanese are at our doorstep and we should teach them a lesson-out of respect to our nation, our religion and ourselves!”

" يا أختاه, لقد أصبت في قولك : إن اليابانيين بين أيدينا. فيجب أن نلقى عليهم درسا قاسيا واحتراما لألمة وللدين وألنفسنا."95

In a play whose violence would ordinarily define it as a male-centered narrative, this scene of a male character taking a woman’s suggestion of military resistance seems noteworthy. As Hoda

Elsadda has shown, mainstream Arabic literature in the 1930s was dominated by an elite class of male authors who “shaped the nation in their own image.”96 Women in mainstream Egyptian culture were almost exclusively represented not in terms of their agency, but rather in terms of their physical appearance and ability to attract male desire. Those few female characters who sought to assert their power in popular texts, El Sadda argues, inevitably ended up being killed off. 97 Literature focused on women at this time, however, defined itself in opposition to the mainstream as a marginalized counter-discourse. This play, in contrast to both trends, shows

94 Shah and Ma, Za’ir al-Sin, 418. 95 Shah and Ma, Za’ir al-Sin, 418. 96 Hoda El Sadda, Gender, Nation and the Arabic Novel : Egypt 1892-2007 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), xiv. 97 El Sadda, Gender, Nation and the Arabic Novel : Egypt 1892-2007, 27. 202 national culture being championed and represented by a woman. The Japanese invasion creates the conditions under which women have opportunities to step outside confined gender roles, and the playwrights imagine national and religious culture as her motivation for doing so.

The playwrights specify this distinctively female agency by differentiating it from the more mindless anger felt by the male members of Munjatan’s generation. When her father’s death is revealed, Munjatan delivers a long monologue, through which she connects personal revenge to nationalist resistance. She states, “The blood … the blood … this is my father’s blood...this is blood of my countrymen … Where are my countrymen? Did they flee or did the enemy kill them? … Oh God, have mercy on Your servants. I have no more desire to live; I cannot accept the disgrace.”

"الدم...الدم..هذا دم أبي... هذا دم بني وطني... أين بني وطني؟ هل هربوا أم قتلهم العدو؟... اللهم ارحم عبادك. لقد سئمت الحياة، وال أقبل الذل."98

Munjatan’s monologue effectively emphasizes the multi-layered relevance of military resistance against the Japanese to personal, national, and religious causes. Following the sequence

where she claims revenge at first for her father and then for (الدم...الدم...) ”of repetition of “the blood her countrymen more generally, the pause in the action found in the ellipsis before she begins to pray represents the moment when she figures out how to attach the rhetoric of revenge and

she seems to be ,(أين بني وطني) ”?martyrdom to actions.99 By asking, “where are my countrymen subtly referring to the non-Muslim Chinese population more generally—as though the Chinese people who are not motivated by martyrdom and ancient belief have not organized themselves into a resistance like this community has.100 In this moment, she stands at the crossroads of two possible

98 Shah and Ma, Za’ir al-Sin, 417. 99 Shah and Ma, Za’ir al-Sin, 417. 100 Shah and Ma, Za’ir al-Sin, 417. 203 lives, one of slavery and one of resistance. By rejecting the path of slavery, she defines resistance as a form of martyrdom that will avenge the death of her father and her fellow countrymen. By asserting that she has no desire to live a life of slavery and humiliation, she is, by antithesis, defining the kind of life she would be willing to live. There is no life for her without resistance.

She demonstrates, in so effectively and justifiably rejecting slavery in the context of the Japanese invasion, that the claim to liberty is a basic right of women in all contexts. Her monologue concludes with an emphasis on her power to decide her own fate: “No, I want to take revenge...I want to avenge their deaths...I want revenge for my father and for my countrymen. Yes. Yes. I have decided.”

" كال. أريد أن أنتقم.. أريد أن أنتقم... أريد أن أثأر ألبي ولبني وطني. نعم. نعم. لقد قررت هذا."101

This scene allows the audience to listen in on her interiorized thoughts and feelings, directing attention to her mind as the source of the actions that will follow. By contrast to the use of “we” by the sheikhs, Munjatan's monologue is based on the “I,” emphasizing her own agency and ability to make decisions that are based on her own personal motivations.

This agency marks a transition from Munjatan’s character in earlier scenes, when she was written with occasional concessions to more passive female stereotypes. Although she exhibited a rebellious nature in protesting the shaykhs’ decision to confine the younger generations, she faints when the Japanese rifles can be heard executing the sheikhs. Munjatan’s fainting can be read in multiple ways, and, just as this play uses China as a setting for disguising opinions on Egyptian political issues, I want to suggest here that buried within this recognizable and culturally acceptable stereotype of the “fainting female” is a deeper spiritual agency the playwrights write into

Munjatan’s character: it is not only a concession to gendered stereotypes, but also a symbolic

101 Shah and Ma, Za’ir al-Sin, 417. 204 moment in her character arc that arises at the precise moment when the older generation, who had previously been the decision-makers, are killed. It is at this point in the plot that the authority for making decisions on behalf of the community is transmitted to the younger generation. As the emergent leader of her generation, Munjatan’s fainting at precisely this transitional moment allows her to symbolically awaken to the crisis facing her community, serving as a kind of rebirth. Indeed,

Islam houses a long tradition of spiritual awakening represented as fainting, most importantly the prophet’s iconic revelation of Qur’anic verse that is revealed to him in a faint.102 By having her faint and reawaken in new form, the play articulates female agency as a quasi-spiritual transformation rather than as a social conflict between men and women that could alienate conservative readers.

The playwrights define the nature of female power as action informed by intelligence and foresight, in contrast to gendered stereotypes of female susceptibility to passion that overwhelms the capacity to think or act. This becomes especially apparent in the following scenes when a group of Japanese soldiers who have been drinking enter the mosque and menace the women inside it.

In describing how Munjatan reacts to the drunk Japanese soldiers, the stage direction tells us that

making the soldiers think she will be compliant with ,(تضحك ضحكة فاترة) ”she gives a weak laugh“ their wishes.103 This feigned laugh indicates the presence of a strategy, the result of the thinking she did in the stage directions earlier that has until now not been revealed to the audience. She then conspires with another woman to open the door and lead the Japanese soldiers to a dark room. The dark room recreates the condition of helplessness and confusion that the Chinese community had felt when hiding in the mosque in the opening scene. Learning from that experience, Munjatan puts the Japanese in that position in order to deprive them of the capacity for action in the same

102 “Muhammad,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, (Brill). 103 Shah and Ma, Za’ir al-Sin, 421. 205 way she had felt herself to be incapacitated earlier.

The militant women in Za’ir al-Sin embody a resistance against a greater force that can only succeed through intelligence and sacrifice, rather than purely a contest of force. The most radical scene in this play appears in the moment where Munjatan Yang and her brother Insha Yang, after killing the Japanese soldiers, emerge from the dark room each holding a Japanese rifle and stand on the stage. Reversing expected gender roles, the women on stage take on the traditionally masculine property of the weapon. Meanwhile, the playwrights avoid the more radical image of a female character alone holding a rifle. By putting her brother, also holding a rifle, next to her, the play maintains a balance between the genders that does not allow female power to assume sole dominance. Furthermore, by arming the Chinese civilians exclusively with Japanese rifles taken from the occupying soldiers, the play stresses that the violence involved in this resistance simply mirrors the violence of Japanese invasion back onto its source.

Munjatan’s actions in leading this fight allow the play to engage with a heated debate in

Egyptian discourse on the woman’s role in anti-colonial resistance. While male elites such as

Muhammad ‘Abdu opposed direct resistance to the British colonial government,104 many women were involved in various forms of social unrest. As Philip Sadgrove points out in The Egyptian

Theatre in the 19th Century, Arabic literature does incorporate some women who can kill on behalf of their tribe and themselves, particularly in the play Layla, although such characters generally rebel against arranged marriages and social constraints rather than a colonial aggressor.105 Yet the

104 Muhammad ‘Abdu was exiled by the British in response to his support for the ‘Urabi revolt at first. But after his exile, he accepted to work with the British, and moved away from politics. His public statements do not show support for future national armed revolts. See Oliver Scharbrodt, Islam and the Baha’i Faith : a Comparative Study of Muhammad Abduh and Abdul-Baha Abbas, (Abingdon: Routledge, 2008). 105 Philip Sadgrove, The Egyptian Theatre in the Nineteenth Century : 1799-1882 (Berkshire: Ithaca Press, 1996), 107-09. 206 presence of powerful female characters acting against the constraints of people who attempt to decide their actions for them resonates with an unmistakable significance in the context of contemporaneous colonial resistance movements. It is worth noting that the phenomenon of female social unrest was generally organized according to a classed structure. In Egypt’s upper classes and intellectual circles, women devoted considerable energy to opposing practices of seclusion and veiling.106 In contrast, peasant and working-class women had more direct contact with colonial rule, including confronting it head on in direct clashes with British soldiers even before the historical landmark of the ‘Urabi revolt.107

Although it was not common to see militant women represented in Arabic literature of the time, Za’ir al-Sin fills this gap by focusing on direct military resistance of women to the oppressors, which diverged from the model of the upper-class and educated women, who were focusing on their rights in voting and having access to public life. This play brings these two classed tropes together, by using the figure of the violent female to attach anti-colonial resistance to a basis in ideas, reason, and considered strategies. Munjatan’s social status, as the daughter of the head Imam, places her in the highest ranks of the community, yet the crisis of the invasion puts her in the more desperate position generally represented by working-class woman. Ma Tianying and Munira

Sayyim Shah thus draw together the cultural issues surrounding female agency in Egypt to shape the way their readers receive and react to Chinese resistance.

106 See Tucker, Women in Nineteenth Century Egypt; Beth Baron, The Women’s Awakening in Egypt : Culture, Society, and the Press (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994); Baron, Egypt as a Woman : Nationalism, Gender, and Politics; Nermin Allam, Women and the Egyptian Revolution : Engagement and Activism During the 2011 Arab Uprisings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). 107 On women’s activism in Egyptian nationalist movement, see Allam, Women and the Egyptian revolution: Engagement and Activism During the 2011 Arab Uprisings. See also, Sandra Mokalled,“Faces of Feminism in Early Twentieth Century,” Clemson University, MA thesis, 2016. 207

Conclusions

Formed within the context of an increasingly mobile and cosmopolitan class of Arabic writers,

Za’ir al-Sin meets the challenge of incorporating into the representation of a single Muslim umma two dissimilar regions that shared little in the way of language, cultural heritage, or geography. In order to articulate a community and conception of Islam inclusive enough to encompass both the

Chinese and Egyptian struggles, the play stages conflicts between genders, social classes, and generations only to overcome these differences through the techniques of martyrdom, sacrifice, and resistance. Ma Tianying and Munira Sayyim Shah chose to tackle topics in a Chinese context that speak to controversial issues in Egyptian society, not only domesticating Chinese anti-colonial resistance for Arab audiences, but also using the defamiliarized setting of a Chinese community to more safely explore and dramatize socially progressive attitudes. Instead of reading these more divisive aspects of the play as separate from their project of incorporating China and Egypt into the umma, I argue here that Ma Tianying and Munira Shah strategically represent empowered women in a way that risked upsetting Egyptian audiences in order to make sisterhood among women struggling for access to public life a powerful tool for speaking across radically dissimilar cultures.

The dynamic between the play’s two authors reflects something of this transnational negotiation. While Ma Tianying was a Chinese male Muslim diplomat who came to Egypt with the diplomatic mission to advocate for the Chinese cause during the second Sino-Japanese War,

Munira Sayyim Shah belonged more to a group of pioneering Egyptian female authors who helped instigate a heated social debate on women’s role in anti-British colonial resistance. These two projects merged into a more refined set of strategies for calling for a unified Muslim umma, which centered on using external threats to Islam and internal theological debates in order to unite 208 outlying Muslim communities with one another. In this play, one can detect traces of Munira

Shah’s own somewhat contradictory social persona as a successful professional author who was nonetheless subject both to the stigma of being unmarried and to limits on what she could have her female characters do without attracting controversy.

The militant role of women in Za’ir al-Sin appears to find expression for some of the female agency embodied in her career but suppressed within Egyptian literary circles. Despite what seem to be categorical differences between the co-authors, however, the play does not show any clear seams or divisions between what each author contributed. Their collaboration produces a synthesis of socially dissimilar positions that the play as whole recapitulates at the level of the

Muslim umma. It is a testament to the submerged circuits of influence and self-understanding that an Egyptian female writer and Chinese male writer could speak for Chinese Muslim women and call for Egyptian readers’ attention to the Chinese struggle.

This play was produced within the larger context of the literary engagements of Chinese

Muslim scholars in 1930s Cairo, which allowed Chinese literary voices access to transnational venues free from the mediation of the European source texts. The presence of Hui Muslim intellectuals in the Arab literary scene and their connection with leading Nahdawi intellectuals transformed China from a silenced region into an active voice in cosmopolitan writing. In turn, the rise of China as a self-fashioning culture that participated in global discourse shaped and helped produce a sharp increase in Nahdawi literary production on China. This play, in essence, rhymes

Chinese anti-colonial resistance with the residual presence of anti-colonial feeling in Egypt following the 1919 rebellion. The presence of European power thus provides the mediation through which Arab and Chinese intellectuals could find solidarity with one another. That this collaboration quite literally took place in a European lingua franca is, more than coincidental, a testament to the 209 enduring effect of the European presence in the Middle East; even in moments of direct contact between China and the Arab world, that contact forms within the framework of triangular translation.

In the case studies examined in the three previous chapters, Chinese and Arabic cultures were separated by differences mediated through European representations. This play, however, represents the historical moment when Chinese and Arabic intellectuals managed to connect directly with one another. This was a connection that was both independent of direct European mediation, but also somehow facilitated through conversations that likely took place in a shared

European language. This newer direct literary production in Arabic, conveying a Chinese setting, plot, character, theme, and historical events, helps to complete the triangle, bringing these two distant geographical regions into direct communication with one another. This development takes place within the idiom of the Muslim umma, freighting Islam’s symbolism and theological debates with the political task of joining distant regions together into transnational solidarity.

210

CONCLUSION

Throughout this dissertation, I have sought to show how the formation of south-south relations represented an early act of autonomy from colonial powers that sought to mediate and control relations among colonized states. This autonomy depended on the power of Nahdawi translators to repurpose colonial and Orientalist discourses, transforming European writing from a means of control into a transnational medium through which colonial and postcolonial cultures could forge understandings of one another. For this reason, the residual presence of English and

French with Nahdawi literature acts as a kind of global lingua franca through which Arabic and

Chinese cultures developed understandings of one another. My aim has been to re-think the act of translation less as a transparent, bilateral act that brings us into direct, unmediated contact with the Arabic literary world, and more as a mode of agency that allowed Nahdawi writers to position themselves within the larger domain of world literature. As I have shown throughout this dissertation, a key feature of Arabic literature since the Nahda period is that original authorship is in many ways modelled on the act of translation itself.

Translating Arabic texts has often meant translating texts that themselves incorporate translated materials or generic templates drawn from transnational sources. However, when scholars assume that translation acts as a transparent interface through which they can access

Arabic texts in western languages and treat them as though they conform to western models of authorship and genre, in fact, unpacking the translated quality of many Arabic texts addressed in this research reveals a layered, sedimented archive of transnational materials that often include

Orientalist stereotypes, mobilized for local political and cultural purposes. But when we take 211 translation at face value as a way of accessing a supposedly authentic expression of Arabic culture, we risk mistaking the fragmented European source texts that caricature eastern culture for eastern culture itself.

Following Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, who has pointed out some of the critical oversights of Western feminists who have viewed translation as a way of removing cultural differences to get at deeper levels of female solidarity, I have argued for the historicization and contextualization of the act of translation itself. I do so in order to understand the way our scholarly relationship to the literature of the Nahda remains limited and shaped by the power relations staged by translation. In contrast to Spivak, who sees translation as an assertion of hegemony in flattening a culture into legibility, however, in this dissertation I unpack the ways in which translation also creates opportunities for resistance, subversion, and creative cultural self- fashioning – as well as the dissemination of colonial stereotypes by one colonized group to another.

For this reason, my readings here have tended to emphasize the ways translation allows writers to further their nationalist projects by emphasizing the representation of women’s liberation and colonial liberation in Nahda literature. Rather than follow the dominant trend in translation studies that emphasizes the power dynamics governing the process of translation between powerful and less powerful languages, I have shown the complexities of these power dynamics in the Chinese-Arabic case. This focus on linguistic power takes two primary shapes: first, investigations into the hegemony of English and French as colonial languages becoming the primary languages of all global transactions, and second, studies of the unequal power relations 212 involved in translating from one culture to another, where one language community has to cede some of its particularities to another.

Given that Arabic literature in the Nahda period was always already translated either linguistically or culturally, how do the creative acts that constitute Nahdawi literature written in

Arabic negotiate and navigate the power dynamics that scholarship has identified in the act of translation? My answer to this question is centered on redefining the emergence of modernity that the Nahda refers to as a self-conscious project that took place within transnational relations.

This means that Arab, and more specifically Egyptian, self-understanding began to be mediated through its relationship to China, often triangulated through translation through European languages. Translation was the tool through which Nahdawi intellectuals developed the ability to formulate claims of solidarity with China or to distance themselves from pejorative European understandings of eastern culture displaced onto east Asia. The four chapters above trace the historical formation of south-south relations, between Arabic and Chinese, and the acts of triangular translation involved in that development.

One thing that ties these four chapters together is the importance of deploying a discourse around gender to establish what it meant to be modern in the Nahda. For this reason, a prevalent theme in Chapters One, Two, and Four is the use of Orientalist stereotypes in creating space for female agency. While it is tempting to read this theme in Nahdawi literature as a purely feminist motivation, the emphasis on female agency in this body of writing has at least as much to do with the nationalist political views of Nahdawi intellectuals. Because Euoprean colonial attitudes suggested that the treatment of women in a given culture was the yardstick of how modern that 213 culture was, nationalist intellectuals in the Arab world positioned women prominently in their writing, representing their societies as ones in which women enjoyed an active role in public life.

In Chapter Three this worked somewhat differently, as we see how Orientalist understandings of

China made space in a parallel way for Egyptian society to declare itself a constitutional state. In each of these four case studies, south-south relations emerged as an integral thought process for

Arab intellectuals in understanding their own culture and the possibilities for a political future.

Salih Jawdat’s Ghadat al-Sin, the focus of the first chapter, mobilized the ethnographic power of Orientalist discourse to offer his readers a view of gender dynamics in Chinese culture that ultimately bends back on itself to diagnose, through defamiliarization and exoticization, the challenges facing women in achieving their rights in Egyptian society. The popular yet critically neglected subgenre of fiction Ghadat al-Sin belongs to indicates these tactics of subverting ethnographic stereotypes for Egyptian political purposes was a prevalent literary phenomenon beyond this particular novel. Throughout all the chapters, this agency of subversion that I argue is constitutive of the Nahda movement, was accessed through the act of translation in that

European source material became pliable and subjected to new meaning through strategic manipulation and recontextualization. .

Indeed, beyond the “Ghadat novel” subgenre, these tactics operated across many different genres, including, as I explained in the second chapter, the political biographies of female rulers worldwide. By borrowing representations of Queen Victoria from Britain that sought to resolve and neutralize the ideological threat of a woman occupying the throne, Arab biographers of the

Chinese Empress Dowager used those signs and symbols of female power but reversed their 214 ideological force. In “Imburaturat al-Sin,” translators sought to use her life to model ways in which Nahdawi women could expand their role in public life. By mediating images of the

Chinese empress through highly visible portrayals of Queen Victoria and then restaging her life for an Arabic readership, Nahdawi biographers also produced a visual culture surrounding the

Chinese Empress that portrayed her as a racial hybrid, retaining physiognomic features of

Chinese, British, and Arab portraiture.

Translators, it transpired, could wield this agency in diverse ways; the appropriation of

European Orientalism afforded space for free exercise of opinion and aesthetic choice, granting translators space to voice otherwise controversial positions on nationalism and female liberation, which were calculated to portray Arab society as capable of self-governance. As I show in the

Chapter Three, the portrayal of the Chinese constitutional revolution in Arabic translations of

British political theory, for instance, repositions Egypt and China in a tentative opposition to one another by keeping pejorative Orientalist tropes about east Asians but excising those related to

Egypt and Arabs. Egyptian intellectuals who understood their society to occupy an indeterminate position on a spectrum of east-to-west sought, through representing the Chinese constitutional struggle as primitive, to distance their political future from the south and align it more with the constitutionalism of western Europe. As China came to serve both as a source of inspiration and of disgust whereby Nahdawi intellectuals wished to distance themselves from it, a

“triangularization of self-positioning” emerged that allowed Arabic political commentators to fashion national identities out of a set of differences and similarities in relation to China and

Europe. 215

The final chapter of this dissertation argued that the multiple relationships between Egypt and China that emerged from acts of translation ultimately become encapsulated in representations of the Muslim umma, or the transnational Islamic community, with a Chinese intellectual undertaking a direct collaboration with an Egyptian author/translator. In order to ventriloquize one another’s cultures, these co-authors, whose work I examine in Za’ir al-Sin, take China’s anti-colonial resistance as an opportunity to condense the struggles facing China into a set of theological questions at the heart of Islam concerning violence and the justification of martyrdom. The power and popularity that theatrical genres had acquired in Egypt during the

Nahda allowed these playwrights to stage acts of martyrdom, fantasies of female empowerment, and forms of cultural hybridity that resonated simultaneously within the political contexts of dissimilar regions.

An ensemble of textual attributes of Arabic literature that otherwise define explanation has emerged from this study as signature features of triangular translation. These include: politics of regional solidarity and regional exceptionalism, an Orientalist-style obsession with ethnographies of other regions that somehow attach themselves to liberatory politics in the home context, and contradictions internal to a text that testify to its fragmented, multiple origins. This account of triangular translation offers a framework for further scholarship exploring south-south literary relations worldwide, especially but not limited to Nahda literary production in Arabic dealing with other parts of the world. My study provides a way of making sense of linguistic relations outside of the simpler schematics of linguistic hegemony exerted by European languages over the east. 216

By exploring Arabic intellectual, cultural, and literary interest in China, this dissertation opens a door to new possibilities for future Nahda studies and those of Arabic literature in general. Shifting the mastery of the western gaze on the Arabic world, triangular translation shows how Arabic culture and literature can redeploy that gaze in relation to the rest of the world, for specific political and cultural purposes. In the Nahda era, this was largely tied to the establishment of modern nation states situated as transnational regional identities. The analytic developed in this dissertation acknowledges Europe’s mediating presence in colonial and postcolonial Arab culture/s, but views that presence experimentally as a medium within which south-self and south-other met and formed political and textual relations with one another.

Moreover, my theorization of triangular translation shows how translation represents an act of power that operates outside the simple relations of dominance that Translation Studies scholarship has typically articulated as an east-west dynamic. Nahdawi intellectuals' investment in defining what modernity meant for the Arabic world involved creative acts and forms of resistance that unfolded through strategic translation tactics despite the hegemony of colonial powers. My dissertation, therefore, does not evaluate whether Arabic writing about China in the

Nahda period is positive or negative, racist or Orientalist. On the contrary, the goal of this dissertation is to explore and probe the complexities and ambiguities of the relationships that formed through translations between cultures that European Orientalism brought into contact with one another. As Nahdawi writers looked to China simultaneously for inspiration for the future and a culture onto which derogatory Orientalist stereotypes could be displaced, such seemingly contradictory attitudes were made possible through triangular translation. This 217 framework enables future scholarship to focus attention on the forgotten literary texts by

Nahdawis writing about other non-European countries. It is a framework that can be applied to translation studies and global south studies, helping researchers investigate how south-self translates south-other via hegemonic languages such as English or French. Thanks to these circuits of translation textual exchange, Nahdawi culture was organized around core concepts that were inherently cosmopolitan and global, the products of international relations, at the same time that they defined the cohesive regional culture of the Arab world.

This dissertation opens a door. It offers a preliminary reading of a large literary archive that has not previously been studied, and is an attempt to formulate an analytic necessary for reading that archive. My study is a call to the field of Arabic literary studies to give more attention to triangular translation practices in all their complexities, as this can illuminate the way the Nahda also established relations with, and had conceptions of other parts of the world, including India, Iran, and other locations throughout Asia and the larger world. My dissertation is not intended to be an exhaustive or comprehensive study of all texts produced through triangular translation. Indeed, the fact that I was unable to locate reliable source texts for all of the translated materials here indicates the partial and incomplete nature of studies to be done on this subject. What I hope instead to show is how the cultural materials we identify as features of the Nahda movement, whether these are concerned with translation and/or the politics of representing women, along with original archival materials I introduce here in this dissertation 218 that were not studied in the past, were produced through a triangular circuit of translation between Egypt, the Arab world, Europe, China, and other eastern regions.

219

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