Reading Darwin in Arabic, 1860-1950 / Marwa Elshakry

Reading Darwin in Arabic, 1860–1950 Reading Darwin in Arabic, 1860–1950 MARWA ELSHAKRY The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London Publication of this book has been aided by a grant from the Bevington Fund. Marwa Elshakry is associate professor in the Department of History at Columbia University, where she specializes in the history of science, technology, and medicine in the modem Middle East. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2013 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2013. Printed in the United States of America 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 1 2 3 4 5 ISBN-13: 978-0-226-00130-2 (cloth) ISBN-13: 978-0-226-00144-9 (e-book) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Elshakry, Marwa, 1973– Reading Darwin in Arabic, 1860-1950 / Marwa ElShakry. pages. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-226-00130-2 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-226-00144-9 (e-book) 1. Evolution—Religious aspects—Islam. 2. Darwin, Charles, 1809–1882. 3. Islam and science. I. Title. BP190.5.E86E47 2013 297.2′65—dc23 2013009170 This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper). CONTENTS Acknowledgments / vii INTRODUCTION / 1 ONE / The Gospel of Science / 25 TWO / Evolution and the Eastern Question / 73 THREE / Materialism and Its Critics / 99 FOUR / Theologies of Nature / 131 FIVE / Darwin and the Mufti / 161 SIX / Evolutionary Socialism / 219 SEVEN / Darwin in Translation / 261 Afterword / 307 Notes / 319 Bibliography / 391 Index / 419 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Much of the time that went into this book was spent reading texts through layers of translation: Darwin in Arabic, or Haeckel, originally in German but rendered into Arabic from a French translation. One American mis- sionary translating the Bible into Arabic in the mid-nineteenth century complained of having piled words “six or seven deep and high, above and below nearly every important word in the line,” which he then carefully vetted with a native speaker. All translations are multiple, and so I, too, like some of the characters in this book, often had to weigh literal fi delity against meaning when translating. If, as I quickly learned, writing is a col- lective effort, reading in and writing about translation is doubly so. Over many years, everyone from language tutors to my mother was conscripted to gloss over translations, read texts with me, and check on embedded meanings. It was they who often helped make sense of particular idioms, expressions, verses, or references that would have otherwise escaped me. Of course, all oversights and errors remain mine. I have also relied on the ideas and scholarship of many people. I would like to thank in particular Peter Buck, Graham Burnett, Angela Creager, Omnia El Shakry, Khaled Fahmy, Carol Gluck, Thomas Gluck, Matthew Jones, Mark Mazower, James Moore, Steven Shapin, Pamela Smith, Daniel Stoltz, Bob Tignor, and many other conference participants, students, and colleagues who read drafts of chapters. Conversations with Tamara Griggs, Samira Haj, Shruti Kapila, Rashid Khalidi, Suzanne Marchand, Elizabeth Merchant, Gyan Prakash, Samah Selim, Pamela Smith, and numerous others also helped me. Echoes of the late Gerald Geison can be found throughout the text, and I shall always regret that I was not able to show it to him in its fi nal iteration. A special thanks goes to my favorite book dealer, Muhammad ʿAli, for viii / Acknowledgments tracking down many rare and scarce items in Cairo. My thanks, too, to li- brarians and archivists at the Egyptian National Library (particularly the periodicals room), the American University of Beirut, and the Zahiriya Mosque at Damascus, as well as at the archives and special collections at Amherst, Yale, Harvard, and Princeton. I would also like to gratefully ac- knowledge Ahmed Ragab and Ays¸e Ozil for their help with researching and collecting materials for this project. Ays¸e located fi les and manuscripts in the Ottoman Archives for chapter 4, while Ahmed referenced a number of newspaper and journal articles toward the end of this project’s revisions. Ahmed also helped me read through stacks of handwritten Arabic materials from the khedival collection at Durham University for chapter 5. For their generous funding and support I thank the Carnegie Corpo- ration, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies, the British Academy, Harvard University, and Columbia University. The Social Science Research Council, the American Research Center in Egypt, and Princeton University were critical in the early phase of my research. The editors at the University of Chicago Press and especially my long-suffering copy editor, Pamela Bru- ton, have been wonderfully supportive. My thanks too to Marc Saint-Upery for reviewing the transliterations, and to June Sawyers for the index. Finally, I was fortunate to have family on both sides of the Atlantic who always managed to strike the right balance between forbearing curiosity and discreet encouragement. My parents’ and sisters’ patience and good humor were critical; in many ways, they have lived with this book as long as I have. Omnia in particular offered inspiration from the start. Lastly, I owe my greatest debt to Mark. He had to take on a dizzying number of roles during much of the research and writing of the book—interlocutor, critic, confi dante, and much, much more. Meanwhile, at least two of our creative collaborations have also provided the best distraction to it. My debt to him, to Selma, and to Jed is beyond words. INTRODUCTION “This journey in the East, especially in Egypt and Greece, marked a new epoch in my thinking,” wrote the American diplomat and educator An- drew Dickson White after his travels there in 1888–89. “I became more and more impressed with the continuity of historical causes, and realized more and more how easily and naturally have grown the myths and legends which have delayed the unbiased observation of human events and the scientifi c investigation of natural laws.”1 White had recently stepped down from serving as the fi rst president of Cornell University and was a fi gure of some renown: his serialized study of the “warfare of science with theology in Christendom” had (along with fellow American John Draper’s 1874 History of the Confl ict between Religion and Science) sealed the view for many that Darwin’s theory of evolution constituted the “fi nal victory of science” in its clash with “myths and legends.”2 Amid excursions to the usual sights (fi g. I.1) and while visiting with English, Ottoman, and Egyptian offi cials, White made the acquaintance of “an especially interesting man of a different sort”3—one who turned out to know quite a lot about White already.4 This “interesting man” was a recent émigré from Ottoman Syria called Faris Nimr. White was “amazed to fi nd in his library a large collection of English and French books, scientifi c and literary—among them the ‘New York Scientifi c Monthly’ containing my own articles, which he had done me the honor to read” (fi g. I.2).5 Indeed Nimr’s extensive subscription list included the (New York–based) Popular Science Monthly, as well as many other English and American science magazines and numerous book titles in English and French. Nimr and White turned out to share a surprising amount. Both men were avid bibliophiles, for instance. The fi fty-six-year-old widower was 2 / Introduction Fig. I.1. The Pyramids, White in Egypt, 1888. traveling with Willard Fiske, the librarian of Cornell University, aboard a “modest ship . with an excellent library,” and not the least of the pur- poses behind the trip was to collect books and manuscripts for their new institution (fi g. I.3).6 Both Nimr and White combined faith in science with a particular reverence for religious faith. Despite being labeled an “infi del and atheist” and attacked by “careless and unkind” readers, White insisted that he was “not actuated by any hostility to religion.” Indeed, much like Nimr, he hoped to raise people to “the loftier conviction” that “there is a God in this universe wise enough to make all truth-seeking safe, and good enough to make all truth-telling useful.”7 Both men saw understanding the Fig. I.2. Faris Nimr in his offi ce. Fig. I.3. Fiske’s “modest ship,” with library, anchored in Egypt. 4 / Introduction laws of nature as compatible with religious belief and necessary for the formation of an educated society whose citizens could question authority when needed and yet still accept the rationale and rule of law. (Both men were also interested in Freemasonry.)8 Above all, White found that Nimr was a fellow enthusiast of Darwin and of what White called the “Darwinian hypothesis”: “I found that he had been, at an earlier period, a professor at the college established by the American Protestant missionaries at Beyrout; but that he and several others who had come to adopt the Darwinian hypothesis were on that account turned out of their situations, and that he had taken refuge in Cairo where he was publishing, in Arabic, a daily newspaper, a weekly literary magazine, and a monthly scientifi c journal.” 9 White had in fact stumbled on the editorial powerhouse of contemporary science publishing in Arabic: this press was responsible more than any other for popularizing throughout the region the ideas of both Darwin and White himself. Nimr was one of the proprietors of a Cairo-based fi rm that published—as White notes—the “daily newspaper” Al-Muqattam, the “literary” (and Masonic) magazine Al-Lataʾif, and the popular-science monthly Al-Muqtataf (The digest).

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