Translation and the colonial imaginary: Ibn khaldûn orientalist

History and Theory

Volumn 42, Issue 1, 2003, Pages 61-81

  Hannoum, Abdelmajid ^a  

^a Simon's Rock College of Bard

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 3042715696     PISSN: 00182656     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/1468-2303.00230     Document Type: Article

References (83)

1. A. Hannoum, "Colonialism and Knowledge in Algeria: The Archives of the Arab Bureau," History and Anthropology 12, no. 4 (2001), 343-379.
2. Those are related to history, geography, and law: Qayrawani, Histoire de l'Afrique, transi. E. Pellissier and Ch. Remusat (Paris: Imprimerie Impériale, 1845);
3. Al-Aiachi-Moula-Ahmed, Voyages dans le sud de l'Algérie et des Etats barbaresques de l'Ouest et de l'Est, transl. Louis Andrien Berbrugger (Paris: Imprimerie Impériale, 1846);
4. Khalil B. Ishaq, Précis de jurisprudence musulmane: ou, Principes de législation musulmane civile et religieuse selon le rite mâlékite, transi, Nicolas Perron (Paris: Imprimerie Impériale. 1848-1852).
5. E. Carette, Recherches sur l'origine et les migrations des principales tribus de l'Afrique septentrionale et particulièrement de l'Algérie (Paris: Imprimerie Impériale, 1853);
6. E. Carette, Etudes sutla Kabilie, 2 vols. (Paris: Imprimerie Impériale, 1848).
7. Ibn Khaldûn, Histoire des Berbères, transi. William de Slane, 4 vols. (Algiers: Imprimerie du Gouvernement, 1852-1856).
8. Cornelius Castoriadis, L'institution et l'imaginaire (Paris: Seuil, 1975), 8.
9. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York; Basic Books, 1973), 44.
10. Cornelius Castoriadis, "The Imaginary: Creation in the Social-Historical Domain," in Disorder and Order: Proceedings of the Stanford International Symposium (Sept. 14-16, 1981), ed. Paisley Livingston (Saratoga, Calif.: Anma Libri, 1984), 152.
11. For the French text, see "L'imaginaire: La création dans le domaine social-historique" in Domaines de l'homme (Paris: Seuil. 1977), 226-227.
12. Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1944).
13. See also R. G. Collingwood, for whom history is re-enactment of past experience in the mind of the historian, The Idea of History (Oxford: Clarendon Press: 1946), 252.
14. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "The Crisis of Understanding," in Adventures of the Dialectic, transl. Joseph Bien (Evanston: Northwestern University Press: 1973), 11.
15. Cassirer, An Essay on Man, 178.
16. Lawrence Venuti, The Scandais of Translation : Towards an Ethic of Difference (New York: Routledge, 1998), 81-82.
17. Paul Ricoeur, "Imagination in Discourse and in Action," in Rethinking Imagination, ed. Gillian Robinson and John Rundell (New York: Routledge, 1994).
18. A. Berman, Pour une critique des traductions: John Donne (Paris: Gallimard, 1995),
19. Quoted in Venuti, The Scandals of Translation, 84.
20. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York, Vintage Books, 1979), 124.
21. Silvestre de Sacy, Chrestomathie Arabe, 3 vols. (Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1826-1827), II, 387, 393-401.
22. Also de Sacy, Relation de l'Egypte par Abd-Allatif, (Paris: Treuttel et Würtz, 1810), 509.
23. De Sacy, "Ibn Khaldûn" in Biographie universelle (Paris: Michaud, 1818), t. 21, 154.
24. Joseph de Hammer, "Sur l'introduction à la connaissance de l'histoire, célèbre ouvrage d'ibn Khaldûn," Journal Asiatique 1 (1822). 267-278.
25. Garcin de Tassy, "Supplément à la notice de M. de Hammer," Journal Asiatique 4 (1824), 158-161.
26. F. E. Schulz, "Sur le grand ouvrage historique et critique d'ibn Khaldûn," Journal Asiatique 7 (1825), 213-300.
27. Ibn Khaldûn himself narrates the history of the composition of his book in the last part, entitled al-ta'rif bi ihn Khaldûn.
28. A.Cheddadi, Ibn Khaldûn revisité (Casablanca: Les Editions Toubkal, 1999).
29. This view was first expressed by de Sacy and reproduced in the Arab discourse of Ibn Khaldûn; see, for instance, Taha Hussein, Etude analytique de la philosophie sociale d'Ibn Khaldûn (Paris: Vrin, 1919). It was confirmed by most of the subsequent interpreters of Ibn Khaldûn.
30. Such is the view of Robert Brunschvig, La Bebérie orientale sous les Haftides (Paris: Adrien-Maisonneuve, 1940-1947), vol. 1.
31. An example of this is the collective work Interpreting the Self: Autobiography in the Arabic Literary Tradition, ed, Dwight Reynolds (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001 ). It contains no treatment of the autobiography of Ibn Khaldûn.
32. Ibn Khaldûn, Histoire des Berbères, Arab text (Paris: Imprimerie du Gouvernement, 1847).
33. Ibn Khaldûn, Muqaddima, in Notices et extraits des mss. de la Bibliothèque impériale, vols. XVI-XVIII (Paris: Bibliothèque impériale, 1858).
34. Translated by de Slane, Prolégomènes, in ibid., vols. XIX-XXI.
35. See Ernest Gellner, Muslim Society (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1981). However, Gellner does not investigate the relation between Ibn Khaldûn 's thought and Durkheim's. In addition to the fact that the work of Ibn Khaldûn was available by mid-nineteenth century, Durkheim also had an Egyptian doctoral candidate, Taha Hussein, working on the Muqaddima.
36. See A. Hannoum, "L'auteur comme authorité en ethnographie coloniale," in La sociologie musulmane de Robert Montagne (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 2000), 249-264.
37. Joseph Reinaud, "Ibn Khaldûn," in Nouvelle biographie générale (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1854), vol. 25, 746.
38. Emile-Felix Gautier, Les siècles obscurs (Paris: Pavot, 1927 );
39. F. Rosenthal, The Muqaddima (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966).
40. Jacques Berque, L'intérieur du Maghreb (Paris: Gallimard, 1978), 13.
41. Especially in the work of Michel Foucault. The Archeology of Knowledge, transl. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972).
42. Regis Blachre, "Place d'Ibn Khaldun dans l'humanisme Arabo-islamique," Revue des Deux Mondes (October 1972), 70-79;
43. Berque, L'intérieur du Maghreb;
44. Yves Lacoste, Ibn Khaldun: The Birth of History and the Past of the Third World (London: Verso, 1984).
45. Blachère, "Place d'Ibn Khaldun dans l'humanisme Arabo-islamique," 79.
46. Charles Issawi, An Arab Philosophy of History: Selections (Princeton: Darwin Press, 1987), ix.
47. William de Slane, Histoire des Berbères et des dynasties musulmanes de l'Afrique septentrionale (Algiers: Imprimerie du Gouvernement, 1852-1856), i.
48. A.-J. Greimas, "Le savoir et le croire: un seul univers cognitif," in Du Sens II (Paris: Seuil, 1983), 115-133.
49. De Slane, Histoire des Berbères, lxix.
50. Algirdas-Julien Greimas, "On Chance Occurences in What We Call the Human Sciences," in On Meaning, transl. Paul J. Perron and Frank H. Collins, foreword by Fredric Jameson (London: Pinter, 1987).
51. Benjamin Whorf, Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1956), 235.
52. Roman Jakobson, "On the Linguistics Aspects of Translation," in Language and Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), 429-430.
53. Whorf, Language, Thought, and Reality. 252.
54. Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de linguistique générale (Paris: Payot, 1985).
55. See Louis Hjelmslev, Prolégomènes à une théorie du langage (Paris: Minuit, 1968),
56. translated from Danish by Una Canger. Also see the significant contribution of A.-J. Greimas, Sémantique structurale (Paris: Larousse, 1966).
57. For a very brief review see the entry "Text" in Dictionnaire raisonné du language (Paris: Hachette, 1979).
58. See A. Hannoum, "Colonialism and Knowledge in Algeria."
59. John White, "Taine on Race and Genius," Social Research 10 (February 1943), 76-99.
60. Hannah Arendt, "Race-Thinking Before Racism," Review of Politics 6 (January 1944), 47.
61. Also, Theophile Simar, Etude critique sur la formation de la doctrine des races au 18è et son expansion au 19è siècle (Brussels: M. Lamertin, 1922).
62. See A. Gobineau, Essai sur l'inégalité des races humaines (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1853-1855).
63. English translation by Adrian Collins, Inequality of Human Races (New York: H. Fertig, 1967).
64. See also H. Taine, Histoire de la littérature anglaise (Paris: Hachette, 1863), vol. 1.
65. Gobineau, Inequality of Human Races, 133.
66. It is these forms that constitute Taine's work, which was mainly a study of the genius of races, interestingly enough European races, especially the Latin and German. Taine was one of the most dominant figures in nineteenth-century Europe. Among his admirers was Nietzsche. After a solid background in philosophy, he turned to the study of art and literature, Among his well-known work is his dissertation La Fontaine et ses Fables (Paris: Hachette, 1861);
67. Histoire de la littérature anglaise (Paris: Hachette, 1863);
68. De l'intelligence (Paris: Hachette, 1861).
69. Gobineau, The Inequality of Human Races, 171.
70. According to the translation of Jacques Berque, "Ibn Khaldûn et les Bedouins," in Maghreb, histoire et sociétés (Algiers, Duculot, 1974), 18. Berque, too, translates jîl as race.
71. Muqaddima, 129.
72. Muqaddima, 91. I intentionally, but unavoidably, depart from the English translation of Franz Rosenthal because it is too inscribed in the same colonial discourse. He too translates jîl or umma as race and nation.
73. See Tarif Khaldidi, Arabic Thought in the Classical Period (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
74. Muqaddima, 180.
75. See Cheddadi, Ibn Khaldûn revisité.
76. Muqaddima, 145.
77. In the nineteenth-century French dictionary, "domination" means: "Authorité qui, accepté ou non des subordonnés, s'exerce pleinement." (Emile Littré, Dictionnaire de la langue française [Paris: Gallimard/Hachette, 1967).
78. See A. Hannoum. Colonial Histories, Postcolonial Memories (Portsmouth; Heinemann, 2001 ).
79. See Hannoum, "Colonialism and Knowledge in Algeria."
80. Louis Leon Cesar Faidherbe, Instructions sur l'anthropologie de l'Algérie (Paris: Hennuyer, 1874), 12.
81. 'Ibar, 121.
82. For more details see Hannoum, Colonial Histories, Postcolonial Memories. 1-28.
83. The most known of this is Abdallah Laroui who, despite his criticism, was caught in colonial categories. The most illustrative example of a post (?) orientalist historiography is Maya Shatzmiller, The Berbers and the Islamic State (Princeton: Markus Wiener, 2000) in which she writes the history of the Berbers using racial categories found in de Slane.