Doing Justice to “Modern Arab Thought”

Abstract

This essay reflects on the problems of justice and translation posed by the volume Modern Arab Thought: A Reader (forthcoming), coedited with Idriss Jebari. This collection of translated texts and commentaries was conceived as a practical pedagogical tool to address the scarcity of translated sources in modern Arab intellectual history, but it also comes up against thorny problems of epistemic justice. Rather than reproducing a canon of “major” Arab intellectuals, for instance, the volume is structured around debates and controversies, in an attempt to foreground the dialogic, provisional, and contested nature of Arabic intellectual production. It works to address the structural inequities of translation work, the hierarchies of linguistic exchange, and hegemonic Anglocentrism; strategies such as glossaries and commentary essays seek to foreground the conceptual fluidity of Arabic terms and to render visible the labor of translation. This essay acknowledges the profound limitations of such translation projects as a response to material and legal injustices, but argues nevertheless for translation’s ethical potential to reframe questions of representation, canonicity, and intellectual exchange. In doing so, it positions translation as a provisional yet reparative praxis for engaging the plurality of modern Arab thought.