Rules of Exchange: Translating Egypt’s Laws, 1830-1885

CCLPS Early Career Researchers Seminar Series

Location: room C325 (SOAS College Building) or Teams.

Speaker: Dr Hannah Scott Deuchar

Abstract

Based on the first chapter of Hannah Scott Deuchar's current book manuscript (Translational Justice: Law, Empire, and the Arabic Literary Archive) this talk argues that translation, and a set of shifting ideas about difference, equivalence, and translatability, shaped the making of Egypt’s legal codes from the 1830s through the 1880s. 

Early legal translations from French and Ottoman Turkish, including a full translation of the Napoleonic Code made by Rifa’a Rafi’ al-Tahtawi in 1867, practised translation as Arabization: a process of radical transformation which reconstituted foreign legal concepts and systems in accordance with existing Ottoman and Islamic legal practice. 

However, al-Tahtawi’s 1867 Arabization of the Napoleonic Code would pave the way for a second and very different translation project: the secularisation of Egypt’s legal system through the wholesale introduction of “adapted” French codes. 

Drafted and edited across different European languages, and overseen not by Egyptian translators but by international committees, these codes employed translation as a practice of simplification and efficiency. Translatability across cultural and legal systems was both insisted upon and constantly undermined, as Egyptian legal reform became a site of inter-imperial comparison and competition. And in the process, translation in Arabic - as a concept, and as a practice - was also and irrevocably transformed

About the speaker

Hannah Scott Deuchar is Lecturer in Arabic and Comparative Literature in the Department of Comparative Literatures and Cultures at Queen Mary University of London.

Image: Cristina Gottardi (Unsplash)