What We're Missing

Words Without Borders has an interesting follow-up to that recent Guardian story that asked prominent Arab writers to tell us what Arabic book they'd most like to see translated to English.

Among the several interesting responses that caught my eye were Sabry Hafez’s list of younger fiction writers (about whom I will devote a subsequent post), and NYU Professor Hala Halim’s comment that publishers and translators need to start thinking about translating critical and intellectual work from the region. I have been a fan of this idea for a long time, but reading Professor Halim’s statement from here in Cairo got me considering what exactly English language readers might be missing by having to consume a culture only through a few novels, stories, and books of poetry, without any exposure to the role and nature of the thinker in contemporary Arab culture.

An evening forum featuring one of Egypt’s most prominent intellectuals, Nasr Hamid Abû Zayd, the Ibn Rushd Chair and Professor of Humanism and Islam at Universiteit voor Humanistiek in Utrecht, the Netherlands, held May 3 at the American University in Cairo, gave me a piece of my answer . . .