Arabic Literature - Outside Views of Arabic Literature

Outside Views of Arabic Literature

Literature in Arabic has been largely unknown outside the Islamic world. Arabic has frequently acted as a time capsule, preserving literature form ancient civilisations to be re-discovered in Renaissance Europe and as a conduit for transmitting literature from distant regions. In this role though it is rarely read but simply re-translated into another standard language like Latin. One of the first important translations of Arabic literature was Robert of Ketton's translation of the Qur'an in the 12th century but it would not be until the early 18th century that much of Arabic's diverse literature would be recognised, largely due to Arabists such as Forster Fitzgerald Arbuthnot and his books such as Arabic Authors: A Manual of Arabian History and Literature.

Antoine Galland's translation of the Thousand and One Nights was the first major work in Arabic which found great success outside the Muslim world. Other significant translators were Friedrich Rückert and Richard Burton, along with many working at Fort William, India. The Arabic works and many more in other eastern languages fuelled a fascination in Orientalism within Europe. Works of dubious 'foreign' morals were particularly popular but even these were censored for content, such as homosexual references, which were not permitted in Victorian society. Most of the works chosen for translation helped confirm the stereotypes of the audiences with many more still untranslated. Few modern Arabic works have been translated into other languages.

However, towards the end of the twentieth century, there was an increase of translations of Arabic books into other languages, and Arabic authors began to receive acclaim. Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz has most if not all of his works translated after he won the 1988 Nobel Prize for Literature. Several other writers, including Abdul Rahman Munif and Tayeb Salih have been taken quite seriously by Western scholars, and both Alaa Al Aswany's The Yacoubian Building and Rajaa al-Sanea's Girls of Riyadh attracted significant Western media attention in the first decade of the 21st century.