Gustave Le Bon’s works were translated into Arabic by leading Egyptian intellectuals

Evidence

Ahmad Fathi Zaghlul, Sirr tatawwur al-umam (Cairo: Matbaat al-Maarif, 1913), a translation of Le Bon’s Lois psychologiques de l’évolution des peuples, 12th ed. (Paris: Alcan, 1916), translated into English as The Psychology of Peoples (New York: Macmillan, 1898); Taha Husayn, Ruh al-tarbiya (Cairo: Dar al-Hilal, 1922), a translation of Le Bon’s Psychologie de l’éducation (Paris: Flammarion, 1904; nouvelle edition, 1912, ‘augmenté de plusieurs chapitres sur les méthodes d’éducation en Amérique et sur l’enseignement donné aux indigènes des colonies’); Ahmad Fathi Zaghlul also translated Le Bon’s Aphorisms du temps présent (Paris: Flammarion, 1913), published posthumously as Jawami al-kalim (Cairo: al-Matbaa al-Rahmaniyya, 1922). — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 847

Categorization

• DEFINE: Notable detail: the French edition Le Bon’s education psychology was augmented with chapters on ‘l’enseignement donné aux indigènes des colonies’ — colonial pedagogy embedded in the source text.
• SEED: Article angle: how Taha Husayn, a towering figure of the Egyptian liberal age, translated a European text explicitly framed around educating colonial ‘indigènes’ — the importation of the colonial gaze into native self-improvement discourse.