Le Bon’s book on Arab civilization circulated in Arabic translation in the Arab east

Evidence

Gustave Le Bon, La civilisation des Arabes (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1884), translated in installments in al-Mufid (see Rashid Khalidi, ‘Abd al-Ghani al-Uraisi and al-Mufid; the press and Arab nationalism before 1914', in Martin R. Buheiry, ed., Intellectual Life in the Arab East, 1890–1939 (Beirut: American University of Beirut Press, 1981), p. 41); and Les premières civilisations (Paris: Marpon et Flammarion, 1889), trans. Muhammad Sadiq Rustum, al-Hadara al-misriyya (Cairo: al-Matbaa al-Asriyya, n.d.). — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 848

Categorization

• XREF: Le Bon’s La civilisation des Arabes in Arabic translation pairs with Mitchell’s larger argument about how Egyptian nationalist intellectuals absorbed the orientalist/colonial framework that described them.
• CANDY: A French orientalist wrote a book celebrating Arab civilization that Egyptians then translated — the colonizer’s flattery recycled as native self-knowledge.