State-sponsored translation supplied Egypt’s cultural content because the Arab world lagged in translations

Evidence

In 1995, perhaps in response to UN reports that the ‘Arab World’ produced far fewer translations of foreign language works than any other major region on the planet, the Majlis al-‘Ala lil-Thaqafah (Supreme Council of Culture), an adjunct of Egypt’s Ministry of Education, launched a massive Translation Project under the direction of Dr Gaber Asfour. Over the following decade the Project published no less than one thousand translations (usually in runs of 1,000 copies), including works by, or on, Neruda, Rousseau, Trotsky, Pessoa, Kafka, Eliot, Hegel, Sartre, Woolf, Foucault, Cavafy, Chomsky, and Freud. Most of the early titles were pirated, including IC (No. 81). The books are sold at low, subsidized prices, and are distributed almost entirely in Egypt. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 813

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the Islamophobia field’s interest in how Arabic-language intellectual worlds were built and how Western theory entered them — a concrete pipeline for how critical-theory vocabulary gets diffused.

Related

• Arabic translation of ancient texts peaked between 750 and 900 AD (similarity 0.81)