Translating machiavelli in Egypt: The prince and the shaping of a new political vocabulary in the nineteenth-century arab mediterranean

Abstract

The chapter questions the current Eurocentric paradigm of the reception of Machiavelli’s Prince by looking at its first Arabic translation, conceived in 1832 in Cairo at the court of Muḥammad ‘Alī (r. 1805-1848). The translation appeared in Egypt at a crucial moment in its historical trajectory, marked by projects of nation-building and modernisation. The chapter focuses particularly on the analysis of the language used by the translator. His transformation of Machiavelli’s language shows the effort at shaping a modern political vocabulary inspired by The Prince while maintaining close relations with the semantics of traditional Islamic concepts. The chapter also discusses the second translation of The Prince, published in Cairo in 1912. The analysis of the language, circulation and reception of both works, raises a number of issues relating to the emergence of new concepts of governance, citizenship and socio-political power in nineteenth-century Egypt and the Arab Mediterranean.