On Translation and Being Just: The Arabic Novel and the British Archive

Abstract Through comparative readings of a single violent event, this article argues that translation functions simultaneously as a technology of imperial governance, a ground for the critique of legal justice, and a practice through which to theorize alternative forms of redress. The Dinshaway affair was a 1906 court case in which four Egyptians were hanged and seventeen were flogged or imprisoned for the death of one British soldier. It became a global symbol of injustice and a spark for anti-imperial activism. The author places the British trial documents in conversation with a contemporaneous Arabic novelization of the event. Reading across these divergent texts, the author investigates how translation shaped Dinshaway, and how Dinshaway might yet reshape conceptions of justice. In the archive, British officials use untranslatability to justify delay, absence, and fatal error. Maḥmūd Ṭāhir Ḥaqqī’s novel The Maiden of Dinshaway dramatizes this, turning on instances of miscommunication in the colonial courtroom. The novel’s own mis/translation of Victor Hugo ultimately rejects legal justice (‘adl) in favor of a violent, divine, disproportionate compassion (raḥma). The author ends by asking whether raḥma might inform reparative modes of comparison and translation today.