Analysis Of Al Tahtawi

Rifa’a al-Tahtawi and the Translation of La Marseillaise

Rifa'a al-Tahtawi was one of the first Arab authors to introduce the ideas of the Enlightenment to the Arab audience via his native Egypt. Tahtawi’s own introduction to these ideas came when he was selected as part of one of Muhammad Ali’s university missions to France (we are of course referring to the governor of Egypt during the Ottoman Empire and not the boxer). Tahtawi was in France between 1826 and 1831, and out of this trip came his famous translation of La Marseillaise. Tahtawi’s translation is remarkable in that it highlights a very conscious and for the most part successful effort to avoid losing meaning through translation, and this is especially impressive when one considers

In the original Marseillaise, one verse reads, “Liberté, liberté chérie, Combats avec tes défenseurs!” This intends to show how liberty fights those who would oppose it via those who would defend it. Tahtawi spins the relationship when he says, “تمانع عن بنيها ما يهم”, meaning “liberty protects its children from evil”. Here, the combination of the two meanings leads to a deeper allegory of the self-reinforcing mechanism of freedom within the concept of “patrie”: the freedom it guarantees protects its people and the people are the ones who would keep this liberty safe. However, Tahtawi here has also hinted at the fact that he himself believes in this product of the Enlightenment when he chooses to call everything which is not freedom “evil”. This choice was clearly deliberate since the word “evil” does not even appear in the original French and in that case, the enemies of the “patrie” are simply left indefinite and value-free. Moreover, this shows how Tahtawi was positively moved by his experience in France since the idea of the state guaranteeing individual liberties was hardly commonplace in his home country of Egypt but was likely an idea that appealed to