Heterotopia as a Site of Cross-Cultural Collaboration: Ibrāhīm Al-Dusūqī and Edward Lane

Abstract

Egyptian scholars' encounters with European Orientalists in the 19th century have been overdetermined by the imperial subtext and accompanying inequalities of power emphasized by Edward Said in Orientalism. At most, as Shaden Tageldin contends, the encounter with European Orientalism would offer the local collaborator the chance to seek power through empire and translate himself into the figure of the European—to repress the inequalities of empire rather than confront them. Edward Lane and Ibrahim al-Dusūqī have crystallized in this literature respectively as the consummate anthropologist-spy and the gullible informant. The history of their collaboration in 1840s Cairo on an edition of the Tāj al-‘arūs and the Arabic–English Lexicon, however, suggests less overdetermined possibilities. Al-Dusūqī's memoir of his seven-year collaboration with Lane describes a shared quest (however fragile) for a heterotopia where their worldviews might dovetail and overlap.

Notes

¹Ibrāhīm al-Dusūqī, “Essay,” in Ali Mubarak, al-Khitat al-Tawfiqiyya al-jadida etc., Bulaq 1887-8, pp. 13.

²A. Amin, “Al-Shaikh al-Dasuqi and Mr. Lane,” in Faid al-Khatir, Cairo 1965, pp. 48.

³Edward William Lane, An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, Written in Egypt during the Years 1833, -34, and -35, Partly from Notes Made During a Former Visit to that Country in the Years 1825, -26, -27, and -28 ([1836] Reprinted Cairo: AUC Press, 2003); Edward William Lane, The Thousand and One Nights, Commonly Called, in England, the Arabian Nights' Entertainments. A New Translation from the Arabic, with Copious Notes (London: Charles Knight and Co., 1839–1841); Edward William Lane, An Arabic–English Lexicon. Derived from the Best and the Most Copious Eastern Sources: Comprising a Very Large Collection Of Words and Significations Omitted in the Kamoos, with Supplements to its Abridged and Defective Explanations, in Prose and Verse (London: Williams and Norgate, 1863–1893).

⁴Jason Thompson, Edward William Lane, The Life of the Pioneering Egyptologist and Orientalist (Cairo: AUC Press, 2010).

⁵Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978); and Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing: Orientalists and their Enemies (London: Allen Lane, 2006).

⁶See James Clifford's ‘Traveling Cultures,’ in Cultural Studies, ed. Grossberg et al. (New York: Routledge, 1992), 96–116.

⁷‘This is no doubt a very shocking state of matters, and must appear strange to those who have been accustomed to consider the maintenance of any religion as essentially dependent upon the existence of an establishment, and a regularly trained priesthood. Islamism, however, supports itself without possessing either of these accessories, in the sense in which they are understood in Europe. It is a religion that entwines itself with the habits of daily life, which it has mainly contributed to form, and continually affecting the actions and conduct of its votaries, it acquires a hold on their natures sufficient to maintain itself, even with the poor means provided for the celebration of its worship.’ Anonymous, ‘Modern Egypt and the Modern Egyptians,’ The Edinburgh Review LXV (1837): 154. See also the anonymous review in theQuarterly Review 59 (1837): 165–203.

⁸Ibrāhīm al-Dusūqī, “Essay,” in Ali Mubarak, al-Khitat al-Tawfiqiyya al-jadida etc., Bulaq 1887-8, 12.

⁹Ibid., 12.

¹⁰Lane, An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians: The Definitive 1860 edition, ed. Jason Thompson (Cairo; AUC Press, 2003), 263–75.

¹¹Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics 16 (Spring 1986), p. 25.

¹²‘[Review of] An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians,' Quarterly Review, 195–203.

¹³‘It has been suggested that the performances were effected by means of pictures and a concave mirror; and that the images of the former were reflected from the surface of the mirror, and received on a cloud of smoke under the eyes of the boy. This however, I cannot admit; because such means could not have been employed without my perceiving them.’ An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, 275n.

¹⁴Sophia Poole, The Englishwoman in Egypt: Letters from Cairo, Written During a Residence there in 1842, 3, & 4, ed. Azza Kararah, 3 vols (London: Charles Knight and Co., 1844–1846; reprint Cairo: AUC Press, 2003).

¹⁵‘Many of their communications I have written in Arabic, at their dictation, and since translated, and inserted in the following pages,' Lane writes in his ‘Author's Preface' to An Account of the Manners and Customs of Modern Egyptians (xx). See also Thompson, Edward William Lane, 295.

¹⁶Al-Dusūqī, ‘Essay,’ 12.

¹⁷ Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (London: Tavistock, 1970; Les Mot et les Choses, Paris: Gallimard, 1966).

¹⁸Al-Dusuqi, ‘Essay,’ 11.

¹⁹Thompson, Edward William Lane, 521.

²⁰‘I trust that I shall not be thought vain if I add that several learned Arabs, besides my own Sheykh, have expressed astonishment (not to myself, but to others) at many of my critical observations, & explanations of passages in the Lexicons which they did not themselves previously understand.’ Lane to Lord Prudhoe, 22 July 1843, quoted in Thompson, Edward William Lane, 521.

²¹Thompson, Edward William Lane, 677.

²²Lane sketched the plans of the upper two floors of his house in Harat al-Sakkayin in a letter to his brother Richard Lane dated January 1843, interleaved in Richard's copy of Modern Egyptians (Dupre Collection), cited and reproduced in Thompson, Edward William Lane, 519 and 534–5, respectively.

²³Al-Dusūqī, ‘Essay,’ 11.

²⁴Peter Stocks cited in Thompson, Edward William Lane, 505n.

²⁵Quoted in Thompson, Edward William Lane, 505.

²⁶Al-Dusūqī, ‘Essay,’ 11–12.

²⁷Ibid., 10–12.

²⁸Ibid., 10.

²⁹Ibid., 12.

³⁰Ibid., 12.

³¹Ibid., 12.

³²Ibid., 12.

³³Poole, The Englishwoman in Egypt, 175.

³⁴‘Islam, too, knows of angels. The Muslims of Cairo live blotted out by angels, the real world virtually deluged by the angelic, for according to Edward William Lane, each follower of the Prophet is assigned two guardian angels, or five, or sixty, or one hundred sixty.’ Esther Allen, trans., ‘A History of Angels,’ in Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Non-fictions (New York: Penguin, 1999), 17.

³⁵Stanley Lane-Poole, ‘Edward William Lane: Memoir’, in Lane, An Arabic–English Lexicon, 6: xxxvii.

³⁶Ahmed Amin, A. Amin, “Al-Shaikh al-Dasuqi and Mr. Lane,” in Faid al-Khatir, Cairo 1965, pp. 39–50.

³⁷Lane-Poole, ‘Edward William Lane: Memoir’, 6: xxxiv.

³⁸Amin, ‘Sheikh al-Dusuqi and Mr. Lane,’ 50.

³⁹Ibid., 50.

⁴⁰Wen-chin Ouyang, ‘Fictive Mode, ‘Journey to the West,’ and Transformation of Space: ‘Alī Mubārak's Discourses of Modernization,’ Comparative Critical Studies 4, no. 3 (2007): 348.

⁴¹Amin, ‘The Story of ‘Alam al-Din,’ ‘Qissat ‘Alam al-Din,' al-Thaqafa 3 (1941): 745.

⁴²The subject of the commentaries he appended to the academic works in these areas that he edited.

⁴³Ouyang, ‘Fictive Mode,’ 348–9.

⁴⁴For ‘Alī Mubārak's ‘Alam al-Dīn (The Sign of Religion, 1882), see ibid., 331–58.

⁴⁵Leila Ahmed, Edward Lane: A Study (New York: Prentice Hall, 1978).

⁴⁶In their absence too much of the evidence available is mediated through a common acquaintance who had a disliking for al-Dusūqī and dates to the time Lane began to regard al-Dusūqī as a rival given the imminent publication of his edition of Tāj al-‘arūs.

⁴⁷Although the continued funding of the dictionary was not a given.