On 25 August 1905, at al-Jumhur Printing House ‘next to the Khedival Library and [Museum of] Arabic Antiquities’ on al-Khalij Street in Cairo, printing was completed of a translation by Salim Qub‘ayn (1870–1951). This book was an Arabic rendering of Azerbaijani scholar Ahmad Aghayev’s (1869–1939) Russian-language treatise on the relationship between ‘Islam’ and ‘women’ (1901). A journalist, public intellectual and political activist, Aghayev supported Azerbaijani nationalism; moved between the Russian and Ottoman Empires and Iran; and thought in five languages. Also known as Ahmet Ağaoğlu, he would relocate to the Ottoman capital in 1909 due to political pressures in Azerbaijan.

By 1905, the relationship between ‘Islam’, ‘women’ and the modern era had been a topic of intense debate and publication across the Ottoman Empire for two decades, and – as the volume before you attests – was at the thematic core of much translation energy. The Rights of Women in Islam was one of Aghayev’s earlier works. It was one of Qub‘ayn’s earliest books, too, but not his first. He had published translation-adaptations of works by Tolstoy and, having relocated to Cairo from Palestine in 1897, founded periodicals in which translations from the Russian appeared.

In translation, Aghayev’s treatise cited a linguistically and generically eclectic range of sources: an Indian periodical, French orientalist Ernest Renan (whom Aghayev had known in Paris), Voltaire (with verses in French, carried over untranslated into the Arabic) and German orientalist Max Müller. Aghayev referenced the first Russian translation of the Qur’an to be made directly from Arabic into Russian; the Ruba‘iyyat of Omar al-Khayyam; the Shahnameh; works by Anglophone and Russophone scholars (such as George Rawlinson’s on ancient ‘eastern’ monarchies); and an essay on ‘women’s influence in Islam’ by the Bengali lawyer and writer Syed Ameer Ali, who wrote in English and sought to influence public opinion in Britain. The famous Persian Shi‘i tafsir of Mulla Fathallah Kashani made an appearance, as did ‘the book Ashhar al-nisa’ (‘The most famous women’) by the late Mu‘tamad al-Saltana, Minister of Education in the government of Iran’. Aghayev drew on premodern Arabophone scholar-compilers (al-Tabari, al-Suyuti, Ibn Khaldun, al-Mas‘udi), too, as well as the ancient Persian Zendavesta.