Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 September 2021
This article focuses on the Chouf-born poet, lawyer and translator Wadiʿ al-Bustani (1888–1954), who called himself a “Lebanese Palestinian,” as he moves from Beirut, to Cairo, Hudaydah, Bombay, Transvaal, and finally Haifa. The first to translate Tagore into Arabic after a visit to his Santiniketan in 1916, Bustani spent his life annotating and translating into Arabic the Mahabharata, the Ramayana, and Kalidasa's Shakuntala . Alongside his self-professed and self-funded philological project, Bustani was one of the most important poets and lawyers in British Mandate Palestine, inspiring protest with his verse and litigating against colonial land policies. By focusing on Bustani's relation to British imperial culture, his political commitments in Palestine, and the contours of his indological project, this article uncovers a new history of global philology and an enabling colonial frame, long hidden in the many narrations of orientalism's travel and Palestine's colonization.
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20 Empire's centrality in the making of modern British literary and cultural institutions and sensibilities was among the central concerns of postcolonial studies, and therefore constitutes a massive body of work produced over several decades; see, for example, Benita Parry, Delusions and Discoveries: Studies on India in the British Imagination, 1880–1930 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1972); Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York, 1993); Catherine Hall, Civilizing Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination 1830–1867 (Chicago, 2002). On the question of the English language and pedagogy specifically see Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (New York, 1989); and Sanjay Seth, Subject Lessons: The Western Education of Colonial India (Durham, NC, 2007).
21 Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago, 2005), 260; Arie L. Molendijk, Friedrich Max Müller and the Sacred Books of the East (Oxford, 2016), 57–8.
22 Wadiʿ al-Bustani, “Al-ustath Margoliouth,” al-Zuhur, 1 Oct. 1911, 413–15.
23 Aamir Mufti, Forget English! Orientalisms and World Literatures (Cambridge, MA, 2016), 11, original emphasis. On Arab intellectuals’ schooling in orientalism see Ronen Raz, “The Transparent Mirror: Arab Intellectuals and Orientalism, 1798–1950” (Ph.D. thesis, Princeton University, 1997); Anne-Laure Dupont, “How Should the History of the Arabs Be Written? The Impact of European Orientalism in Jurji Zaidan Work,” in George C. Zaidan and Thomas Philipp, eds., Jurji Zaidan: Contributions to Modern Arab Thought and Literature. Proceedings of a Symposium, The Library of Congress (Bethesda, 2013), 85–122; and the relevant chapters of Susannah Heschel and Umar Ryad, eds., The Muslim Reception of European Orientalism: Reversing the Gaze (New York, 2019).
24 John Yohannan, Persian Poetry in England and America: A 200-Year History (Delmar, NY, 1977), 199.
25 Wadiʿ al-Bustani, “Muqaddimah,” in Bustani, Rubʿiyat ʿUmar al-Khayyam (Cairo, 1912), 5–29, at 5.
26 Yaseen Noorani, “Translating World Literature into Arabic and Arabic into World Literature: Sulayman al-Bustani's al-Ilyadha and Ruhi al-Khalidi's Arabic Rendition of Victor Hugo,” in Marilyn Booth, ed., Migrating Texts: Circulating Translations around the Ottoman Mediterranean (Edinburgh, 2019), 236–65, at 243.
27 John M. Willis, “Making Yemen Indian: Rewriting the Boundaries of Imperial Arabia,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 41/1 (2009), 23–88, at 24.
28 al-Bustani, “Dibajat al-muʿarib,” 10.
29 On Tagore's trip to Egypt see Ahmad Muhammad Ahmad ‘Abd al-Rahman, “Rihlat Tagore ila Misr,” Thaqafatul Hind 62/4 (2011), 85–100; on Iraq see Salma al-Youzbaki, “Tagore in Iraq: Poet and Educator,” Bulletin of the College of Arts, University of Baghdad 20 (1977), 149–65.
30 “Tagore fi al-lugha al-ʿArabiyya,” al-Risala, 10 Nov. 1941, 1387.
31 Khuri-Makdisi, The Eastern Mediterranean and the Making of Global Radicalism, 44.
32 Rabindranath Tagore, “Ila buhayrati: min diwan al-Bustani,” trans. Wadiʿ al-Bustani, al-Funun, May 1918, 318–19. On al-Funun see Richard Alan Popp, “Al-Funun: The Making of an Arab-American Literary Journal” (Ph.D. thesis, Georgetown University, 2000).
33 Mikhail Naimy, “Fi ʿalam al-ta'lif: al-Bustani,” al-Funun, June 1918, 461–4, at 462.
34 Ibid., 463.
35 Wadiʿ al-Bustani, “Ghand Rabindranath Tagore,” al-Hilal, June 1916, 716–21, at 716. Earlier, in May 1916, al-Hilal published an article of Bustani's on Tagore which included translations of three of Tagore's poems into Arabic.
36 Ibid., 719–20.
37 See Michael Collins's well-researched study of Tagore's connections with the British and the circumstances of his being awarded the Nobel Prize. Michael Collins, “History and the Postcolonial: Rabindranath Tagore's Reception in London, 1912–1913,” International Journal of the Humanities 4/9 (2007), 71–83.
38 Abd al-Rahman Yaghi, Hayat al-adab al-Filastini al-hadith min awwal al-nahda hatta al-nakba (Beirut, 1968), 176.
39 W.F. Boustany [Wadiʿ al-Bustani], The Quatrains of War (Transvaal, 1915), 7. My thanks to Mahmoud Elewa for helping me acquire a copy of this text.
40 Ibid., 10.
41 al-Bustani, Al-Filastiniyyat, 82.
42 Milhim Ibrahim al-Bustani, Al-Salsibil (Jounieh, 1968), 191.
43 Laura Robson, Colonialism and Christianity in Mandate Palestine (Austin, 2011), 9. See also Noah Haiduc-Dale, Arab Christians in British Mandate Palestine: Communalism and Nationalism, 1917–1948 (Edinburgh, 2013); and Nicholas E. Roberts, Islam under the Palestine Mandate: Colonialism and the Supreme Muslim Council (London and New York, 2017).
44 Ussama Makdisi, Age of Coexistence: The Ecumenical Frame and the Making of the Modern Arab World (Oakland, 2019).
45 Wadiʿ al-Bustani, “Kulna Muslimin,” al-Zahra’, 1 March 1925, 183–5.
46 Thomas Hippler, Governing from the Skies: A Global History of Aerial Bombing (New York, 2017), 71.
47 al-Bustani, “Kulna Muslimin,” 185.
48 Ibid., 184.
49 Khalid Sulaiman, Palestine and Modern Arab Poetry (London, 1984), 21.
50 al-Bustani, Al-Falistiniyyat (Beirut, 1946). The book is dedicated to “the friend of the Arabs” Frances Emily Newton, an English missionary expelled from Palestine by the British in 1938 for writing against British colonial practices in the Mandate. Bustani translated her memoirs into Arabic and served as her lawyer.
51 Ibid., 202.
52 Ibid., 205
53 Nicholas E. Roberts, “Making Jerusalem the Centre of the Muslim World: Pan-Islam and the World Islamic Congress of 1931,” Contemporary Levant 4/1 (2019), 52–63.
54 Maoz Azaryahu and Yitzhak Reiter, “The Geopolitics of Interment: An Inquiry into the Burial of Muhammad Ali in Jerusalem, 1931,” Israel Studies 20/1 (2015), 31–56, at 49. In general, the authors construe any support or good feeling expressed in the Arab press regarding Ali's burial as evidence of al-Husseini's propaganda, never the possibility that Palestinians felt any Eastern or anticolonial solidarity despite their differences with al-Husseini.
55 Sulayman Jubran, Nazarah jadidah ʿala al-shiʿr al-Filastini fi ʿAhd al-Intidab (Haifa, 2006) 50.
56 Ghassan Kanafani, “Thawra 1936–39 fi Filastin: Khalifat wa tafasil wa tahlil,” Shuʿun Filastiniyya 6 (1972), 45–77, at 57. Bustani himself is the source of this exchange, which is recounted in al-Bustani, Al-Falistiniyyat, 114.
57 A. L. Tibawi, Anglo-Arab Relations and the Question of Palestine, 1921–1921 (London, 1978), 270.
58 “Summary of the Proceedings of the Sixth Palestine Arab Congress,” The National Archives, Kew, CO 733/47/Appendix 6. That same year Bustani was part of the Palestinian delegation to London.
59 W. F. Boustany [Wadiʿ al-Bustani], The Palestine Mandate: Invalid and Impracticable. A Contribution of Arguments and Documents towards the Solution of the Palestine Problem (Beirut, 1936).
60 Ibid., 71
61 Ibid., 129
62 Al-Hilal, Feb. 1937, 472–3; al-Mashriq, Jan.–March 1937, 145–6; see also the review in Filastin, 3 Nov. 1936, 6.
63 In 1921, the British administration established what were called simply the Jerusalem Law Classes. In a building that once housed Russian pilgrims to the Holy City, Arabs and Jews would spend their evenings studying the new law of the land, an orientalist amalgamation of what British administrators imagined Ottoman law to be and English legal norms. The curriculum was developed by the attorney general of Mandate Palestine, Norman Bentwich, a British Zionist who had previously been posted in Cairo. Taught at night so officials could attend, the law classes were a five-year program of instruction which provided a diploma that allowed one to practice law in the Mandate. See H. Kantrovich, “The Jerusalem Law Classes,” Journal of the Society of Public Teachers of Law, 1937, 46–9; Donald M. Reid, Lawyers and Politics in the Arab World, 1880–1960 (Minneapolis and Chicago, 1981), 297–8; Assaf Likhovski, Law and Identity in Mandate Palestine (Chapel Hill, 2006), 112–14; Robson, Colonialism and Christianity in Mandate Palestine, 51–4.
64 Munir Fakher Eldin, “Communities of Owners: Land Law, Governance, and Politics in Palestine, 1858–1948” (Ph.D. thesis, New York University, 2008), 59. See also Eldin, “British Framing of the Frontier in Palestine, 1918–1923: Revisiting Colonial Sources on Tribal Insurrection, Land Tenure, and the Arab Intelligentsia,” Jerusalem Quarterly 60 (2014), 42–58.
65 Chaim Weizmann, Trial and Error: The Autobiography of Chaim Weizmann, vol. 2 (Philadelphia, 1949), 276. Bustani went on to translate Weizmann's autobiography into Arabic.
66 In order of appearance: Bernard Wasserstein, “‘Clipping the Claws of Colonisers’: Arab Officials in the Government of Palestine, 1917–48,” Middle Eastern Studies 13/2 (May 1977), 171–94, at 191 n. 32; Philip Graves, Palestine, the Land of Three Faiths (London, 1923), 11; Gershon Agronsky, “Inquiry Commission to Examine Grand Mufti Monday in Own Home,” Jewish Daily Bulletin, 1 Dec. 1929, 12; “Note by Herbert Samuel,” 21 July 1923, The National Archives, Kew, CO 733/54/427; M. Perlmann, “Chapters of Arab Jewish Diplomacy, 1918–22,” Jewish Social Studies 6/2 (1944), 123–54, at 131.
67 Al-Jahiz, “al-Adab w al-fan fi al-usbuʿ: saʿa maʿ al-ustath Wadiʿ al-Bustani,” al-Risala 15 (31 March 1947), 376.
68 Fuad al-Bustani, “Qissat al-muʿarib,” 8.
69 Partha Chatterjee, “The Disciplines in Colonial Bengal,” in Chatterjee, ed., Texts of Power: Emerging Disciplines in Colonial Bengal (Minneapolis, 1995), 1–29; Omnia El Shakry, The Great Social Laboratory: Subjects of Knowledge in Colonial and Postcolonial Egypt (Stanford, 2007); Durba Mitra, Indian Sex Life: Sexuality and the Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought (Princeton, 2020).
70 Sheldon Pollock, “Future Philology? The Fate of a Soft Science in a Hard World,” Critical Inquiry 35/4 (2009), 931–61, at 956. See also Pollock, “Towards a Political Philology: D. D. Kosambi and Sanskrit,” Economic and Political Weekly, 26 July 2008, 52–9; Pollock, “Comparison without Hegemony,” in Barbro Klein and Hans Joas, eds., The Benefit of Broad Horizons: Intellectual and Institutional Preconditions for a Global Social Science, Leiden, 2010), 185–204; Pollock, “Liberating Philology,” Verge: Studies in Global Asias 1/1 (2015), 16–21; Pollock, “Conundrums of Comparison,” Know: A Journal on the Formation of Knowledge 1/2 (2017), 273–94. See also Said, Edward, Humanism and Democratic Criticism (New York, 2004)Google Scholar.
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79 Ibid., 17.
80 Ibid., 5–6
81 Ibid., 15.
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83 Ibid., 16.
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86 Kalidasa, al-Shakuntala, trans. Wadiʿ al-Bustani (New Delhi, 1966).
87 Wadiʿ al-Bustani, trans., Al-Ramayana (Abu Dhabi, 2012).
88 al-‘Arayyed, Ibrahim, “Al-shiʿr wa qadiyatu fi al-adab al-Arabi al-hadith,” Al-Abhath 7/2 (1954), 139–88Google Scholar. The only other scholarly mention of Bustani's indology after his death is from a publication by the ICCR itself, and even then exceedingly brief. Ashraf, M. S., “India in Arabic Literature,” in Ashraf, India and World Literature (New Delhi, 1990), 211–18Google Scholar.
89 “Al-Falsifa al-Hindiyya al-qadima,” al-Risala, 17 Feb. 1947, 209.
90 Moseh Yitah to Mr. T. Eshbal, 9 Feb. 1949, Israel State Archives (ISA), 1329/19-C. The Ministry of Minority Affairs, the only Israeli ministry not based on a department within the Yishuv, would close in July 1949, scarcely a year after its founding.
91 Wadiʿ al-Bustani to Moshe Yitah, 15 June 1953. I thank Nora Boustany for sharing this document with me from her personal archive.
92 ‘Wadiʿ al-Bustani, “ʿIrfan,” al-Adib 7 (July 1953), 6.