Note on Translation
Amel penned part one of his essay ‘Colonialism and Underdevelopment’ in French. When he presented it to al-Tariq’s editor Mohammad Dakroub, the latter implored him to submit an Arabic version. Amel returned with an Arabic copy that impressed Dakroub.1 From then on, all of Amel’s major works were written and published in Arabic. In this translated collection, we have striven to preserve the concise yet dense Arabic writing style of Amel while seeking to maintain sentence flow and idiomatic soundness. Any apparent opaqueness must not deter readers from delving deeper, no more than similar shortcomings of European philosophy stand in the way of trying to make sense of it.
Some of Amel’s arguments can be drawn out or repetitive, which may be a reflection of Amel’s consciously didactic approach to analytical reasoning. But others open up new heuristic horizons. Amel was meticulous in his choice of vocabulary and innovative in his derivation of Arabic terminology intended to reflect the theoretically rich nature of his arguments. We have tried to reflect this in the translation. Frequently employed concepts which have a clear equivalence in the Hegelian, Marxian, or Islamic philosophical traditions were often rendered in their English equivalent. These include the roots and derivatives of terms like differentiation (tafaruq), identification (tamathul), determination (tahaddud), universality (kawniyya), particularity (tamayyuz), development or evolution (tatawwur), unity (wihda), domination (saytara), hegemony (haymana), overexploitation (faʾid al-istighlal), financial oligarchy (tughma maliyya), principal contradiction (tanaqud raʾisi), antagonistic contradiction (tanaqud tanahuri), cultural heritage (al-turath), Islamic law (shariʿa), and Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh).
Other concepts had more than one possible equivalent, and were therefore trickier to translate. The concept of takhalluf could be translated as ‘underdevelopment’ or ‘backwardness’. Both terms were in common usage during Amel’s time in anti-colonial literature. Given the preponderance of ‘underdevelopment’ today and the negative association of ‘backwardness’, we opted for the former in most cases, particularly in reference to political economy, and the latter only in relation to questions of culture. The concept of tawazun haymani was generally rendered hegemonic ‘balance’ rather than ‘equilibrium’.
We were less strict in translating the concept of bunya ijtimaʿiyya, using either ‘social structure’ (for the most part), or ‘social formation’. In line with contemporary terminology, we translated al-insan (human) as man. Still other concepts were much more tied to the colonial context, rendering their translation far from straightforward. This applied to certain fundamental features of the Colonial Mode of Production (CoMP) like dead-locked contradiction (tanaqud maʾziqi) and crisis-ridden contradiction (tanaqud azami). Other CoMP-related concepts have an equivalent in dependency or world systems theory parlance, but they do not fully capture Amel’s articulation. A primary example is al-burjwaziyya al-istiʿmariyya, which we translated as ‘colonialist bourgeoisie’. The more conventional translation would have been the ‘metropolitan bourgeoisie’. We could have also used “imperialist bourgeoisie”. Our reasoning was as follows: Firstly, Amel could have used the transliterated form (metroboliyya) since he makes reference once to the word in its transliterated form. He also uses other transliterated concepts like ‘imbiryaliyya’ to denote ‘imperialism’ and ‘kulunyaliyya’ to denote ‘colonial’. Secondly, Amel generally avoided terms like core and periphery which privilege the social reality of capitalist countries, by placing them at the core, over that of their colonised counterparts, and metropole can carry such a signification. Lastly, ‘colonialist bourgeoisie’ is used in the translation of Frantz Fanon’s canonical anti-colonial text, which sets a precedent. By opting for the less common usage, we might have steered clear of conventional usage in dependency theory literature, but we believe that we have stayed closer to the course of Amel’s own conceptual universe. A less challenging but highly significant choice of translation was the distinction between nationalist (qawmi) and national (watani). While the difference is not always significant in English, it is highly so in the context of national liberation movements. The national (as opposed to nationalist) struggle denoted the anti-colonial form of class struggle and thereby has a very progressive connotation in Arabic compared to a nationalist struggle. With rare exceptions, we dropped the transliterated term so as not to interrupt flow.
Overall, we have tried to be as truthful to the original meaning in terms of both text and context while remaining attentive to readership expectations. We did so knowing that translation is not always possible, let alone perfect.
See Hamdan 2018, p. 437.