In the Middle East, translation movements and the debates they have unleashed on language, culture and the politics and practices of identity have historically been tied to processes of state formation and administration, in the form of patronage, policy and publishing. Whether one considers the age of regional empires centred in Baghdad or Istanbul, or that of the modern nation-state from Egypt to Iran, this relationship points to the historical role of translation as a powerful and flexible tool of cultural politics. Nation and Translation in the Middle East focuses on this important aspect of translation in the region, with special emphasis on translation movements and the production of modernity in a historical context defined by European imperialism, enlightenment universalism, and globalization.

While the papers assembled in this special issue of The Translator each address specific translation histories and practices in the Middle East, the broader questions they raise regarding the location and the historicity of translation offer a fruitful intervention into contemporary debates in translation studies on difference, fidelity and the ethics of translation. The volume opens with two essays that situate translation at the intersection of national canons, postcolonial cultural hegemonies and 'private' market or activist-based initiatives in Egypt and Turkey. Other contributions discuss the utility of translation paradigms as a counterweight to the dominant orientalist historiography of modern print culture in the Arab World; the role of the translator as political agent and social reformer in twentieth-century Egypt; and the relationship between language, translation and the politics of identity in the multi-ethnic and multilingual Islamicate contexts of the Abbasid and Mughal Empires. The volume also includes a general bibliography on translation and the Middle East.