Editions, translations, transformations: refashioning the Arabic Aristotle in Egypt and metropolitan Europe, 1940–1980

The paper investigates how critical editions, like translations, participate in reshaping political concepts via language, focusing on Abd al-Rahman Badawi’s 1979 critical edition of the medieval Arabic Nicomachean Ethics. It sets the historical scene: two ninth-century translators (Eustathius and Ishaq ibn Hunayn) produced Arabic versions; the sole known surviving witness is the Fez manuscript (copied 1222 CE), partially rediscovered by Arberry (1951–52) and Dunlop (1959), with a complete modern critical edition eventually published by Akasoy and Fidora in 2005. Between Arberry’s and Dunlop’s deaths, Badawi issued his own edition (1979). The introduction situates Badawi within a complex post-colonial, trans-Mediterranean intellectual network: an Egyptian philosopher deeply engaged with European existentialism (notably Heidegger) and with Islamic philosophical traditions, holding nuanced views about orientalism and drawing on both European and Arab scholarly lineages. Badawi’s stated aim was to modernise Arabic philosophical discourse, extending Arab existentialism and enriching the Arabic philosophical lexicon. Accordingly, his edition sought both philological credibility among European classicists and accessibility for modern Arabic readers. The author contrasts Badawi’s aims with those of Akasoy and Fidora’s later edition, which privileged philological-historical analysis of the Arabic text and its value for Greek textual criticism. The paper poses the guiding claim: that a critical edition can be treated as a form of translation producing a hybrid “third text,” shaped by linguistic, discursive, and disciplinary parameters; the case study explores this via Badawi’s paratextual strategies and corpus-based lexical analysis around the concept of the citizen.

The study engages with translation studies and the historiography of textual criticism. It draws on Venuti’s framing of translation’s interpretive agency and Timpanaro’s account of nineteenth-century philology’s self-conception as an empirical science resistant to interpretation (Lachmann’s dictum to edit without interpreting). It mobilises Said’s reflections on orientalism and Renan’s ‘philological laboratory’ to contextualise how modern classicists treat Arabic witnesses of Greek texts. Against positivist ideals of mechanical reconstruction, the author argues editions are interpretive enterprises akin to translations. This framework informs the analysis of Badawi’s edition as a hybrid product shaped by classical philology, orientalism, and modern Arabic linguistic norms. The literature on the Arabic Nicomachean Ethics (Ullmann; Akasoy & Fidora) and on the Arabic political lexicon’s modern shifts (Ayalon) provides historical grounding for diachronic lexical comparisons between city-based (madina) and nation-based (watan) terminology.

The paper combines qualitative paratext analysis with corpus-based lexical analysis. Data sources: (1) Genealogies of Knowledge medieval Arabic subcorpus (≈3.28M tokens) comprising translated and original classical Arabic texts; (2) Genealogies of Knowledge ancient Greek subcorpus, with Bywater’s 1894 Nicomachean Ethics; (3) Sketch Engine Modern Arabic web corpus (arTenTen; ≈8.32B tokens). Due to repository practices, premodern corpora omit paratexts, so paratexts are analysed manually from the edition. The corpus analysis uses concordances to identify collocational patterns around Greek politēs (‘citizen’) in Aristotle, their medieval Arabic renderings (madina-derived terms), and the Modern Standard Arabic term muwāṭin (‘citizen’) that Badawi adopts in a lacunose passage he retranslated. The approach traces diachronic semantic shifts via collocations (e.g., family, law, obligations, needs, state services, public action) to evaluate how Badawi’s lexical choices align with modern Arabic usage and audience expectations.

• Material state of the source and editorial choices: The Fez manuscript is unique, damaged, and lacunose; Badawi acknowledges relying on the Greek text and especially Jules Tricot’s French translation to conjecturally fill gaps. His sectioning and headings mirror Tricot rather than Bywater; he relocates the spurious Arabic ‘Book Seven’ to an appendix; and he supplies extensive footnotes that explain lexicon, discuss Greek-Arabic equivalents, cite secondary literature, and even retranslate passages where the medieval Arabic misreads the Greek—thereby mediating and modernising reader experience. - Evidence of ‘third text’ hybridity: These paratextual and structural interventions produce an edition that is neither a pure transcription of the Fez manuscript nor a reconstruction of the archetype but a hybrid work shaped by classical philology, orientalist scholarship, modern Arabic discourse, and Badawi’s philosophical program. - Diachronic lexical analysis: In Aristotle’s Greek Ethics, politēs (≈10 instances) collocates with kinship, friends, laws, dangers, justice, and public goods, depicting citizens embedded in social relations within the city. Medieval Arabic translators render politēs via madina-based terms: Eustathius employs constructions like ahl al-madina, al-mushārik fī al-madina, alladhīn fī madina wāhida, and madanī(yīn); Ishaq uses ahl al-madina (sg.) and ahl al-mudun (pl.). Classical Arabic political texts continue this city-centric lexicon (madina/madanī). - Modern Arabic collocations diverge: In the arTenTen corpus, ahl al-madina (~58,000 hits) often bears religious-historical overtones (especially Medina in early Islam), while madanī (~132,000 hits) commonly means ‘civilian’ (vs. military) or ‘civil’ (civil law, civil society), misaligned with Aristotle’s politēs. By contrast, muwāṭin collocates with living/residing (ya‘īsh/yaqṭun/yaskun), suffering needs/hardship (faqr, amrāḍ, baṭāla; yu‘ānūna), basic needs provision (ta’mīn/tawfīr/taḥqīq/tablīya iḥtiyājāt), and public collective action (taja mma‘ū/iḥtashadū/tawāfadu) demanding services and rights—mirroring Aristotle’s depiction of citizens as agents within a community pursuing needs and the good life. - Editorial lexical intervention: In NE 1.9 (1099b28–32), missing in the manuscript, Badawi translates politai as muwāṭinīn instead of madina-derived terms, aligning with Modern Standard Arabic semantics and audience expectations. - Overall: The corpus evidence and paratextual practices support the thesis that Badawi’s edition operates as a translational act that refashions Aristotle’s Ethics for a modern Arab context, evidencing how editions can transform texts.

The findings substantiate the central claim that critical editing is an interpretive activity akin to translation. Badawi’s editorial strategies—reliance on Tricot for lacunae, retranslation in notes, modern sectioning and headings, relocation of spurious material, and extensive explanatory apparatus—reshape the Arabic Ethics into a hybrid ‘third text’ tailored to modern readers. The corpus-based comparisons show why city-based medieval terms (ahl al-madina, madanī) would poorly convey ‘citizen’ to a contemporary Arab audience; their modern collocations skew religious-historical or civilian/legal, whereas muwāṭin encodes everyday life, needs, state obligations, and public collective action—conceptually resonant with Aristotle’s citizen as a social-political agent pursuing the good life within a community. Thus, linguistic ‘priming’ from Modern Standard Arabic interacts with philological norms and orientalist/classicist discourses to shape editorial decisions. The study demonstrates the value of integrating corpus linguistics with traditional philological analysis to reveal how editions mediate conceptual transmission across languages, periods, and political imaginaries (city → nation).

The paper concludes that critical editions are best viewed on a spectrum with translations: both are interpretive, transformative acts constrained by textual, linguistic, and disciplinary parameters. In Badawi’s case, Modern Standard Arabic usage, French classics scholarship (Tricot), and norms of classical/Arabic philology, along with orientalist frameworks and his philosophical program, jointly shaped a hybrid edition of the Arabic Nicomachean Ethics. Corpus evidence shows a diachronic shift from city-based to nation-based citizenship in Arabic, explaining Badawi’s anachronistic but coherent choice of muwāṭin to render politēs in a lacunose passage. Recognising editions as translations clarifies how they can actively refashion canonical works for new audiences. The study advocates complementing traditional textual criticism with corpus-based approaches to better understand how editorial choices influence the evolution of political concepts.

• Corpus design constraints: Premodern corpora omit paratexts due to source repositories’ markup and consistency concerns; thus, paratextual analysis could not be conducted via the corpora and relied on manual reading. - Data access: Modern Arabic raw texts (Sketch Engine) and many Classical Arabic texts are subject to copyright/proprietary restrictions, limiting full-text verification beyond concordances. - Case specificity: The study centers on a single editor (Badawi) and a single work, which may limit generalizability across genres or editors. - Historical anachronism acknowledged: Using muwāṭin for politēs is philologically anachronistic; the study arguments rest on modern collocational fit rather than historical equivalence. - Manuscript context: The unique, damaged Fez manuscript and missing folios complicate clear separation of editorial reconstruction from translation proper, which may not extrapolate to traditions with multiple witnesses.