Crusoe’s Babel, Missionaries’ Mistakes

Abstract

This chapter discusses Robinson Crusoe, the differences between the original and its Arabic translation, and how it was used as a tool for conversion by the Church Missionary Society (CMS) to guide Eastern Christians to the right path of Protestantism by emulating Crusoe s direct and individual spiritual awakening. CMS missionaries took active steps to discourage cultural hybridity, even monitoring the translators in their employment for signs of the Catholic influence. The fantasy of purity and process of purification were part of the foundation of the missionary movement, making Crusoe s own myth of individualism and fantasy of autonomy its perfect ideological surrogate. The CMS hoped they would find inspiration in Crusoe s spiritual trials and error, as he moves from rebellion to punishment, repentance, and eventually religious conversion. The observations that emerge from setting these two versions of Crusoe s eating habits side by side might amount to a minor point but for the fact that observing Crusoe s autonomous actions on the island have played an important role in theorizing what have been called the formal and cultural institutions of the novel: individual subjectivity, formal realism, colonial accumulation, the labor theory of value, national identity, to name a few. Many translators of this period adapted or changed the source material. Regardless of the radical changes, translators praised importance of the original version and often lamented their inability to do justice to it. As the earliest surviving translation of a novel into Arabic, Qiṣṣat Rūbinṣun Kurūzī stands as an ideal starting point from which to understand the origins of the Arabic novel as they emerge from translation.