ABSTRACT
In the 1940s and 1950s, the Arab world, particularly Egypt, witnessed the advent of a new Islamic discourse negotiating the ideological space between ‘state’ and ‘religion’. Consequently, the field of translation developed from translating Islam, to translating political Islam, i.e. from translating Islam as a religion to translating Islam as a political system. This development meant that the positions and position takings within the field of translation were reorganized. The aim of this chapter is to investigate the relationship between the field of translating political Islam and the field of power, and the possible effects agents’ contributions may have had on the imminent narrative as a consequence, where the translation of Hassan al-Banna’s Towards the Light نحو النور is a case in point.
This chapter is motivated by the following question; how could Bourdieu’s sociology, particularly his understanding of agency, help us to explain the activities in the field of translating political Islam?
