Translation and the construction of the religious other : A sociological approach to english translations of islamic political discourse

Translations of texts associated with the phenomenon known as ‘political Islam’ into English remain largely unexplored. The main objective of the current thesis is to develop a sociological model for the study of translations of Islamic political discourse, based on the work of Pierre Bourdieu.The basic assumptions of Bourdieu's sociological theory are adapted to formulate a methodology for the study of translations of Hassan al-Banna’s Towards the Light, and Sayyid Qutb’s Social Justice in Islam into English. The thesis discusses in detail Bourdieu's sociology of cultural production, its intellectual foundations, theoretical tools, and methodological relevance to both translation in general, and translation of Islamic discourse in particular. The research hypothesizes a field of activity which could be called ‘the field of translating political Islam’ in the Anglo-American culture. The dynamics of this field and its structure are premised on the notion of struggle over specific forms of capital between producers and co-producers of translation in this context.Bourdieu’s key concepts of field, habitus, capital, and doxa, are used to both describe and interpret the activity in this field. They are also used to provide a sociological insight into the production and consumption of translation, as well as the translatorial agency within this field