(Josephine Quinn on the Myth that Arabic Translations Merely Preserved Greek Literature. What is less well-known is that the point of translating foreign works was not to preserve them but to build on them)

n the eighth-century CE the Abbasids undertook to collect the wisdom of the world in their new capital at Baghdad. This project started with the second Abbasid caliph, al-Mansur (“the Conqueror,” r. 754–74), who commissioned Arabic translations of important scientific texts from Persian, Sanskrit, Greek, and Syriac (a late form of Aramaic), and came into its own under al-Ma’mun (“the Trusted One,” r. 813–33).

The operation was lavishly funded by the caliph himself, as well as by members of his household, courtiers, merchants, bankers, and military leaders. It reflects the prosperity of the era, as the Abbasids created a powerful centralized government based on a land tax, which as conversion became more common they pragmatically extended to Muslims as well as non-Muslims.

The most important thing to understand about what is often now called the “Translation Movement” is that it wasn’t primarily about translation. It was part of a wider commitment by Islamic scholars and political leaders to scientific investigation that also saw caliphs commission new works of science, geography, poetry, history, and medicine.

It is well-known that classic works of Greek science and philosophy were translated into Arabic before they were translated into other European languages—including Latin. What is less well-known is that the point of translating foreign works was not to preserve them but to build on them. As links around the Mediterranean continued to increase, that Arabic scholarship began to reach western Europe, and to change the way people there thought.

Back in Baghdad, as so often happened, cultural change began from the outside—and in this case with the collection and comparison of foreign knowledge. The fundamental model and first material for the Abbasid translation project came from Iran, where sixth-century Sasanian shahs had commissioned Persian translations of important Indian and Greek works.

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Today, each one of the assumptions that underpinned western policymaking and journalism for nearly three decades lie shattered

(The following is a lecture delivered by Pankaj Mishra, winner of the 2024 Weston International Award, at the Royal Ontario Museum on September 16.)

“In the beginning was the press and then the world appeared,” Karl Kraus wrote in 1921. The biblical allusion was no rhetorical flourish. Living through an apocalyptic era, the Austrian writer, and arguably the first major media critic, had reason to believe that journalism had moved from being a neutral filter between the popular imagination and the external world. It had taken charge of forging reality itself.

Kraus’s critique had assumed sharper focus during World War I, when he began to blame newspapers for deepening the disaster they were meant to be reporting on. “How is the world ruled and led to war?” Kraus asked, arguing that the origin of the 20th century’s seminal war lay in a continent-wide collapse, triggered by the press, of cognitive and imaginative faculties, which allowed European nations to blunder into a war they could neither anticipate nor stop. “Through decades of practice,” he wrote, “[the reporter] has produced in mankind that degree of unimaginativeness which enables it to wage a war of extermination against itself.”

It may seem easy to look down, from our higher and well-furnished vantage point, on the parochial world of Viennese periodicals that Kraus fulminated against. But as ferocious wars rage unstoppably in Europe and the Middle East, threatening wider conflagrations, and rending the social fabric of several societies, Kraus’s critique of the fourth estate, the so-called pillar of democracy, not only becomes more pertinent. It resonates as a broader analysis of the decay of democratic institutions in the West.

The impunity with which Israel murdered nearly two hundred writers, academics, and journalists in Gaza, after banning foreign reporters from the scene of the executions, was granted to the country by its Western supporters soon after September 11. In 2002, after Israel bombed and destroyed a broadcasting center in the West Bank, Anne Applebaum, a prominent critic today of “autocracy,” asserted that “the official Palestinian media is the right place for Israel to focus its ire.” Trump’s “Muslim ban” and J. D. Vance’s violent fantasies seem outrageous only if one forgets that in 2006 Martin Amis conspiratorially confided to a London Times journalist his “definite urge” to say things like, “The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order. What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation—further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan.”

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The myth of the frontier traces our national origin to the colonial settlements and the westward expansion that followed. It enshrines a distinctively American concept of capitalist development: Our extraordinary growth as a democracy arose from the discovery and exploitation of abundant natural resources beyond the zone of established order. Winning the frontier also resulted in dispossessing the nonwhite Indigenous peoples, which made racial exclusion part of our original concept of nationality. The myth of the frontier explains the origin of America’s exceptional character and unparalleled prosperity. It was the myth of choice for Gilded Age imperialists and for John F. Kennedy’s “New Frontier.”

The myth of the founding is the story of the creation of our nation-state by an intelligent and virtuous (though flawed) set of white men, the founding fathers. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution embody the contradictions at the heart of our ideal of free government. From generation to generation, Americans have invoked these documents, and the principles they symbolize, to address the fundamental issue of our national organization: whether it is possible — and desirable — to form a single nationality and a just republican government out of diverse racial and ethnic elements.

The myth of the Lost Cause celebrates the Old South and its culture, and justifies violence, sometimes extreme, first to defend and then to restore its traditional structures of patriarchy and white supremacy. The Lost Cause myth sustained the South’s Jim Crow order for 100 years.

In all of these myths, the default American nationality is white. That ethnonationalist presumption would be challenged by the crises of the 20th century: World War I, the Depression and World War II. These compelled the nation’s political and cultural elites to start seeing as equals the racial and ethnic minorities that had been marginalized or excluded from the body politic. One result was the creation of the myth of the good war, which used the war-movie convention of the multiethnic and multiracial platoon to link the diversity of our country to our success as “leader of the free world.” It was this myth that informed our role in the Cold War and helped justify the interventions in Vietnam and Iraq.

Mr. Trump’s 2024 campaign rhetoric follows the Lost Cause playbook. He invokes fear of racial pollution by characterizing liberal policies on immigration as the “poisoning” of the American bloodstream. He identifies himself as the agent of his people’s retribution. He promises to redeem American greatness by rooting out “communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country” and declares that that retribution “allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.”

By contrast, since the 1970s, the left has struggled with this. Although the New Deal was the most transformative political movement since the Civil War, it did not generate a comparable mythology. Until Joe Biden, the last president to so fully invoke it as a major policy model was Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s. Popular culture has rarely exploited the New Deal’s stories of relief and recovery, of enormous public works projects or union struggles that reshaped the relations between workers and executives. There is no genre of movies akin to those that memorialize the frontier or the Civil War. Rather, the New Deal’s social justice values and patriotic appeal were abstracted and subsumed in the good-war myth.

Ms. Harris has continued that focus on union jobs and middle-class economics and has rooted her personal story in the civil rights movement. At the Democratic convention, her acceptance speech emphasized labor rights, patriotism and public service as the basis of the Democratic agenda — but without specifically invoking the New Deal.

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Instead of midwifing the landmark Middle East peace that he hoped for, Biden became the arms supplier for the leveling of Gaza — a war that killed more women and children in a single year than any other war in the last two decades, according to Oxfam.

Biden restricted and conditioned U.S. arms transfers to Ukraine but worried that doing the same to Israel might tempt Hezbollah to attack it. So Biden kept the arms flowing (with the exception of at least one shipment of 2,000-pound bombs) and never imposed serious restrictions on their use. This impunity emboldened Netanyahu to ignore Biden, and the upshot is that Biden has nurtured not a regional peace but, it seems, a regional war — with America at risk of being sucked in.

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