A About a decade ago, a friend approached Dr. Magdi Meligui to ask for a favor: Translate into Arabic the writings of Charles Darwin, the father of evolutionary theory.

This friend worked for one of the government cultural authorities, which had been unable to find a translator willing to take on the nineteenth-century British naturalist’s complex English and often controversial ideas of how life on earth evolved. Although 2009 marked the 150th anniversary of Darwin’s seminal On the Origin of Species, Meligui’s is the first complete Arabic translation of the work.

“No one would dare to touch it, it was too difficult,” Meligui says. “I said ‘fine.’”

A professor of dermatology at Ain Shams University and one-time coroner in the United Arab Emirates, Meligui has devoted the last nine years to his translation project. Darwin was a prolific author with nearly 30 books to his name and even more articles and letters. In addition to Origin of Species, the 70-year-old Meligui has translated four other books and plans to complete two more.

The desk at his Heliopolis home is strewn with yellowed biology reference books and the marked-up pages of his translations, which he spends hours revising each day.

“I’ve started living with the guy,” Meligui says, pointing to a stately black-and-white photo of Darwin that hangs on the book-lined wall of his parlor.

Mohsen Allam/Egypt Today Darwin translatorMagdi Meligui

But few, he says, know of his translations. While the original Origin of Species averages about 550 pages, the Arabic version looks intimidating at nearly 1,000 pages, including detailed footnotes and appendices. Selling for LE 50, it is available in very few bookstores around Cairo. The translation’s publisher, Meligui says, is a government body that is not interested in the challenges of distribution.

Nor is it clear if Meligui’s translations, pioneering as they are, would find much of an audience even if they were readily available at a lower price. Few in the Arab or Muslim worlds accept Darwin’s idea of evolution and natural selection, least of all in Egypt — a 2007 study published in Science magazine on Muslim views of evolution found that fewer than 10 percent of Egyptians thought the theory was “true or probably true,” the lowest rate of acceptance in any Muslim nation in the study.

The theory of evolution, as framed by contemporary biology, says that plant and animal species change over time in response to pressures from their environment. Crucial to the theory is the concept of natural selection. When organisms reproduce, their offspring’s genetic profile differ from the parents’ in small and random ways. Darwin’s theory says that offspring with useful genetic mutations will be more likely to reproduce — that is, nature has ‘selected’ them — and those useful mutations will become more prevalent. Eventually, so many new traits develop that a distinct species emerges.

Many people of different faiths have objected to aspects of evolutionary theory because it suggests that humans physically developed gradually in response to environmental pressures rather than by divine guidance, as their holy books describe.

While some Jews and Christians reject evolution because it seems to contradict the creation story set forth explicitly in the Bible’s Old Testament, the Qur’an does not contain a specific chronology of the earth’s creation. Islamic objections tend more to question whether evolution’s account of man’s development through natural selection contradicts the Qur’anic teaching that God created man.

Much of the discussion of anti-evolution ideas in the Middle East focuses on the anti-evolution stances of Islamic scholars, most notably Zaghloul El-Naggar, an Egyptian geology professor and member of the Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs noted for analyzing the Qur’an for prophesies of scientific discoveries, and Turkish writer Harun Yahya, whose work has gained a popular following due to its easy availability online in multiple languages and his substantial funding.

Scholars who gathered at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in November, however, spurn the interpretation that the controversy over Darwin in Egypt is simply a brawl between religion and science over the natural history of man. Scientists and thinkers from around the world convened for Darwin’s Living Legacy: An International Conference on Evolution and Society, sponsored by the British Council to mark the bicentennial of Darwin’s birth.

Some of the conference speakers suggested that tracts of the Qur’an and the Bible are not the only causes of local opposition to evolution. While the debate over Darwin is intertwined with the growing influence of conservative Islam and the wider debate of Western influence in the Arab world, some argued that the more important discussions are the less flashy ones about the quality of local science education and regional investment in putting basic scientific knowledge within reach of the Arabic-speaking public.

In October, a bizarre report appeared in Al-Jazeera, claiming that research on a 4.4 million-year-old hominid skeleton, referred to by its English nickname ‘Ardi,’ disproved Darwin’s theory of evolution. Because Ardi’s anatomy does not resemble contemporary chimpanzees or apes, the article reported, it proves that man did not descend from monkeys and therefore Darwin was wrong.

The fossilized remains, the oldest known skeleton of a human ancestor, prove no such thing, its investigators say. Darwin never wrote that men evolved from monkeys; he merely posited that they share a common ancestor.

Those who noticed Al-Jazeera’s inaccurate coverage were hardly surprised. Although Darwin’s theory of evolution is widely accepted by scientists, his theory is often misunderstood by non-scientists in both the Western and Arab worlds.

Islam and modern science are certainly not incompatible. During his conference presentation, Dr. Salman Hameed, an assistant professor of integrated science and humanities at Hampshire College in the United States, noted that the Muslim world has a long tradition of scientific research and acceptance of scientific concepts that originated in the West. To illustrate this, Hameed used images of Pakistani science textbooks that use Qur’anic verses to introduce scientific concepts.

Evolution, however, is an exception: its common association with Western atheism and secularism hampers its popularity. “What can we do?” Hameed said. “Charles Darwin happened to be British.”

That association accounts for only part of the problem. Comparative research conducted in Egypt, Lebanon, Pakistan and Indonesia points to the difficulties in teaching not just evolution, but science itself.

“Egyptian and Lebanese students seem to have inadequate understandings of the nature of theories and the role of evidence in theory development,” said Dr. Saouma BouJaoude, an American University in Beirut professor of science education, presenting the results of surveys of teachers and students about science education in Muslim countries. “[There are] similar misunderstandings of the scientific basis of evolutionary theory []. We cannot focus on evolution without looking at the bigger picture.”

Egypt, he noted, should be leading the region in education on evolution. Unlike most of its regional counterparts, Egypt’s curriculum for secondary schools has a well-defined unit on evolution. During his research interviews, however, local biology teachers told BouJaoude, “We teach what is in the book, but we tell students not to believe it.”

Clarifying the nature of Darwin’s work requires more than just subjecting students to another lecture on man’s origins. Dinosaur toys, suggests conference presenter Dr. Amir Yassin, could be surprisingly important.

Yassin, a University of Alexandria genetics professor who spoke with Egypt Today after his presentation, is referring specifically to the colorful plastic dinosaur toys widely sold in museums like New York’s American Museum of Natural History, where he also works as a post-doctoral research fellow. Across Europe and the US, families can take their children to these museums to see for themselves fossils of extinct animals, evidence for evolution.

No such educational museum of this type exists here, he notes, and that absence reflects a lost opportunity for Egyptians to learn about natural history from the Egyptian perspective.

Inspired by his own interactions with students in his classes at Alexandria, Yassin studied the Egyptian curriculum on evolution. He concluded that the biology curriculum segregates evolution into a separate unit and overemphasizes science technology in general. As a result, he says, students do not understand the importance of basic biological research and the applicability of evolutionary theory to all aspects of biology.

Not to mention, he says, that in teaching evolution, examples from Egypt’s own rich history, such as Wadi Hitan, a desert spot outside Fayoum Oasis that is home to important fossils of extinct whales, are overlooked. Yassin hopes the Bibliotheca will open an exhibit focused on the natural history of Egypt’s environment.

“People don’t know about the Galapagos [Islands],” he pointed out in his presentation, referring to the Pacific Ocean archipelago whose biodiversity Darwin studied while formulating his theory of natural selection. “It’s as if evolution only happens abroad.”

Yassin’s first encounter with Darwin’s theory came from a book about Islam, Mustapha Mahmoud’s Understanding the Qur’an. The book’s openness to evolution helped him, as it reconciled the often-controversial theory with the tenets of religion.

Here too, the design of the curriculum bears some blame for heightening the perception of a divide between religion and evolution. Yassin says that the currently selected readings emphasize Islamic opposition to evolution. When his students ask about Qur’anic teachings on evolution, which he says they inevitably do every semester, he encourages them to pick up Mahmoud’s book. It is not on the required reading list, Yassin notes, adding that it should be.

He emphasizes that although Al-Azhar’s fatwa on evolution rules against the theory, it also calls Darwin’s theory a probability, seemingly leaving the door open for future acceptance of evolution. “There is a plasticity within even the fatwa of Al-Azhar, so this is very promising.”

However, before people can agree or disagree on evolution, they need to decide on the terms of the debate.

Jason Wiles, a Syracuse University professor working on the comparative survey of evolution education in Muslim-majority nations, noted at the Alexandria conference that the Arabic word commonly used for evolution can also mean development. So how, he asked, can one design a survey that asks a student whether they support the idea of development?

Not to mention that the Arabic word for ancestor, he added, can have religious connotations, so talking about apes’ and humans’ common ancestors can seem far more provocative than the same question in English.

On the Origin of Species translator Meligui has been wrestling with these questions of word choice for nearly a decade now. He has finally settled on a style of translation that strives to use Arabic terms that are as visually descriptive as possible. For example, Darwin’s “great ape” is translated into Arabic as ‘monkeys without tails.’

Meligui also notes that partial translations that appeared in the early twentieth century were often eloquent in Arabic but scientifically inexact. In his own work, he changed the Arabic phrase used to describe “natural selection” away from the phrase used in a partial 1918 edition that could also be understood to mean “natural election.”

The challenge is not limited to Darwin’s theory. Meligui estimates there are only about a dozen scientific translators in Egypt, and they are struggling to standardize their terms for biological phenomena. His books are laden with footnotes and appendices offering readers the English originals of the Arabic neologisms, part of his attempt to standardize future works.

Of course, he says, some people object to his word choices, and he spends many days poring over and cutting up old translations to improve his own work. Meligui recently found yet another alternative translation for natural selection in some Syrian writings. “I may be wrong,” he says of his strategy for translating Darwin’s tricky English, “but at least we’re breaking the ice.” et

A lthough Darwin’s theories are often seen as a Western import, they are far from universally accepted in the most populous Western nation, the United States. A 2009 British Council survey found that although 84 percent of American adults have a high awareness and understanding of Darwin’s theories, only 42 percent believed enough scientific evidence exists to support his theories — the lowest percentage of any developed nation surveyed.

The American fight against Darwin is vocally led by Christian organizations that object on religious grounds to the teaching of evolution in public schools. Organizations such as the Seattle-based Discovery Institute encourage schools to tell students that a belief known as intelligent design could explain the development of modern species. Intelligent design posits that species develop according to the dictates of an intelligent creator rather than through random genetic mutations and natural selection.

Although American acceptance of evolution remains tepid, promotion of intelligent design has seen pushback from parents and legislatures. After a school district in Pennsylvania required that intelligent design be added to the science curriculum, the US Supreme Court ruled that intelligent design represented a religious viewpoint and that a mandate to teach it in public school violated the US Constitution’s separation of church and state.

Evolution skeptics are attempting to make anti-evolution the next Western theory to be exported. According to a 2009 Washington Post report, the Discovery Institute sent speakers to Istanbul in 2007 to discuss intelligent design, and members of the anti-evolution Institute for Creation Research in Dallas have spoken before numerous Turkish conferences on evolution.