Mein Kampf in Arabic

File:The front cover of the 1995 edition of Mein Kampf issued by Beisan Publishers and sold in London.jpg

The front cover of the 1995 edition of Mein Kampf issued by Beisan Publishers and sold in London

The extracts of the Arabic language translation of the book Mein Kampf, the book originally written by Adolf Hitler, were first published in 1934 in newspapers in Baghdad and Beirut.

In a speech to the United Nations immediately following the Suez War in 1956, Golda Meir justified Israel's involvement by arguing that the Arabic translation of Mein Kampf was found in Egyptian soldiers' knapsacks. During the 1967 Six-Day War, the book was regularly found carried by Egyptian soldiers.

It later became a bestseller in the Palestinian territories. In 2002 in London, the book, which could previously only be found in academic and political bookstores, had become readily available in its Arabic translation in Edgware Road, a neighborhood in central London with a significant Arab population.

First translation

The first attempts to use Mein Kampf to influence Arab opinion started in early 1930s. The German-Nazi diplomat Fritz Grobba played a key role in preparing the first publications of the book's extracts that appeared in Arab newspapers in 1934. Grobba, who in 1934 served as Ambassador to the Kingdom of Iraq, initiated the inquiry about the possibility of translating the complete book into Arabic. Grobba was familiar with Arabic culture, and he made a few useful suggestions about making the book more appealing to Arab readers. In particular, he suggested changing "Anti-Semitic" to "anti-Jewish" and "anti-Semitism" to "anti-Judaism." A larger translation problem was presented in the chapter "Nation and Race." In this chapter of Mein Kampf, Hitler described the Aryan race as superior to all other races. Grobba offered to change the first sentence in the chapter to "German racial legislation does not want to pass judgment on the quality and worth of other peoples and other races."

It took two years for Hitler to accept the changes to his book in its Arabic version, but Bernhard Moritz, an Arabist consultant for German Government rejected the proposed translation, and this particular attempt ended at that time.

Consequently, the Ministry of Propaganda of Germany decided to proceed with the translation via the German bookshop Overhamm in Cairo. The manuscript was presented for Dr. Moritz's review in 1937. Once again, his reaction was negative. Among other objections, he alleged that the translator was not a Muslim. Dr.Moritz was incorrect. Not only was the translator, Ahmad Mahmud al-Sadati, a Muslim, but he was the publisher of one of the first Arabic books on National Socialism: "Adolf Hitler, za 'Tm al-ishtirdkfya al-watanlya ma' al-baydn lil-mas'ala al-yahudTya. (A.H., leader of National Socialism, together with an explanation of the Jewish question)."

al-Sadati's translation was published in Cairo in 1937.

Reaction to publication

According to Yekutiel Gershoni and James Jankowski, "Sadati's book appears not to have been widely circulated, and its public impact is unclear."

Arab

In response to the publication of al-Sadati's translation, a local Arab weekly published Hitler's quote about the Arabs: a "decadent people composed of cripples."

Hamid Maliji, an Egyptian attorney was one of the first to denounce the racist book in 1937. He wrote:

Arab friends:...The Arabic copies of Mein Kampf distributed in the Arab world do not conform to the original German edition since the instructions given to Germans regarding us have been removed. In addition, these excerpts do not reveal his [Hitler's] true opinion of us. Hitler asserts that Arabs are an inferior race, that the Arabic heritage has been pillaged from other civilizations, and that Arabs have neither culture nor nor art, as well as other insults and humiliations that he proclaims concerning us.

— Hamid Maliji

Yekutiel Gershoni and James Jankowski say that Niqula Yusuf denounced the militant nationalism of Mein Kampf as "chauvinist."

German

A German diplomat in Cairo suggested that instead of deleting this passage, it would be better to add to the introduction a statement like this: "Egyptian people 'were differentially developed and that the Egyptians standing at a higher level themselves do not want to be placed on the same level with their numerous backward fellow Egyptians.'" The diplomat did not realize that such an addition would cause the opposite effect. At that point, Otto von Hentig, a staff member of the German foreign ministry suggested that the translation should be done by a person who knows both the German and Arabic languages well. He said that a "truly good Arabic translation would meet with extensive sympathy in the whole Arabic speaking world from Morocco to India." von Hentig suggested the book should have the tone "that every Muslim understands: the Koran."

Haj Amin al-Husseini meeting with Adolf Hitler in December 1941.

He suggested that the translation should be shown to a "scholar of the Koran who will give it the sacred tone which will be understood and valued in the whole Islamic world, a world that reads the Koran." Eventually the translation was sent to Shakib Arslan. Arslan, who lived in Geneva, Switzerland, was an editor of La Nation arabe. He also was a confidant of Haj Amin al-Husseini, a Palestinian Arab nationalist and Muslim leader in the British Mandate of Palestine, who met with Hitler. The 960 page translation was almost completed when the Germans requested to calculate the cost of the first 10,000 copies to be printed with "the title and back of the flexible cloth binding... lettered in gold." On December 21, 1938 the project was rejected by German Ministry of propaganda because of the high cost of the publications.

Role in Nazi propaganda

In October 1938, anti-Jewish treatises that included extracts from Mein Kampf were disseminated at an Islamic parliamentarians' conference "for the defense of Palestine" in Cairo.

One of the leaders of the Syrian Ba'ath Party, Sami al-Jundi, wrote: "We were racialists, admiring Nazism, reading its books and the source of its thought... We were the first to think of translating Mein Kampf." This statement was incorrect. There were other translations or partial translations of the book well before 1939.

According to Jeffrey Herf, "To be sure, the translations of Hitler's Mein Kampf and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion into Arabic were important sources of the diffusion of Nazi ideology and anti-Semitic conspiracy thinking to Arab and Muslim intellectuals. Although both texts were available in various Arabic editions before the war began, they played little role in the Third Reich's Arab propaganda."

Arabic Mein Kampf as a bestseller

Another Arabic translation of Mein Kampf was published in 1963, translated by Luis al-Haj, a Nazi war criminal originally named Luis Heiden who fled to Egypt after World War II. The book was republished in 1995, and reached top 6 among the best selling books in the Palestinian territories. This edition has become a perennial best seller in many Islamic countries. It is also on sale in Turkey, and sold well in Arab neighborhoods of Great Britain. To appeal to Arab readers, the introduction of the book presents Hitler as a jihadist: "What springs to mind is Hitler's jihad as a soldier and his summons to action to achieve the aims of his party and his community."

See also

• Islam and antisemitism