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The Arab world is not the only cultural or geopolitical area that must face the vital necessity of translating the modern knowledge produced by Europe and North America in our current times. Japan, China, India as well as South Korea worked relentlessly on translations throughout the twentieth century. More recently, at the turn of the century, and in the wake of important political upheavals, the former USSR countries started massively translating western classics. Muslim countries such as Turkey and Iran are facing the same challenge.

The question today facing the Arab countries (intellectual elite, universities, research centers, translation funds and programs, publishers etc.) is how to escape the current situation summed-up by Richard Jacquemond in a concise sentence that expresses all the Arab uneasiness: “we still translate very few, very late, never the books that must be translated and never as it should be”?

Suddenly, voluntary servitude transformed into an intense passion for life and for freedom. But by what miracle, and with what alchemy, does the mystery of ancestral submission dissolve and the flower of joyful disobedience bloom?