The article highlights the significance of the first full English translation of Naqd al-Hitāb ad-Dīnī (Critique of Religious Discourse), one of the most characteristic and important works of the acclaimed Egyptian intellectual Nāsr Hāmid Abū Zayd (1943–2010). The work was firstly published in 1992 by Sīnā li-an-Našr in Cairo, coinciding with the beginning of the so-called Case of Abū Zayd (1992–1995), the campaign of Egyptian fundamentalists against the scholar. Abū Zayd’s critique of the dominant discourses and worldviews in the Arab world, created both by the Islamic fundamentalists and so-called Islamic left, has gained huge acclaim in the international academia but so far there has not been a full translation of the work into English (also taking into account the important role of the full German edition published by Chérifa Magdi and Navid Kermani in 1996). In 2018 Jonathan Wright’s translation was published by Yale University Press in the series “World Thought in Translation”. The edition was enriched by Carool Kersten’s scholarly introduction. The following article discusses the translation dilemma regarding Naqd… (e.g. problems with finding equivalents for Arabic semiotic and hermeneutical terminology utilised by the Egyptian scholar), giving examples of the choices made by the translator. Adding to it, the more general issues of the impact of Abū Zayd’s work on the contemporary rereading of Arab-Islamic turāt are analysed.

Jonas Hassen Khemiri, born in 1978, is one of the most interesting contemporary Swedish and European writers with a Tunisian immigrant background. His second novel Montecore: en unik tiger ( Montecore: The Silence of the Tiger), published in 2006, has got an epistolary form deducted from the exchange of letters between Kadir and Jonas. However, the main character of the novel is Abbas Khemiri – the disappearing, estranged father of Jonas – a figure close to the real writer. Khemiri’s book has got an innovative linguistic form and contains many erudite references to the phenomena of popular culture. It is also a complex portrayal of the different generations of (mainly Arab-based) immigrant and post-immigrant communities in Sweden coupled with a nuanced look on bright and dark sides of the Swedish state, model of identity and integration. This material is enriched by the examples taken from Khemiri’s novel Everything I Don’t Remember and short story As You Would Have Told It To Me (Sort Of) If We Had Known Each Other Before You Died.