ʿAlī al-Sharafī of Sfax: Atlases 1551/1571 and World Map 1579

This open access book offers for the first time a rigorous study of the cultural translation processes carried out by the 16th century North African author ʿAlī Bin Aḥmad Bin Muḥammad al-Sharafī (d. after 1592) in his three extant works, two atlases (composed in 1551, 1571) and a big world map (1579) (1551, 1571, 1579). Its authors pursued new perspectives appropriated mainly from transcultural and translinguistic translation studies, in an attempt to liberate al-Sharafī's corpus from the isolation that it suffered within the larger field of the history of Mediterranean nautical map making. Traditionally treated as simple specimens of mirror image translations, this book proposes to study these artifacts as complex products resulting from complicated and intertwined processes of cultural translation. In their production al-Sharafī carried out creative combinations, reconfigurations, and innovative integrations of materials originally composed in a variety of natural languages. Many factors – social, cultural, political, linguistic and extralinguistic – were involved.  Besides a careful Arabic edition and a critically annotated English translation of al-Sharafī's three extant works, the book offers also a survey on the historical, geographical, social and cultural conditions in the 16th century Mediterranean basin as experienced by ʿAlī and his family in Sfax and Qayrawan.