This study deals with rendering the historical element in Bassiouney's (2021/2023) Al-Qata'i: Ibn Tulun's City without Walls in light of the pushing-hands approach—a translation metaphor borrowed from the world of Chinese martial arts. This approach guards against bias by avoiding an excessive use of force or challenge while receiving another culture. A successful translation allows a healthy pushing-hands between the reader and the text in a mood of cooperation and positive contact. It is an empirical approach to translation that allows successful dealing with problems, conflicts and contradictions. The main question of this study is how to form a pushing-hands model that may solve certain translational problems, especially as far as the historical element in Al-Qata'i is concerned. The study also shows how other earlier translation theories like polysystem theory and the narrative theory of translation are echoed within the pushing-hands approach in that if the translated text occupies a central position, this means submission to the target culture in the pushing-hands game. In the analyses, the three elements of the pushing-hands approach have been applied: that is, attentiveness to new phenomena, continuous dialogic engagement between the two cultures, and reacting to force not with force, but by redirecting or borrowing it. The point of view towards a historical event is the main translational problem in the novel. Sometimes the translator reflects it successfully. In other cases, he fails due to a linguistic mistake or misunderstanding a meaning, or not abiding by the three elements of the pushing-hands approach.
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