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The European Qur'an

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The European Qur'an The European Qur’an A new ERC Synergy Project at the Faculty of Theology By Professor, PhD Jan Loop I am joining the Faculty of Theology at pean Religion and Culture to the Euro- UCPH from the University of Kent (UK) pean Research Council in Brussel. where I was a Professor of Early Modern Global History at the School of History. A European Qur’an? My academic work is mainly concerned When we had to present our project to with cultural and religious encounters, the ERC in 2018, we decided to start our and particularly with interactions bet- presentation with a reference to Keith ween the Christian, Muslim and Jewish Ellison’s inauguration in January 2007. world in the early modern period. Among Being the first Muslim to be elected to other topics, I have long been interested the US Congress, Ellison asked to be in the Reformation and ensuing confes- allowed to take his oath on the Qur’an. sionalisation as a driver of European in- He took the oath on Thomas Jefferson’s terests in Islam and Arabic and Ottoman personal copy of the Qur’an. No surprise, language and culture. this use of the Qurʾān caused controversy Three years ago, in the spring of 2017, in the US and spurred anti-Islamic pole- I met with John Tolan from the Univer- mics: The Qurʾān, it was said, is alien to sité de Nantes to discuss the idea of put- Western culture and political institutions. ting together an exhibition at the British However, Jefferson’s Qurʾān tells a dif- Library on the Qur’an in European Cul- ferent story: It is the first English trans- ture. This was the start of a conversation lation directly from the Arabic, made by that developed rather quickly into an am- George Sale in 1734. This is a ground- bitious research project, which was joi- breaking work of Enlightenment scho- ned by Roberto Tottoli (Università degli larship. And it had a considerable impact Studi di Napoli “L’Orientale”) and Mer- on numerous Western intellectuals inclu- cedes García-Arenal (Consejo Superior ding such figures as Voltaire and Goethe de Investigaciones Científicas, Madrid). and how they perceived Muhammad, the In November of the same year, we sub- Qur’an and Islam. mitted a proposal with the title The Euro- We chose this story at the interview pean Qur’an – Islamic Scripture in Euro- because it raises questions which are at 23 to study the history of European inter- actions with the Qur’an in all its aspect from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century. The project has started in April 2019 and we are now a healthy cohort of more than 25 postdocs and PhD-students. At Copenhagen, we will be a group of 7 researchers – literally from all over the world (Japan, Belgium, US, Romania, Germany, Switzerland) – and one project manager, Kira Storgaard Hansen. I hope that this project and the work we are car- rying out will strengthen the faculty’s international profile and its ambition to become a centre of comparative religious studies. The main focus of our research at Copenhagen will be on early modern uses of the Qur’an and practices of orien- tal scholarship. What role did the Qur’an play in inter-Christian, confessional po- lemics from the sixteenth to the eighte- Congressman Keith Ellison taking his enth century? What role did it play in oath on Thomas Jefferson’s copy of early modern missionary attempts? How George Sale’s 1734 translation of the did European scholars interested in the Qur’an, 5 January 2007 Qur’an get into possession of Qur’anic texts? How did they read, translate and interpret these texts? What uses did they make of the Qur’an in historical, exege- the heart of our research project: Is the tical, cultural, diplomatic and political Qur’an really so alien to the history of discourses? How did these uses change the West, its culture, and institutions? over the centuries? These are just a few What are the roles that the Qur’an has of the research questions that we will be played in Christian European religious trying to tackle. and other discourses between the 12th The thematic, chronological and geo- and the 19th century? And further: What graphical range of our research is wide: are the changes that happen to the Qur’an From Greek anti-Islamic polemical trea- – or any other sacred text for that matter tises, to 17th-century Hebrew translations – when they cross religious, cultural and of the Qur’an, to the description of pre- linguistic borders. Islamic Arabia by a German consul for In November 2018, The European the Dutch Republic in Istanbul we will Research Council awarded us an ERC follow the manifold forms that the Euro- Synergy Grant of € 10M over 6 years pean Qur’an could take on. 24 Translations of translations in Qur’an was treated like a written text, Reformation-Age Europe that could be analysed with critical philo- If there is one text that best embodies the logical tools like the Bible – some Euro- ‘European Qur’an’, it is probably the La- pean scholars even attempted to publish tin edition from 1543 by the Zurich He- a polyglot edition of the Qur’an after the braist and Reformer, Theodor Bibliander. model of Polyglot Bibles. While such ap- Theodor Bibliander based his edition on proaches might have improved the Euro- three manuscripts of the Medieval Latin pean understanding of the Qur’an on a translation composed by the English- linguistic level, it prevented an apprecia- man Robert of Ketton in 1143. While we tion of the ‘dynamic’, semi-oral charac- know of a number of other medieval La- ter of the Islamic revelation, as well as tin versions of the Qur’an that circulated of the ritual significance of its recitation in manuscript form, Ketton’ s paraphra- and transcription in manuscript form. It sing translation, and the various vernacu- also made it almost impossible for Euro- lar texts that depended on it, shaped the pean readers to understand the sensual impression that European readers had of experience and aesthetic excitement that the Qur’an over a long period of time. the Qur’an evoked in the process of its Hence, over centuries, the European recitation – and thus the fundamental Is- readers of the ‘Alcoran’ were confron- lamic dogma of the inimitable beauty of ted with a text that on stylistic, semantic, the Qur’an. structural, and material levels was quite removed from the Arabic original. This The Role of the Qur’an in is even more true for the many vernacu- the construction of Christian lar translations that were based on the European identities Bibliander edition. It was translated into But the European Qur’an is not just a Italian by Giovanni Battista Castrodardo product of translations and the result of in 1547. In 1616, this Italian Qur’an was attempts to gain more accurate insight translated into German by the Lutheran into the Islamic religion. In fundamen- minister Salomon Schweigger, with re- tal ways, it is also the result of the va- editions published in 1623, 1659, and rious uses that Europeans have made of 1664. In 1641, the German edition was the Qur’an in intra Christian debates. translated into Dutch, and from here into The Qur’an has played a crucial role in Hebrew and Spanish. attempts to define Christian orthodoxy So, European readers who wanted to and heterodoxy, to confirm Christian read the Qur’an in a vernacular language theological ideas, to contest and confute in the sixteenth and early seventeenth religious enemies within Christianity, century were reading a translation of and to support or undermine historical a translation of a translation – a Euro- assumptions. In other words, since the pean Qur’an, in other words, that was Middle Ages, the Qur’an has played a pi- many stages removed from the Arabic votal role in the construction of Christian original it claimed to represent. Particu- European cultural, religious, and political larly in Protestant circles, the European identities. 25 Bibliander’s edition can again serve also Bibliander’s Apologia and other as an illustrative case in point. The work paratexts. Florimond de Raemond, in was not only a reaction to the imminent his anti-Protestant pamphlet Historia de threat of an Ottoman onslaught on Cen- ortu, progressu, et ruina haereseon huius tral Europe in the mid-sixteenth century. saeculi (‘History of the Origin, Progress, The compendium is also a work of early and Ruin of the Heresies of this Age’) Reformation propaganda, and it is read from 1605, also presented a list of simila- and re-read in a number of polemical rities – from excessive focus on Scripture contexts during an age of unprecedented to the use of violence in the spreading of religious struggle. From the outset, the their faiths – which was again based on confessional reading of Bibliander’s his reading of Bibliander’s Qur’an and of book was driven by the fact that it invol- Protestant literature. Roman polemicists ved some of the spearheads of the Ger- often used Qur’anic vocabulary when man-Swiss Reformation – Melanchton writing about their Protestant foes: the and Luther, as well as Bibliander himself. second volume of Johann Pistorius’ Ana- Melanchthon’s Praemonitio ad lectorem tomia Lutheri from 1598 not only claims (‘Notice to the Reader’) concludes on a to show Turkish errors in Luther’s con- combative note and compares the threat cept of the Trinity, but also organises Lu- to Christianity that emanates from Islam ther’s teachings into azoaras (i.e.
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