The European Qur'ān: The Place of the Muslim Holy Book in European Cultural History (original) (raw)
Related papers
Jurnal Studi Ilmu-Ilmu al-Qur’an dan Hadis 24, no. 2 (2023), 285-336, 2023
The broad interest in the emergence and presence of Islam and Muslims by Europe goes back to the centuries immediately following Muslim conquests and spread through the Mediterranean (from the 1st ce. AH / 7th cen. AD). A number of studies in the previous decades have discussed the perceptions and evaluations of Islam by Europeans from the Middle Ages till modern times, at times focusing on the Qur'an. How the Islamic holy text was known, collected in manuscripts, translated, read, used and polemically discussed in its contents from the 12th century until contemporary times is a chapter of European intellectual activity. Recent research and above all the projects financed by the European commission, which are currently being carried out, are a contribution to the study of the Qur'an and in particular to the history of the presence of the Qur'an in European consciousness. In this field the project "EuQu-The European Qur'an" is particularly significant; it has the ambition to demonstrate how the reading and uses of the Qur'an were important in the intellectual, cultural and religious developments of Europe through the ages.
The Qur'an in Europe - the European Qur'an, Journal of Quranic Studies, 20.3 (2018), 1-20
2018
This introductory article follows one of the most widely read and used Qur’an editions in Christian Europe, Theodor Bibliander’s Machumetis Saracenorum principis, eiusque successorum vitae, ac doctrina, ipseque Alcoran, printed in Basel in 1543 and in a second edition in 1550. The article analyses some of the interpretations, appropriations, and polemical uses that this Qur’an version was exposed to during an age of confessional rivalry and political fragmentation. By doing so, the article tries to show the deep entanglement of the Qur’an in European religious and political discourses. It argues that with regard to the transformations that the Qur’an underwent in its transition from the Islamic-Arabic world to the various Latin and vernacular versions in Europe, as well as with regard to the ways that the Qur’an is read, used, and adapted in Christian and Jewish European contexts, we are confronted with a text genre sui generis–—the European Qur’an.
European Visions of the Qur'ān in the Middle Ages (9 th -15 th centuries) Workshop Program
JOURNAL OF QUR'ANIC STUDIES, vol. 25, pp. 93-119, 2021
Comment le Qur’ān est-il nommé, défini, figuré? Comment le Qur’ān est-il jugé, évalué? Comment le Qur’ān est-il lu et compris? Comment le Qur’ān est-il utilisé, transformé, exploité? Ces questions, au centre du débat des journées d’étude, ont été appliquées à la réception de l’Alcoranus dans les commentaires à la Comédie. La question des sources arabes de la Comédie, depuis la publication des thèses de Asín Palacios, a donné lieu à une polémique considérable entre partisans et decrateurs de la dépendance de Dante aux traditions musulmanes. Les chercheurs ont toutefois compris qu’il faut repenser les terms du débat et évaluer le rôle joué par les intermediares latins ou romans. On a donc insisté sur la reconstruction des canaux de transmission possibles de la culture arabe, à la fois dans le christianisme et dans l’Alighieri, ou sur l’évaluation de l’image de la religion musulmane et de son fondateur, Mahomet, répandue au Moyen Âge. En revanche, la réception du texte de l’Alcoranus est restée insuffisamment étudiée, confinée dans le cadre, qui est d’ailleurs philologiquement sûr, de la citation indirecte. La communication s'est concentrée donc sur l’image du livre sacré de l’Islam rendue par les anciens commentaires à la Comédie. Le texte de l’Alcoranus apparaît le résultat d’un filtrage idéologique et culturel réitéré qui devient une opportunité pour rappeler les tópoi les plus courants de la polémique anti-islamique.
Horizon 2020 DMP - The European Qur’an. Islamic Scripture in European Culture and Religion 1150-1850
2019
EuQu is an ERC Synergy project formed by a consortium led by the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC); the University of Naples L’Orientale (UNO); the University of Kent (UoK) and the University of Nantes (UN). Other members of the consortium are the University of Amsterdam (UvA);Autonomous University of Barcelona; and the Humanities Research Centre of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Funder: European Commission (Horizon 2020) Institution: European Research Council.
Impostor or lawgiver? Muhammad through European eyes in the 17th and 18th centuries
Christiane Gruber & Avinoam Shalem, eds., The Image of the Prophet between Ideal and Ideology: A Scholarly Investigation, 2014
For centuries, Muhammad has been at the center of European discourse on Islam. Medieval polemicists and chroniclers often portrayed him as a shrewd heresiarch who had worked false miracles to seduce the Arabs away from Christianity: as such, the root of Saracen error and an implicit justification of wars of conquest against Saracens. This medieval polemical image proved tenacious; in slightly modified forms, it provided the dominant European discourse on Muhammad the “impostor” in the seventeenth century. In 1697, Humphrey Prideaux, Anglican minister and Oxford-educated doctor of theology, published The True nature of The Imposture Fully Display'd in the Life of Mahomet. Prideaux casts a critical eye on many of the legendary elements concerning the prophet that had been popular in medieval and early modern polemics; he claims to present, in lieu of fables, the "true nature" of Muhammad's "imposture". Yet in fact he relies heavily on the works of medieval polemicists such as Riccoldo da Montecroce. Beginning in the eighteenth century, some European authors present the prophet in a favorable light: as an inspired religious reformer and great legislator. Henri, comte de Boulainvilliers, wrote a Vie de Mahomet which was published posthumously in 1730. He presents the prophet at a divinely-inspired messenger through whom God confounded the bickering oriental Christians, liberated the Orient from the despotic rule of the Romans and Persians, and spread the knowledge of the unity of God from India to Spain. Emmanuel Pastoret has a similar view of the prophet in his Zoroaster, Confucius and Muḥammad (1787), in which he presents the lives of these three "great men", "the greatest legislators of the universe". Napoleon Bonaparte presents the prophet as a model conqueror and legislator. This image of Muḥammad as a "great man", a statesman and conqueror, is a common trope in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe. It allowed a relatively objective and irenic appreciation of the importance of the prophet and of Islam on the stage of world history, avoiding the bitter religious polemics that had so often colored European discourse on Islam. Yet by presenting Muḥammad as first and foremost a political and military leader, his role as an envoy of God and a model for Muslims was willfully avoided.