Polemic, Philology, and Ambivalence: Reading the Qur'an in Latin Christendom

Abstract

Thomas Burman: ‘Polemic, Philology, and Ambivalence: Reading the Qur’an in Latin Christendom’ This article argues that by relying almost entirely on the literature of religious polemic as a evidentiary base, earlier scholars of how Christian–Muslim relations have provided us with a distorted view of what Latin-Christian Qur‘an-reading was like in the period from the mid-twelfth to the mid-sixteenth centuries. An examination of a different set of sources—the Latin Qur‘an translations and the manuscripts of the Qur‘an in Latin and Arabic that circulated in Europe—reveals rather that Latin-Christian encounters with the Qur‘an were often far more complex than the narrow, solely polemical events that the polemical literature leads us to imagine. In fact, the Qur‘anic study aids, commentaries, and abundant marginalia written in Latin in the margins of such manuscripts suggest that Latin readers practised as much philology as polemic as they read the Qur‘anic text, with lexicographical, grammatical, and exegetical questions frequently preoccupying them as much as religious disputation. Moreover, the ways in which the Qur‘an was translated and the material form it took in manuscripts and printed books suggest that Latin-Christians had complex attitudes about the Qur‘an, not just complex reading practices. The fact that, for example, the most widely read Latin version presented the text to readers in an elegantly written paraphrase that conformed to contemporary canons of elevated prose, and the fact that it sometimes circulated in expensively produced manuscripts commissioned by wealthy laymen, suggests that the Qur‘an—while seen always as a fraudulent revelation—was seen also as a text that deserved a certain amount of admiration.