- Muslims (named Mudejars before the orders of conversion) and Moriscos (converted Muslims) interpreted and translated their sacred scripture for their own use as they were becoming increasingly at home in the Romance vernacular and losing the knowledge of Arabic. There were translations from Arabic to vernacular Castilian or Aragonese, written in the Latin alphabet or more frequently in what is called “Aljamiado”, i.e., Romance vernacular in Arabic script. The first written evidence of such translations appears in Aragon dated in 1415. In the Crown of Aragon the Muslim population would be allowed to practice Islam until 1526, when they too were forced to convert to Christianity or face expulsion. Catalan scholars and clerics (from the famous examples of Ramon Martí and Ramon Llull up to Juan Andrés and Joan Martí de Figuerola) had easier access to Arabic or Islamic works than other European scholars interested in studying the Qur’an, and they had much greater opportunities to engage Muslim or formerly Muslim collaborators to help them study it than they would have had elsewhere in Europe. As far as is known, the earliest Romance Qur’an translation (now lost) was made from Latin into Catalan in 1382 at the behest of King Pere III el Ceremoniòs (Peter IV of Aragon, d. 1387).
- In Castile the period of collaboration between Christian scholars and Muslims was shorter. But we do have the famous example of the translation of the Qur’an made by Juan de Segovia in 1456 with the cooperation of the faqih and mufti ʻĪsa ibn Jābir, a Mudejar, not a convert, who died in Tunis and was buried there. This translation has not been found. The only complete translation of a Morisco Qur’an that has reached us, known as “El Corán de Toledo” was copied in 1606; one of its colophons is shown on the cover of this book.
- “Morisco” refers to a Muslim or Moorish inhabitant of Spain
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- “Mudejar” refers to Muslims who lived in territories that were conquered by Christian kingdoms during the Reconquista
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- Forced conversion of Muslims to Christianity was completed by the 1520s; those who wanted to remain Muslim had to practice their religion in clandestinity and, from the 1530s onwards, under persecution by the Inquisition.
- And that was so in spite of the fact that Felipe II, by means of a decree in 1567 in the Kingdom of Granada, had forbidden the oral and written use of the Arabic language.
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- In 1142 the head of the Cluniac order, Peter the Venerable, travelled to Northern Spain, where among other things he commissioned from the astronomer and mathematician Robert of Ketton a complete translation of the Qur’an. Therefore the first translation of the Qur’an into Latin was made somewhere in the Ebro valley in 1143, half a century after the conquest of Toledo (1085) and after Pope Urban II had launched the first Crusade (1095).
- A second translation was carried out in Toledo in 1210 at the time of the emergence of the Mendicant orders (Franciscans and Dominicans) in Italy and Spain, where they established themselves as the Church missionary arm committed to the evangelisation of Jews and Muslims.
- This second translation was made by Mark of Toledo, canon of the Toledo cathedral and a member of the entourage of Archbishop Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada, and probably patronised by him. Those two first translations arose, according to Davide Scotto, from personal and collective convictions in regard to the Crusades —or rather, at the intersection between translation and Crusade.
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- Some of these translations reflect local concerns: mainly, the intention to persuade families who had accepted Islam or their descendants to revert to Christianity. Robert of Ketton who refers to lex sarracenorum, but the term Qur’an itself is not used.
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- A new, complete translation of the Qur’an into Latin was completed in 1456 by Juan de Segovia in close cooperation with a faqih of Segovia, Yça de Gebir.⁸ This translation is lost except for a few fragments in other manuscripts.We know that it was a trilingual endeavour, with parallel texts in Arabic, Castilian and Latin.
- Davide Scotto, who has done previous important work on Segovia,⁹ dedicates his contribution to this volume to Juan de Segovia’s reports on the disputes between himself and three Muslims that took place in Medina del Campo starting in October 1431.
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- The abundance of Qur’ans demonstrates that the Holy Book continued to be the backbone of Morisco Islam up to the years of the general Expulsion of the Moriscos (1609–14). Many were hidden in false floors and walls, and discovered after the expulsion and up to the nineteenth century. We also have Arabic Qur’ans copied throughout the Morisco period up to the beginning of the seventeenth century; some of them are rich and well-decorated manuscripts that reveal the patronage of wealthy Muslim families and the existence of copyists, calligraphers and illustrators, access to good paper and ink, etc. A good example of this is a Muṣḥaf preserved in Madrid, Real Academia de la Historia, copied in 1597 by Muḥammad b. Muḥammad Ballester in Aranda de Moncayo.
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- Most of the copies of Mudejar and Morisco Qur’ans that have reached us date from the sixteenth century, and constitute either a part or excerpt of the Qur’an or what is known in the scholarly literature since Eduardo Saavedra as “abridged Qur’ans”. More recently, Nuria de Castilla has called the standard selection of chapters and verses “the Morisco Qur’an”. In fact, it is remarkable that there is only one complete Qur’an translated during the Mudejar-Morisco period that has reached us, the already mentioned BCLM MS 235 (known as the Toledo Qur’an), copied in 1606 in Castilian language and Latin script from a copy written in Aljamiado.¹² We have two copies made outside the Peninsula in Salonica (Thessaloniki), where there was an important community of Iberian exiles, Moriscos and Sephardic Jews. One of the Thessaloniki Qur’ans was translated by the Aragonese Ybrahim Izquierdo in 1568; it contains an interlinear translation in Arabic and Castilian, and is held at the Bibliothe`que nationale de France where it was donated by the French Orientalist Antoine Galland. The other was made by Muhamad Rabadan in 1612, also in Salonica, and is written in Aljamiado. Both are abridged or abbreviated Qur’ans, of which we have nearly thirty examples.
- Adrián Rodríguez and Pablo Roza Candás devote a chapter to this newly discovered reverse-order Qur’an and to the role of memory and memorizing in the religious life of Mudejars and Moriscos.
- the typical Spanish Qur’an made by and for Iberian Muslims is found in anonymous sixteenth-century manuscripts, but these translations appear to be copies of versions made earlier. What were the originals, and who made them? – we don’t know.
- All the Antialcoranes contain numerous qur’anic quotations which are recorded in Arabic transcribed into the Latin alphabet (i.e., in inverse Aljamía), accompanied by a Spanish translation and the pertinent exegesis provided by the authors of tafsir.
- Szpiech explores the question of what role the ability to read Arabic —either silently or aloud— played in the missionary campaign of García and his circle. He argues that written transliteration plays a valuable role in highlighting the place of oral presentation of the Qur’an in campaigns of preaching to Muslims and Moriscos from Granada to Valencia.
- Also transversal to both these sections of the book is the question of transliteration: Romance in Arabic letters by the Muslims, Arabic in Latin letters by the Christians. Szpiech calls this second form of transliterating, or inverse Aljamiado, “Anti-aljamiado”. He uses this term to stress that transliteration is not a neutral or transparent action, and to propose that in his view, putting the Qur’an into Latin letters in this sixteenth-century Iberian context is inherently a polemical gesture. – The question of transliteration is, no doubt, in need of being explored further. It is obvious that in this context changing alphabets is not neutral, but rather a tool of identity formation or of undermining identity formation. Szpiech’s suggestion that one community transliterates in order to express and defend identity, while the other employs transliteration to undermine that identity formation, deserves further exploration.
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- Robert of Ketton w/ Translation
- He usesadifferent metaphor in his preface to the Qur’an itself: that of “just taking off the Arabic veil” (Arabico tantum semoto velamine), and therefore revealing the material in its own light (pro sui modo), “not having recourse to excerpts, not changing the sense of anything, except only for better understanding” (nil excerpens, nil sensibiliter nisi propter intelligentiam tantum alterans), but not making the translation any more beautiful than the original. He continues: it is important not to make any changes, because the Qur’an “although lethal, in many places provides for select and understanding readers, very great testimony and the strongest argument for the sacredness and excellence of our religion.
- Surah al-Fatiha:
- Robert makes a single sentence of the whole of the Fātiḥa. He puts a main verb at the end (7) and turns verbal phrases into nouns that depend on this one verb (in verses 5 and 6). Other finite clauses in the Arabic have become a subordinate clause (4) or a participle (5). Above all, God, who is directly addressed with vocatives and imperatives in the Arabic, becomes the subject of verbs in the third person and is described by third person pronouns and adjectives.
- Surah II:
- Robert’s text is a single sentence with the subject at the beginning and the single finite verb at the end, and intervening nominal phrases introduced by -que, necnon, and item. The first phrase is an expansion on the Arabic “This is the book, there is no doubt in it.” Robert uses a doublet for “doubt”: “falsity or error”, and, for euphony adds annexu (“addition of”). “A guidance for those who fear God” is expanded into “in those in whom there is divine love, and awe and worship of the deity,” whilst the “belief in the Unseen (i.e. afterlife)” is omitted, probably because it is stated in different words later on (“spes seculi futuri”). Prayers and almsgiving are retained, but with the use of a distinctly Christian term “eleemosyne”, and the last three words have been added to complete the sentence (“sectam veracem patefecit”).
- One can say, then, that Robert used the same translation method in translating astrological texts, as in translating the Qur’an. His aim was to present a text in good Latin which, at the same time, got to the heart of whatever he was translating. He eschewed a literal translation, whether he was translating a scientific or a theological work. Julian Yolles has detected signs of his real competence in astronomy and astrology in the way he translated certain verses of the Qur’an, but he made an effort, through the use of Arabic interpretations of the Qur’an (whether written or by word of mouth) to render the religious text intelligible, as has been demonstrated by Thomas Burman.
- Mark of Toledo’s Translation Mark of Toledo’s translation of Surah al-Fatiha:
- Intervention of Mark of Toledo’s translation:
- Surah al-Fatiha:
- Surah II:
- Mark of Toledo’s translation:
Qu’ran in Iberia (Wiegers)
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