Jan Loop

The chapter discusses Albert Schultens’ (1686-1750) linguistic and sociolinguistic theories in the light of his 17th-century predecessors and some of his 18th-century successors, with a particular focus on his promotion of the study of Arabic poetry. It tries to show that, in spite of its shortcomings, Schultens’ work is a significant moment in the history of oriental studies. It stimulated an entire generation of young scholars in Protestant northern Europe; and his comparative study of Semitic languages, his concepts of the primeval language and its transmission, as well as his great interest in the poetry of the East, still resonate in early Romantic approaches to oriental poetry.

Early modern Europeans developed several ways of thinking about the Qur’an and the person whom they took to be its author, the Prophet Muḥammad. This article looks at two distinct traditions of reading the Qur’an as law and as literature and shows how these traditions intersected and eventually merged. Together, they made the Qur’an fruitful for ‘thinking with’ under a variety of headings. Philologists, not philosophes, advanced this long-term process, though prominent non-scholars such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) took advantage of its fruits and used the example of Muḥammad and the Qur’an in their work.
The Qur’an made another contribution to what is now called the Enlightenment. Not too foreign and yet at an intellectually productive distance from Judaism and Christianity, it was a useful point of comparison for the Hebrew Bible. The reinterpretation of Hebrew Bible and Qur’an proceeded in lock step, often through bi-directional comparison, as both works came to be perceived through new aesthetic, rhetorical, and historical lenses. As a result, the two works converged as never before in European intellectual history. What is more, the study of the Qur’an helped to generate a new comparative concept: that of lowercase, plural
scriptures.

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.

Im Zentrum dieses Essays stehen die Romane l’Argent von Emile Zola, erschienen 1890/91, Anthony Trollope’s The Way we live now von 1873 und Friedrich Spielhagens Sturmflut von 1877. Sie alle sind innerhalb von 20 Jahren erschienen und thematisieren aus je unterschiedlichen sozialen, nationalen und kulturellen Perspektiven die Gewalt, mit der die neue, dritte ökonomische Kultur die ökonomischen wie sozialen Strukturen Europas im 19. Jahrhundert radikal umzupflügen begann –und die insbesondere nach dem Börsenkrach von 1873 und der darauffolgenden Weltwirtschaftskrise, der Grossen oder Langen Depression, in den Augen von vielen apokalyptische Züge annahm.

This volume brings together the leading experts in the history of European Oriental Studies. Their essays present a comprehensive history of the teaching and learning of Arabic in early modern Europe, covering a wide geographical area from southern to northern Europe and discussing the many ways and purposes for which the Arabic language was taught and studied by scholars, theologians, merchants, diplomats and prisoners. The contributions shed light on different methods and contents of language teaching in a variety of academic, scholarly and missionary contexts in the Protestant and the Roman Catholic world. But they also look beyond the institutional history of Arabic studies and consider the importance of alternative ways in which the study of Arabic was persued.

Contributors are Asaph Ben Tov, Maurits H. van den Boogert, Sonja Brentjes, Mordechai Feingold, Mercedes García-Arenal, John-Paul A. Ghobrial, Aurélien Girard, Alastair Hamilton, Jan Loop, Nuria Martínez de Castilla Muñoz, Simon Mills, Fernando Rodríguez Mediano, Bernd Roling, Arnoud Vrolijk.

The Reformed Church historian and orientalist Johann Heinrich Hottinger (1620-1667) is a key figure in the history of Arabic and Islamic studies in early modern Europe. His life and his work have been almost completely neglected and there has never been a full-length study on Hottinger. This book presents a thorough documentation of Hottinger's Arabic and Islamic studies. Based on printed books and a great number of unpublished and hitherto unknown manuscripts, the book assesses his scholarship in the context of seventeenth-century oriental studies and confessional rivalries. The book contains a biographical account of Hottinger and inserts him into the Zurich tradition of oriental studies, which can be traced back to Theodor Bibliander and Konrad Pellikan in the sixteenth century. It gives an account of his years as a student of Jacobus Golius in Leiden, where Hottinger copied and collected an impressive number of Arabic manuscripts on which he later based his teaching and his publications. The book explores Hottinger's network in the Protestant Republic of Letters and it contains studies of his activities as a bibliographer of Arabic texts, as a teacher of the Arabic language, as a linguist who promoted a comparative approach to oriental languages, as a student of the history of Islam and as a Protestant who used his knowledge of Arabic and of Islam in the theological debates of the time.

“The European Qur'an. Islamic Scripture in European Culture and Religion 1150-1850” (EuQu) is a six-year research project funded through a synergy grant from the European Research Council (ERC). Its four principal investigators (and host institutions) are Mercedes García-Arenal (Centro de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales, CSIC), John Tolan (Université de Nantes), Jan Loop (University of Kent) and Roberto Tottoli (Università di Napoli l’Orientale). The project studies the ways in which the Islamic Holy Book is embedded in the intellectual, religious and cultural history of Medieval and Early Modern Christians, European Jews, freethinkers, atheists and European Muslims. We will conduct research on how the Qur’an has been translated, interpreted, adapted and used in Christian Europe from the Middle Ages through to early modern times, in order to understand how Islam’s Holy Book has influenced both culture and religion in Europe. EuQu will look at the role of the Qur’an in interactions with Islam, in debates between Christians of different beliefs and in critiques of Christianity during the Enlightenment. The six-year project will produce interdisciplinary research through scientific meetings across Europe, a GIS-database of Qur’an manuscripts, translations and other works in which the Qur'an is discussed, and through PhD theses and monographs. It will bring the fruits of this research to non-academic audiences through a creative multimedia exhibition on the place of the Qur’an in European cultural heritage. The kickoff conference in Naples will provide the opportunity for the four Principal Investigators to discuss their program with members of the EuQu advisory board and with other invited scholars.

In diesem Beitrag möchte ich die Errungenschaften von Johann Ludwig Burckhardt im Kontext von anderen Reisenden diskutieren, die sich zur gleichen Zeit im Nahen Osten und Nord-Afrika aufhielten. Dabei wird sich zeigen, dass der Aspekt, der gemeinhin als außerordentlich und charakteristisch für Burckhardts Unternehmung betrachtet wird – nämlich seine Anpassung an Religion, Kultur und allgemeine Lebensverhältnisse in den bereisten Gebieten – weit verbreitet war und auch von anderen Zeitgenossen in manchmal noch radikalerer Weise betrieben wurde. Das Ziel soll dabei nicht sein, Burckhardts Leistungen zu schmälern. Vielmehr geht es mir darum, sie in ihrem wissenschafts- und geistesgeschichtlichen Kontext zu verorten und sie historisch besser zu verstehen.