Qurʾānic Narratives in d’Herbelot’s Bibliothèque Orientale (1697) : An Ethical Reception of Islamic Scripture in Early Modern Europe

To early modern European sensitivities, the Qurʾān was, in Alastair Hamilton’s telling metaphor, a “forbidden fruit” (Hamilton 2008). Desired and despised, coveted and feared, the Scripture founding a rival religion and competing political power had attracted European scholarly attention since the Middle Ages. From its early stages, the European reception of the Islamic scripture was marked by ambivalence for, while the Qurʾān was perceived as blatant forgery, it also celebrated Jesus and Mary and called for the worship of one God. It was, furthermore, the founding text of a powerful religion and an admired civilization. Until the twelfth/eighteenth century, when profound intellectual and political changes gradually set the stage for the emergence of a secular framework of analysis, engagements with the Qurʾān were habitually framed by religious polemics. Translations of the Muslim scripture were prefaced with customary denunciations of the “false religion” and a concern for Christian missionary efforts (Ben-Tov 2015, 119–120; Hamilton 2008; Tolan 2018, 198). Such conventional declarations, whether sincere or not, were necessary to avoid censorship, preserve patronage ties, and generally conform to social expectations. They should not, however, conceal the multifaceted interest that the Islamic scripture elicited from European intellectuals. As several recent studies have demonstrated, religious antagonism did not preclude genuine curiosity, scholarly rigor, or an emotional engagement with the Qurʾān (Hamilton 2004, 91–118; 2005, 2008; Burman 2007; Elmarsafy 2009; Ben-Tov 2017; Bevilacqua 2018; Bevilacqua and Loop 2018).

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Published in: Behind the Story: Ethical Readings of Qurʾānic Narratives
License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
See chapter on publisher's website: https://dx.doi.org/10.1163/9789004683167_012