The Qur’an in the Enlightenment
Presenter: Alexander Bevilacqua (Williams College)
Respondents: Sarah R. bin Tyeer (Columbia University) & Claire Gallien (Université de Montpellier, and Edward W. Said Fellow at the Heyman Center)
Moderator: Pier Mattia Tommasino (Columbia University)
The Qur'an was an object of scholarly attention in the eighteenth century, when, in the wake of Lodovico Marracci's philological Latin achievement of 1698, a number of writers attempted a literary translation of the holy book of Islam. In the same period, the Qur'an also served as a multivalent symbol--of revealed religion, of literature, and of law. This paper first examines the scholarly achievements of the period's European translators from Arabic, and then compares them to the Qur'an's reception in the Enlightenment to reveal both the connections and the differences between philological and "philosophical" reception in this formative era of Western intellectual culture.
