The Enlightenment Qur'an: The Politics of Translation and the Construction of Islam (review)

Thomas E. Burman's landmark 2007 study, Reading the Qur'an in Latin Christendom, 1140-1560, revived interest in the translation and transmission of Islamic scripture in premodern Europe, while leaving ample space for further investigations of these phenomena after the dawn of modernity. It is here that Ziad Elmarsafy's beautifully crafted volume takes up the reins, broadening Burman's original scope to include translations and commentaries that appeared in a wide variety of European vernaculars during the long eighteenth century. The Enlightenment Qur'an presents a two-fold aim: first, to analyze Qur'anic translation projects as well as biographies of Muhammad and accounts of Islamic history carried out by European scholars during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; and second, to trace the influence of these writings on some of the most prominent figures of the Enlightenment. Elmarsafy's clear and engaging writing style, his insightful close readings and his masterful translations from the Arabic, Latin, French and German help the reader to navigate the complexities of this expansive interdisciplinary study.

In the first chapter, Elmarsafy presents a clear and lively historical summary of Qur'anic translation projects in Europe from the twelfth to the eighteenth century. Beginning with Robert of Ketton's early effort under the supervision of Peter the Venerable, Elmarsafy surveys not only the literary style but also the religious and political agenda that informed each translation, thereby providing the reader with a comprehensive yet highly lucid view of Christian Europe's changing perspective on the Islamic world. As the survey moves from the Middle Ages to the Reformation, Elmarsafy exposes a tense dichotomy between the fear of too much or too little information: some thinkers, including Luther, encouraged the dissemination of information on Islamic history, law and religious doctrine in the spirit of "know your enemy," while others, including the authorities responsible for the imprisonment of Bibliander's printer Johann Oporinus, feared that public access to an accurate translation of the Qur'an risked the conversion of unsuspecting Christian readers to the Muslim faith. Moving into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the author introduces Ludovico Marracci and George Sale, two translators who will become the protagonists of the following two chapters. Sale's and Marracci's translations differentiate themselves from those of their predecessors, argues Elmarsafy, through the use of "thick description," to borrow Gilbert Ryle's phrase heavily utilized by Clifford Geertz. In other words, these translators are able to convey the underlying and complex significance of the Qur'an to their contemporary European readers through extensive annotation on the part of Marracci, and, on the part of Sale, through a capacity to render the true sense of the text in a modern vernacular tongue. Furthermore, Elmarsafy finds that "the promulgation of a comparative perspective on the world's religions"—particularly through the works of Ross and Spinoza—"prompted a paradigm shift according to which the validity of religions other than Christianity became increasingly acceptable in seventeenth-century England, thereby paving the way for the outlook of the Sale translation" (9). In the final pages of the chapter, Elmarsafy briefly elaborates his theory tying Spinozism to the Sale translation's global and tolerant perspective, thus inviting a more thorough, targeted investigation of this particular connection.

Chapters 2 and 3 concentrate on the Sale and Marracci translations in order to contrast their differing styles and political agendas. Elmarsafy presents Marracci, a staunch Catholic, as a man on the offensive, using his translation efforts as a sort of "verbal warfare" to attack Muslims with their own doctrine; it is Sale's more liberal Protestant background, according to Elmarsafy, which allows for "a very real desire not only to understand, but perhaps also imitate the other" (46). The contrast between Sale and Marracci highlights the overarching thesis of the second chapter: "we see a transposition of the religious politics of the Enlightenment—the Catholic Reformation, the English Reformation, the deist quarrels—on to the politics...