Reading the Qur'an in latin christendom, 1140-1560
- ISBN: 9780812220629
- Editorial: University of Pennsylvania Press
- Fecha de la edición: 2009
- Lugar de la edición: Philadelphia. Estados Unidos de Norteamérica
- Encuadernación: Rústica
- Medidas: 23 cm
- Nº Pág.: 317
- Idiomas: Inglés
Most of what we know about attitudes toward Islam in the medieval and early modern West has been based on polemical treatises against Islam written by Christian scholars preoccupied with defending their own faith and attacking the doctrines of others. Christian readings of the Qur'an reading have in consequence typically been depicted as tedious and one- dimensional exercises in anti-Islamic hostility. In Reading the Qur'an in Latin Christendom, 1140-1560, Thomas E. Burman looks instead to a different set of sources: the Latin translations of the Qur'an made by European scholars and the manuscripts and early printed books in which these translations circulated. Using these largely unexplored materials, Burman argues that the reading of the Qur'an in Western Europe was much more complex. While their reading efforts were certainly often focused on attacking Islam, scholars of the period turned out to be equally interested in a whole range of grammatical, lexical, and interpretive problems presented by the text. Indeed, these two approaches were interconnected: attacking the Qur'an often required sophisticated explorations of difficult Arabic grammatical problems.