The Venetian Qur'an: A Renaissance Companion to Islam (Material Texts) - Hardcover

Tommasino, Pier Mattia

 
9780812250121: The Venetian Qur'an: A Renaissance Companion to Islam (Material Texts)
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0812250125 ISBN 13: 9780812250121
Verlag: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

An anonymous book appeared in Venice in 1547 titled L'Alcorano di Macometto, and, according to the title page, it contained "the doctrine, life, customs, and laws [of Mohammed] . . . newly translated from Arabic into the Italian language." Were this true, L'Alcorano di Macometto would have been the first printed direct translation of the Qur'an in a European vernacular language. The truth, however, was otherwise. As soon became clear, the Qur'anic sections of the book—about half the volume—were in fact translations of a twelfth-century Latin translation that had appeared in print in Basel in 1543. The other half included commentary that balanced anti-Islamic rhetoric with new interpretations of Muhammad's life and political role in pre-Islamic Arabia. Despite having been discredited almost immediately, the Alcorano was affordable, accessible, and widely distributed.

In The Venetian Qur'an, Pier Mattia Tommasino uncovers the volume's mysterious origins, its previously unidentified author, and its broad, lasting influence. L'Alcorano di Macometto, Tommasino argues, served a dual purpose: it was a book for European refugees looking to relocate in the Ottoman Empire, as well as a general Renaissance reader's guide to Islamic history and stories. The book's translation and commentary were prepared by an unknown young scholar, Giovanni Battista Castrodardo, a complex and intellectually accomplished man, whose commentary in L'Alcorano di Macometto bridges Muhammad's biography and the text of the Qur'an with Machiavelli's The Prince and Dante's Divine Comedy. In the years following the publication of L'Alcorano di Macometto, the book was dismissed by Arabists and banned by the Catholic Church. It was also, however, translated into German, Hebrew, and Spanish and read by an extended lineage of missionaries, rabbis, renegades, and iconoclasts, including such figures as the miller Menocchio, Joseph Justus Scaliger, and Montesquieu. Through meticulous research and literary analysis, The Venetian Qur'an reveals the history and legacy of a fascinating historical and scholarly document.

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Pier Mattia Tommasino teaches Italian literature at Columbia University.

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Preface

Some years ago, as a graduate student at the Scuola Normale Superiore, I began to consult on a daily basis the exemplar of the Alcorano di Macometto in the University Library of Pisa. More than one spring afternoon was spent reading and transcribing a Renaissance companion to Islam, the second half of which contained the first printed translation of the Qur'an in a European language. Published by Andrea Arrivabene in Venice in 1547, this book is well known to experts on a number of subjects. Carlo Ginzburg's essay on the cosmos of the miller Menocchio, The Cheese and the Worms, brought it to the attention of historians and made it known to a wide readership. European scholars of Oriental languages have been familiar with it for some time. Beginning with the European proto-Orientalists of the second half of the sixteenth century, the Alcorano di Macometto was considered fraudulent, an act of plagiarism, an imposture. It was seen as a partial, arbitrary, and awkward translation of the Qur'an, in actual fact translated from the medieval Latin version by Robert of Ketton (1143) and not at all what the publisher stated on the title page: "Newly translated from the Arabic into the Italian tongue."

Given my background in linguistic and philological studies on medieval Italian poetry, the exemplar before me, marked D'Ancona 16.7.10, was a novel object. Half bound in green leather and marble paper, the book revealed visible traces of its history and its owners: on the title page, the stamp of "Dono D'Ancona" to the University Library of Pisa and, on the back of the front cover, a printed ex libris that read: "Ex libris Jacobj Manzoni."

As I read and transcribed the text during the spring of 2004, enjoying the breeze that blew in through the library windows overlooking Piazza Dante, I paid little attention to those notes of ownership. I did not question whether, how, or why Alessandro D'Ancona (1835-1914), director of the Scuola Normale di Pisa from 1892 to 1900, had read the so-called Arrivabene Qur'an before donating it to the library of the university where he taught for many years. Nor did I notice the ex libris of one of the greatest nineteenth-century Italian bibliophiles: Count Giacomo Manzoni (1816-89). Both men were prominent figures during the Risorgimento and in the first post-Unification period, and both, for different reasons, had owned the same copy of the book whose story is told here. Later, unsurprisingly, it was in the essay La leggenda di Maometto in Occidente (The Legend of Muhammad in the West) by D'Ancona of 1888-89 (republished in 1994), that a tantalizing piece of information caught my attention, an old insight into the Alcorano di Macometto made in passing that had remained unexplored for over a century. I followed it up, and my findings on the historiographic and political background of the translator and editor of this Renaissance companion to Islam are contained in Chapter 7, "Scribendae Historiae Gratia."

During those first readings I understood, however vaguely, that beyond the criticism of historians Carlo De Frede and Elena Bonora, among others, and beyond the insights of scholars of Arabic and Islamic studies in early modern Europe, including Angelo Michele Piemontese, Hartmut Bobzin, and Alastair Hamilton, the Arrivabene Qur'an was characterized by problems that were still unresolved and that needed to be discussed. At the same time, I knew that dealing with the subject appropriately would require a very complex strategy, a strategy that demanded working in between disciplines in a way that was systematic, but which would often prove to be slippery as well. Initially, the process was hardly gratifying, yet I had the energy, enthusiasm, and above all the time to follow it through. I was also backed by an institution, the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa, which provided the opportunity to improve my knowledge of Arabic and Qur'an studies for at least two years: I studied the former at Dar Comboni in Cairo, directed at the time by Father Camillo Ballin (2004-5), and the latter at the Pontifical Institute for Arabic and Islamic Studies in Rome under the watchful guidance of Michel Lagarde (2005-6). I had chosen that particular topic—which I then knew very little about—because I was intrigued by the Arabic language and Islamic culture, and wanted to merge this new fascination with the philological and literary studies I had already undertaken.

My interest in Arabic and Islamic culture had early beginnings, during my childhood. My father Luigi, a nuclear physicist, was an expert on the measurement of radon gas and, during the 1980s, my family often hosted students, friends, and colleagues from the Arab and Muslim world. I fondly remember Zora Lounis, Djamel Eddine Cherouati and Salah Djeffal, Mashid Lofti and her husband, Dariush Azimi Garakani, and their son Navid. I also remember Hameed Ahmed Khan, a native of Pakistan, who tried to convert me, to no avail, from my unshakable and fanatic devotion to soccer to the luminous revelations of cricket. Childhood memories, interest, friendship, curiosity. Two decades later, all this came back into my life as a college then graduate student, but in an entirely new form, a methodological one. To understand the Alcorano di Macometto and, more generally, the cultural and religious interweavings, the contacts and overlaps, and the polemical manipulations of texts between early modern Italy and the Islamic world, I needed to know Arabic and be familiar with Islam and the Qur'an. With a hint of presumption, I was not content to merely scratch the surface. I did not want to analyze representations of the Ottomans in European Renaissance literature. Nor did I want to avoid going deeper, or to limit myself to analyzing just the projections of Italian intellectuals, writers, and artists on the mirror of the Ottoman East. I wanted to break that mirror and delve much deeper. At the same time, I questioned whether I would succeed and, above all, wondered what I would find. Would the outcome be equal to my efforts?

Alfredo Stussi put me to the test when, in 2005, he assigned me to analyze the spoken Arabic of the character of the gipsy in the comedy La Zìngana (The Gipsy) by Rovigo-born Gigio Artemio Giancarli (d. c. 1561). The comedy was performed in Venice in 1545 and published in Mantua between 1545 and 1546 by Venturino Ruffinelli. This was my first published research article. Written between Cairo and Rome during 2005-6, it was published in the Italian journal Lingua e Stile by Il Mulino, the Italian publisher of this book. This essay was followed by further studies based on two specular, intersecting, and often inseparable strands. The first of these was European Orientalism, both erudite and popular, with particular interest in the distortions and manipulations made to the text of the Qur'an for the purposes of religious propaganda. The second concerned the spread of the Italian language in the Mediterranean, especially by non-Italians who used Italian for commercial, diplomatic, religious, and literary purposes. These studies are ongoing and their goal is to understand the historical and geographical ties between the European prestige of the Italian language and its practical uses in the Mediterranean and beyond, which are also part of the debate on the issue of the church and the diffusion of vernaculars, and that of Italian as a lingua senza impero (a language without an empire) according to the definition given by the historian of the Italian language Francesco Bruni.

These areas of investigation have developed surrounded by equal amounts of enthusiasm and difficulty over the past fifteen years; that is to say, after September 11 and all that followed turned the spotlight on the cultures of Islam in mass societies. Similarly, in the early...

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Verlag
University of Pennsylvania Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2018
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0812250125
ISBN 13 
9780812250121
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
320
Kontakt zum Hersteller
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