Dahiyat / Shaheen Once Upon the Orient Wave

Milton and the Arab Muslim World
1. Auflage 2012
ISBN: 978-1-78094-104-2
Verlag: Hesperus Press Ltd.
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 120 Seiten

John Milton's poems Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained are among the greatest pieces of writing in the English language. Like other writers of his time, Milton had only a sketchy idea of Islam and the Arab world, from travellers and linguists who had made the arduous journey to and from the Middle East. But buried in his works are signs that Milton had absorbed ideas and influences from Islam and Arab culture. Professor Dahiyat shows how from the Middle Ages, partly as an attempt to counteract Islam with Christianity, a wide range of writers and researchers spoke, read and wrote Arabic and published books in the earliest days of printing which Milton could have read. Dahiyat then shows how many different references there are to the Orient and Islam in Milton's writings, and discusses the later response of Arab writers and scholars to Milton's major works.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Dahiyat, Eid Abdallah

Shaheen, Mohammad

Leseproben

The West Learns of Islam and Arabic

The English attitude to Islam in the Middle Ages and during the Renaissance is a wide and far-reaching subject, inseparable from the attitude of European Christendom as a whole. But my aim is limited to establishing a series of facts that help place Milton in a particular religious, historical, and cultural context, in the light of which his knowledge of and attitude to Islam (as well as any influence Islamic learning1 might have exercised on him) can be assessed.

Europe received most of its information about Arabs and Muslims by way of Syria (conquered in AD 634), of Spain (held 711–1492), and of Sicily (held 825–1091). The ideas about Islam formulated in the Christian east, particularly by the Greek-speaking Syrians and some Christian Arabs, had an enduring influence throughout the west. St John of Damascus (d.749), who knew Arabic, Greek, and Syriac, was the author of two dialogues which have been described as ‘an effective apology for Christianity and a manual for the guidance of Christians in their arguments with Moslems’.2 In his Chronographia, the Byzantine Theophanes the Confessor (c.758–818) followed St John. This Syro-Byzantine source of information was strengthened further by the Arabic Risala, usually attributed to Abd-al-Masih ibn Is?aq al-Kindi. Al-Kindi, apparently a Nestorian priest, wrote his treatise, a bitter attack on prophet Mu?ammad and Islamic tenets, as an answer to a letter sent to him by the Muslim Abdullah ibn Isma’il al-Hashimi, who tried to convert Al-Kindi to Islam. It covers almost all the traditional arguments of Christian polemic writers against Islam, and was translated by Peter of Toledo (late twelfth century) for inclusion in the Cluniac Corpus. The polemic war against Islam had begun.

During the era of the Crusades (twelfth and thirteenth centuries), European hostility to Islam reached a tragic climax. The Crusading oral and written literature helped fix certain stereotypes and strengthen the Syro-Byzantine polemic image of Islam. The rise of the Ottoman Turks as a major Muslim power aggravated European fears and animosity. Beginning in the mid-fourteenth century, the Turkish victories culminated in the acquisition of Constantinople (1453) and of the whole of the Balkan Peninsula. Having failed to conquer Islam by sheer military force or by missionary work, Europe succeeded in establishing a deformed image of Islam, its teachings, and its prophet in European consciousness.

Continually augmented and fervently fostered by Christian missionaries, these polemic stereotypes and misrepresentations became so dogmatic that by the time Milton was writing they already enjoyed the status of established religious authority. They still determine, to a great extent, the way Islam and its followers are viewed in the west, as Edward Said has shown so cogently.

Paradoxically, while Europe was conducting a campaign of endless polemic against Islam, it was steadily absorbing the great heritage of Islamic culture and learning. With original contributions and innovative discoveries of their own, the Arabs transmitted to Europe a rich legacy of Hellenistic, Persian, and Indian learning and knowledge. Without the fruits of Islamic civilisation, Europe would never have achieved the progress it enjoyed in the Renaissance and still enjoys. Spain and Sicily were the centres of Islamic influence on Western Europe; the Palermo court of Roger II (r.1130–54) and of Frederick II (r.1296–1337) looked more Islamic than Christian. Interestingly, Roger II, who spoke and read Arabic, was the patron of the celebrated Muslim geographer and cartographer Al-Idrisi (d.1166). When Frederick II was excommunicated by Pope Gregory IX in 1239, he was charged, among other things, with ‘displays of friendliness towards Islam’. Muslim Spain (Andalusia) played the most crucial role in the revival of learning in medieval Europe. The Mozarabes, the Christians of Spain who became half-Arabicised, helped in the transmission of Islamic learning to the Europeans of the north. In Cordoba, Seville, Granada, and Toledo, schools flourished and translation throve. Toledo (captured from the Arabs in 1085) remained a centre of Islamic learning under Christian rule. It was even chosen (in 1250) by the Order of Preachers as the site for their School of Oriental Studies, designed to prepare missionaries to Muslims and Jews.

The first English scholar to travel to study at the Arab schools in Spain was one of King Alfred’s early lecturers at Oxford, John Scotus (or John Erigena, c.810–77). He is believed to have studied Arabic and Chaldean. Writing in the eighteenth century, Thomas Warton (1728–90) praised the role Arab schools in Spain played in the introduction of learning to England. He pointed out that, at the beginning of the eleventh century, many Englishmen from the clergy and the laity attended those schools, establishing a trend which continued for a long time. Daniel Merlac (or Morley, d.1190), astronomer and mathematician, studied at Toledo’s famous school and returned to England with a valuable collection of books. In his own works, he quotes frequently from Arabic and Greek philosophers, and praises the superiority of the former. Adelard of Bath, who probably learned Arabic in Sicily or the Holy Land, is credited with producing a dozen or more original works or translations from the Arabic on philosophical, mathematical, and astronomical subjects, as well as a treatise on falconry, the earliest book of its kind known in Western Europe. Early in the thirteenth century Michael Scot, who studied at Toledo, translated Aristotle’s treatises on animals from Arabic, and became the astrologer at the court of the emperor Frederick II.

Robert of Ketton (also called Robertus Retenesis, Robert of Chester and Robert of Reading) was by far the most important English Arabist of the Middle Ages. He was working in Barcelona in 1136, under the great Italian scholar and translator from the Arabic, Plato of Tivoli, and he also befriended Hermann the Dalmatian, apparently for the purpose of studying astronomy. As a result of his interest in astronomy and geometry, he compiled a set of astronomical tables based on those of Al-Battani and Al-Zaraqali, and revised the tables of Al-Khawarizmi. He also translated the algebra of Al-Khawarizmi (in 1145), marking the beginning of European algebra. (The word ‘algorithm’ is derived from Al-Khawarizmi.)

However, Robert of Ketton’s greatest achievement was his translation of the Qur’an (the first in Europe) from Arabic into Latin. Done at the instance of Peter the Venerable, abbot of Cluny, that translation, with a preface and marginal annotations attributed to Peter of Poitiers, was completed between 6 July and 31 December 1143. Supplementary to it, Peter the Venerable wrote a Treatise Against Mohammedanism. Unfortunately, the translated text abounds in gross inaccuracies which betray Ketton’s ignorance of the rhetorical subtleties and profound eloquence of the Arabic of the Qur’an. Moreover, Ketton ‘was always liable to heighten or exaggerate a harmless text in order to give it a nasty or licentious ring, or to prefer an improbable but unpleasant interpretation of the meaning to a likely but normal and decent one’.3 The result was not the Qur’an, but rather a mutilated rendering of it, larded with explanatory annotations having no basis in historical fact or religious meaning. Indeed, in his preface Ketton says that he experienced ‘considerable difficulty’ in the translation.

In parenthesis at this point, it is worth saying that, for many people, as a supreme work of art the Qur’an is untranslatable. It must be read in Arabic. Commenting on his own translation of the Qur’an, Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall (1875–1936) says that the aim of his work is:

[T]o present to English readers what Muslims the world over hold to be the meaning of the words of the Qur’an and the nature of the book, in not unworthy language and concisely, with a view to the requirements of English Muslims. It may be reasonably claimed that no Holy Scripture can be fairly presented by one who disbelieves its inspiration and its message; and this is the first English translation of the Qur’an by an Englishman who is a Muslim. Some of the translations include commentations offensive to Muslims. And almost all employ a style of language which Muslims at once recognize as unworthy. The Qur’an cannot be translated. This is the belief of traditional Sheykhs and the view of the present writer. The book is here rendered almost literally and every effort has been made to choose befitting language. But the result is not the Glorious Qur’an, that inimitable symphony, the very sounds of which move men to tears and ecstasy. It is only an attempt to present the meaning of the Qur’an – and peradventure something of the charm in English. It can never take the place of the Qur’an in Arabic, nor is it meant to do so.4

In spite of its defects, Robert of Ketton’s annotated translation enjoyed a considerable circulation in manuscript, and provided new material for fresh attacks against Islam. The gulf between the historical Islam on the one hand and its polemic representations on the other had been widened.

Ketton’s translation was first printed in Basel in 1543, with a preface by Martin Luther himself, and was reissued with a preface by Philip Melanchthon in...