The
earliest direct English translation of the holy book is a testament to its
translator's resourcefulness
The first Muslim member of Congress assumed office
in January 2007. For his swearing-in ceremony, Rep. Keith
Ellison, D-Minn., chose to pledge on the Quran.
The copy he used, specially loaned by the Library of Congress for the occasion,
had once belonged to Thomas Jefferson. [Inset:
Why did Jefferson own a copy of the Quran? The third
president was interested in Islam for many reasons, as Denise A. Spellberg explains
in her book “Thomas
Jefferson’s Qur’an.” He was able to read the holy book of
Islam in the first place, however, only thanks to a recent translation, the
first direct one from Arabic into English, a copy of which he purchased as a
law student in 1765. That translation, by a young English lawyer named George
Sale, would prove to have an outsize role in the Western study and
understanding of the Quran.
European interest in Islam
Long before Europeans governed Muslim colonies,
interest in Islam and its cultures ran high in Europe. Part of the reason was
political. Three Muslim empires dominated large parts of Asia: the Ottomans in
Anatolia, the Mediterranean and Arabia; the Safavids in Persia; and the Mughals
in India.
These Muslim
dynasties were not just powerful but were also admired for their refined arts
and culture — music, poetry, gardens, ceramics and textiles. Moreover, books in
Arabic offered knowledge of many fields to those who learned the language. Not
just the sciences and philosophy but even Arabic literature enticed European
translators. Thus, in 1704 a Frenchman first translated the “1001 Nights,”
whose tales soon became an enduring classic of European as well as of Arabic
letters.
Above all else, the
religion of Islam itself seemed an especially compelling field of inquiry to a
variety of European scholars and thinkers. How had a handful of Muslims emerged
from the Arabian Peninsula in the seventh century to conquer so much of the
known world? This was one of the great questions of
world history, as both the French Enlightenment philosopher Voltaire and the
English historian Edward Gibbon agreed. In addition, philosophers and
freethinking Christians deemed the central tenet of Islam, the unity of God,
more rational than the mystery of the Christian Trinity. Thus, many different
Europeans attributed singular importance to Islam and the language of its
revelation, Arabic.