Christians Reading the Quran Across the Ages - An Interfaith Program

16 المشاهدات· 24/03/22

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The Life Of Sayeda Zaineb (sa) - Hajjah Nada Najar

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Transcript

[2:40]SMIL ar-rahman ar-raheem I begin in the name of the Almighty God

[2:48]the compassionate the merciful the lord of the great prophets of God

[2:54]Abraham Moses Jesus and Mohammed peace be upon them all on this

[3:00]wonderful evening my dear friends from Notre Dame I'd like to sincerely

[3:05]welcome you to the Islamic Institute of America which is a mosque

[3:14]a community center we have a school here we have an English

[3:17]seminary here it's a very very active community center in the Dearborn

[3:20]and Dearborn Heights so I certainly welcome you to our wonderful discussion

[3:26]this evening we're very very honored to be hosting you this evening

[3:34]I hope you all enjoyed the food even though I heard some

[3:37]of you had just come from dinners so I don't know how

[3:41]much you enjoyed the food but hopefully you did enjoy it so

[3:46]my dear friends tonight dr.

[3:47]Berman will be speaking about the various Christian responses to the Quran

[3:54]so I'd like to just share with you a couple of words

[3:59]about the Quran my name is Mohammad cos weeny I graduated from

[4:04]the seminary of Combe in Iran which is the largest Shia Seminary

[4:10]in the world I studied there for about ten years and two

[4:12]years ago I came back to Michigan and I settled and I'm

[4:17]an imam at this Institute along with my father Imam Hassan Coveney

[4:21]some of you may know him he's been to Notre Dame a

[4:27]few times in Indiana and we have a seminary here I'll be

[4:29]teaching tonight so I'll have to miss some of the program unfortunately

[4:35]to go to my classes but that's my background I studied theology

[4:39]I studied Islamic law and the Quran at the seminary so for

[4:46]us Muslims the Quran has been inspiring us more than a thousand

[4:52]years we believe that the Koran is the actual Word of God

[4:55]revealed in the Arabic language so the Prophet Muhammad did not compose

[5:03]the words of the Quran we believe that the Almighty God composed

[5:06]those words and he was just a messenger who received revelation through

[5:12]the Archangel Gabriel and he delivered it to the people otherwise the

[5:18]Prophet Muhammad was unlettered he never practiced reading or writing he was

[5:25]never formally educated anywhere and God chose him to convey the words

[5:29]of the Quran so he's not the author of the Quran God

[5:34]is but he delivered the Quran to humanity interestingly two weeks ago

[5:39]I was talking to my four-year-old girl her name is Fatima my

[5:45]daughter Fatima and this year we had her take a class on

[5:50]the Quran because her older siblings are in the Quran class so

[5:52]she's like you know dad I want to go to the Quran

[5:57]class as well so we enrolled her two weeks ago I asked

[5:58]her just out of the blue I told her Fatima who who

[6:03]authored the Quran so she thought for a moment she has a

[6:06]teacher her name is sister Suzanne she said Suzanne is the one

[6:12]who wrote the Quran I told her Suzanne is your teacher but

[6:15]God is the one who authored the Quran so the Prophet Muhammad

[6:21]delivered the words of the Quran to his community and then later

[6:24]on the Quran was conveyed to most parts of the globe we

[6:31]feel inspired by the Quran because we believe that the Quran on

[6:37]multiple levels represents the miracle of God when we look at the

[6:41]contents of the Quran for example we find the Quran especially in

[6:44]seventh century Arabia calling on human beings to celebrate their unified human

[6:52]family and so in one verse of the Quran God says we've

[6:57]created you from a single male and female we've made you into

[7:01]nation and tribes so you come to know one another and the

[7:06]Quran tells us that one of the signs of God is our

[7:13]diverse backgrounds languages colors and that's something that we should appreciate in

[7:16]another verse of the Quran God says if you save one human

[7:22]life it's as if you've saved all of humanity so the Quran

[7:26]spoke of the sanctity of the human life and this content in

[7:32]itself has been just inspiring another aspect of the Quran that many

[7:37]Muslims have found inspirational as the poetic aspect the Quran was revealed

[7:43]in 7th century Arabia where the highest form of art adopted by

[7:48]the Arabs of the time was poetry and so the Quran came

[7:54]at such a powerful eloquent level with literary gems that baffled those

[7:59]Arabs at the time who could produce something like that and the

[8:03]Prophet Muhammad was not known to be a poet and author he

[8:07]never was seen improvising or writing it somewhere and then editing it

[8:15]he would just receive those words in the form of revelation and

[8:18]he would speak those words to his people in times of war

[8:21]in times of peace when he was at home when he was

[8:25]travelling when he was tired when he was ill he maintained that

[8:28]same level of amazing eloquence and that inspired Muslims that this is

[8:36]indeed you know from the Almighty God even phonetically for those who

[8:41]speak Arabic they're inspired by the words that tone the melody of

[8:46]the Quran I'll share with you one quick example just to demonstrate

[8:50]to you how even the sounds and the letters of the Quran

[8:55]in Arabic have inspired Muslims so one of the short chapters that

[8:58]we have in the Quran in fact it's the last chapter chapter

[9:00]114 it's just a few verses the theme of the chapter is

[9:08]the whispering devil Satan who whispers evil into our minds who puts

[9:12]evil thoughts into our minds that's basically the theme of the chapter

[9:19]now because the idea of a whisper is something that's silent right

[9:25]the Quran uses silent consonants and letters to even convey that meaning

[9:32]phonetically so I'll even if you don't feel word of Arabic I'll

[9:35]read to you the chapter just to get an idea of how

[9:40]Muslims were even inspired by the words let alone the content of

[9:43]the Quran or the scientific references in the Quran so I'll read

[9:48]it in Arabic God says in this chapter bismillah r-rahman r-rahim allahu

[9:58]dhu Berube nos Maliki nos allaha nos men Shari Lewis wasel's an

[10:05]ass and let e us with Sophie surah Naas min al Jannetty

[10:10]one ass did you notice this s sound and the verse and

[10:18]in the chapter the theme of it is the whisper and so

[10:24]even the sound of the verse helps the person reciting it to

[10:28]think of the whisper so the idea of the chapter is be

[10:35]careful from evil whispers or thoughts and try to resist that and

[10:38]stay focused so just to give you an example Muslims have just

[10:40]been inspired those especially who speak the arabic language to really touched

[10:49]by these words of the Quran so tonight we have our dear

[10:54]friend dr.

[10:56]Thomas Burman he's going to talk about the Quran from this particular

[11:02]aspect the various Christian responses and reactions to the Quran over the

[11:10]years and our dear friend John Fitzpatrick from the Notre Dame Club

[11:15]of Detroit he's going to now come and inspire us with his

[11:23]words and then he will also welcome dr.

[11:26]Berman for the keynote speech so once again I'd like to sincerely

[11:30]thank you to coming to the Islamic Institute of America after the

[11:36]program one of our dear sisters here will give you a tour

[11:42]of the place so you can see this wonderful facility it's a

[11:45]facility it was formerly a Faith Baptist Church and they relocated to

[11:52]another place in the Detroit metro area so we moved here about

[11:55]three years ago so I sincerely welcome you and you've honored us

[11:59]with your presence tonight god bless you and I end with the

[12:04]greeting of Islam which is peace be with you assalamu alaikum well

[12:13]Tom I don't know if you're gonna top that that dock that

[12:23]was thank you so much very very graceful so I'm John Fitzpatrick

[12:28]I'm the immediate past president of the Notre Dame Club of Detroit

[12:32]we're joined tonight by Kristin Fitzpatrick who's our current president so please

[12:38]join me in thanking the Islamic Institute of America the women's interface

[12:43]solutions for dialogue and outreach in Metro Detroit and Zaman International for

[12:49]helping to sponsor this event case you didn't know since 1923 the

[12:54]Notre Dame Club of Detroit has served as an ambassador for the

[12:59]University of Notre Dame in the Detroit community now the Hesburgh lectures

[13:06]were inspired by father Hesburgh the late father Hesburgh legacy of lifelong

[13:09]learning and the series has brought lecturers of university faculty to notre

[13:15]dame clubs and communities since 1986 the lectures are presented by mostly

[13:21]tenured faculty and showcase the depth and breadth of Notre Dame's academic

[13:27]expertise in research and in teaching the series further the mission of

[13:35]the university to provide meaningful continuing education to Notre Dame alumni and

[13:41]Friends tonight's lecture is Christians reading the Quran across the ages by

[13:47]Tom Burman Thomas the Robert Conway director of the medieval Institute and

[13:52]professor of history at the University of Notre Dame dr.

[13:56]Berman's research and teaching focus is on the intellectual and cultural interaction

[14:01]between Jews Christians and Muslims in the medieval Mediterranean world so please

[14:15]join me in welcoming dr.

[14:08]Berman to the Islamic Institute all right can you hear me back

[14:34]there do you want to hear me are you sure we could

[14:40]turn it down if you'd rather sleep it's it's a great pleasure

[14:44]for me to be here hosted by the detroit area Notre Dame

[14:50]Alumni Club hosted by this marvelous Islamic Institute and by the other

[14:57]important sponsors of this event it's it's a little bit of one

[15:00]of those weird everything coming together moments for me because I am

[15:04]and I am and have for a number of decades been an

[15:12]Episcopalian but I grew up among the Baptist's and in fact the

[15:15]first time I ever looked at a copy of the Koran was

[15:20]in a Baptist Church Sunday school if you can believe that way

[15:23]back in the mid-70s at some point so somehow things are worlds

[15:31]are colliding here in interesting ways let me see if I've got

[15:36]this thing going the right way yeah so I'm talking about the

[15:38]the ongoing century centuries-long encounter between Christians and the Koran an encounter

[15:49]that goes all the way back to the beginnings of Islam 1400

[15:51]years ago but my paymaster's the Dean of the College of Arts

[15:58]and Letters and the Provost at the University of Notre Dame would

[16:01]would want me not to go on without saying a word or

[16:06]two about the medieval Institute that I'm the director of and them

[16:10]and have the great honor and pleasure of being the director of

[16:13]the medieval Institute you may not know this is the oldest interdisciplinary

[16:17]Institute at the University of Notre Dame we're almost 75 years old

[16:22]and we'll be celebrating that anniversary in a big way a couple

[16:27]of years from now the media will Institute is where graduate education

[16:31]at Notre Dame began the first PhD degrees were granted in our

[16:35]Institute as far as a sort of national and international recognition the

[16:41]medieval Institute is probably the best-known Institute at the University of Notre

[16:46]Dame as well we bring people from all across the world to

[16:50]give lectures and to attend seminars at our Center and everybody knows

[16:57]about the medieval Institute but it is one of these odd things

[17:01]that students passing through Notre Dame alumni visiting campus aren't quite aware

[17:10]of this amazing resource that exists and which is really the largest

[17:15]program in Medieval Studies in the United States many of the people

[17:19]who go out and become professors of medieval history such as myself

[17:22]are educated right there at Notre Dame I'd be happy to answer

[17:27]any questions about that that any of you have at any moment

[17:30]and that's the end of that commercial and and we can get

[17:35]back to our regularly scheduled programming so the the Quran and and

[17:42]Christians you may know you may have heard of of this because

[17:44]it's been in the news recently we are living in an interesting

[17:48]anniversary year the anniversary of a very unusual moment in Christian Muslim

[17:54]relations well way back in 1219 and during the fifth crusade when

[18:04]Latin Christian Knights were camped out besieging Egypt woefully unsuccessfully I might

[18:11]add it was a disastrous crusade from from from the Latin Christian

[18:18]point of view st.

[18:19]Francis of Assisi traveled to Egypt crossed the lines and went and

[18:23]met with the ruler of the Muslim ruler of Egypt the Sultan

[18:29]coming ill and they had a conversation and this event was recorded

[18:34]in a number of texts it was recorded that it happened it's

[18:39]not clear what either one actually said to each other but it

[18:43]is an event that's being commemorated actually around the world right now

[18:47]just a few weeks ago we had an event at notre-dame celebrating

[18:53]this and in some ways it is an event that that people

[18:56]are talking about because it seems so unusual to us looking back

[19:02]that this great Christian Saint would have met this powerful Muslim Sultan

[19:07]but in fact it really wasn't that unusual at all Christians and

[19:11]Muslims have been talking to each other they've been living side by

[19:16]side with each other especially in the Mediterranean world from the very

[19:21]beginning of of the history of Islam and this meeting between Francis

[19:26]and the Sultan as important as it was was one of many

[19:31]many many meetings between Christians and Muslims and one of many many

[19:36]encounters between Christian believers and the holy texts of Islam and what

[19:42]I want to do tonight is give you four short kind of

[19:46]vignettes of different moments of Christians reacting to the Quran I'm gonna

[19:54]start with a reaction that probably you're all expecting you're probably expecting

[19:59]that when medieval Christians encountered the Quran what happened is that steam

[20:05]in their ears and they got very angry and red in the

[20:10]face and said what how can this book possibly be saying this

[20:14]and fact we do have a lot of examples of Christians responding

[20:17]to the Koran in that kind of hostile way and I'll begin

[20:21]with that but I'm gonna move on to three very different reactions

[20:26]to the Koran that we also find in the Middle Ages I'll

[20:29]give you a little warning right now I'm going to jump around

[20:32]a little bit in history I'm not gonna go in straight chronological

[20:34]order I'll try to keep you oriented to where we are more

[20:40]or less in the past and I'll also give you this warning

[20:43]I'm primarily a historian of the pre-modern world of the Middle Ages

[20:48]so the examples I'm giving run from about the 11th century AD

[20:52]up to the 16th century AD but a lot of what I'm

[20:57]saying went on before that and has continued afterwards as well so

[21:01]my first vignette has to do with a very important medieval manuscript

[21:08]that I spend a lot of time studying especially 10 and 15

[21:12]years ago a manuscript that is now part of the collection of

[21:16]the National Library of France in Paris and it is a manuscript

[21:19]that contains two the first copy of the first translation of the

[21:27]Quran into any Western language by this point the Quran had already

[21:32]been translated into other Islamic languages especially into Persian but it never

[21:39]been translated as far as we know into any Western Christian kind

[21:43]of language with the possible exception of Greek in the middle of

[21:48]the 11th century I'm sorry in the middle of the 12th century

[21:53]in the 11 40s it was translated and this manuscript that you

[21:57]see an image of is the original copy of it and what

[22:03]you see there and it doesn't come out very clearly this in

[22:07]the manuscript itself is red and black drawing and what you see

[22:10]here is a human head or a more or less human head

[22:16]and a body that looks like a fish so we have a

[22:22]kind of a monstrous man fish drawn here and this is on

[22:26]about what that I say xi folio or the twenty second page

[22:30]of this volume that contains the Koran in Latin and some other

[22:36]Islamic texts and it's here to kind of tell us something that

[22:39]this guy and he's identified by name ma who meth that's one

[22:44]of the medieval Latin ways of spelling Mohammed is a kind of

[22:50]a man fish he's a kind of a monster and this is

[22:52]one of the first things when you open up this manuscript that

[22:56]you notice that you're being warned that what you're going to be

[23:00]looking at is a book that you should be a little bit

[23:04]shocked by if not a lot shocked by and when you page

[23:06]far enough along in this manuscript and you get to the to

[23:12]the Quran itself in Latin you see many pages that look like

[23:14]this where we whoops sorry where we have the main text of

[23:26]the Quran translated translated from the beautiful sort of poetic Arabic that

[23:32]in mama cause we need discussed into a very high-status Latin prose

[23:39]and then alongside it a bunch of notes and these notes were

[23:46]put there not by a later reader but by the people who

[23:48]are actually making this manuscript there they're like the commentary notes that

[23:52]maybe you have in your Bible and a good friend of mine

[23:57]who's a scholar of this text as well said in an article

[23:59]about 20 years ago that these notes are there to tell Christians

[24:05]where they should be outraged by the Quran what where are the

[24:09]parts that because he's Chris I've never they actually have never seen

[24:12]the Quran before in Latin Europe they don't know anything about it

[24:15]these notes were written by people with a lot of knowledge of

[24:21]Islam and they're they're meant to kind of point out parts that

[24:23]Christians should be a little bit scandalized by and one such note

[24:31]is this one right here and I'll show you a that blown

[24:33]up a little bit I'm sorry it pixelated a bit but so

[24:39]it goes this thing right here is actually a word it doesn't

[24:44]look like it but in medieval Latin handwriting you could connect a

[24:48]bunch of letters together into one kind of note and if you

[24:52]look at it closely you see n there and then you see

[24:56]a oh right there and you see a tall T and then

[25:01]at the bottom you see an A and that all spells nota

[25:03]and you can just imagine what nota means in Latin it means

[25:10]pay attention pay attention to this and what this note is referring

[25:14]to is a very famous passage of the Quran and the 25th

[25:21]verse of the second chapter the second surah a surah that says

[25:25]in these gardens that the gardens of paradise the gardens of heaven

[25:29]they will have immaculate spouses this is the verse of the Quran

[25:37]that seems to say that in heaven believers will have will have

[25:42]sexual partners that sex will happen in heaven because it's part of

[25:47]the beautiful things that God gave us medieval Latin Christians were not

[25:51]at all given to believe that kind of thing and that's why

[25:55]the Notah is there and if we look more closely at what

[25:57]follows the Notah it kind of instructs us about this it says

[26:05]note note that everywhere he Muhammad promises a paradise of carnal delights

[26:12]just as another heresy did now notice a couple things that's happening

[26:16]there here are the Christians are all assuming that Muhammad wrote the

[26:20]Quran which already is a disagreement from as we just saw from

[26:25]the Imam from how Muslims understand the Quran and what this note

[26:28]is telling us is here you should be shocked because Muslims seem

[26:36]to believe in a carnal paradigm para paradise that in heaven there

[26:40]will be there will be bodily pleasures and medieval Christianity did not

[26:46]teach that at all so a lot of these notes do this

[26:51]they they point to passages and they say notice here's something that's

[26:54]contrary to Christian doctrine and you should be a little bit scandalized

[26:58]by it eventually the writers of these notes they kind of got

[27:02]worn out and you can tell this because the farther you go

[27:07]in to the Quranic text the fewer notes there are but way

[27:10]toward the end on one page there's a note in the margin

[27:17]that simply says in Latin nota stool tits iam ubi kwai and

[27:20]if you think back to any Latin you might have you may

[27:26]recognize that as this notice the stupidity everywhere kind of throwing up

[27:31]their hands there's just you know what can we do this is

[27:33]a book that has just all kinds of things that are contrary

[27:37]to Christian teaching we should be scandalized by it okay so that

[27:44]is that is a hostile reading of the Quran from a medieval

[27:47]Christian context I could give you a lot of other examples of

[27:55]this it's a reading of the Quran it's and it's a way

[27:57]of encountering the Quran interacting with it that is always present remains

[28:02]present all the way down to now but what I want to

[28:09]really emphasize tonight that is is that it's not the only way

[28:12]that medieval Christians interacted with the Quran there are a range of

[28:18]other possibilities and my second vignette deals with a particular person that

[28:22]we happen to know a fair amount about and especially about his

[28:25]interaction with the Quran deals with this guy so those of you

[28:31]who went to Catholic schools maybe can identify what habit this gentleman

[28:37]is wearing do you recognize that habit that is the habit of

[28:43]a Dominican friar right they are the black the black friars and

[28:50]he's wearing that black and them and remember that the Dominican friar

[28:53]is founded in the early 13th century where the extremely learned order

[28:59]religion order of the later Middle Ages and dominated in many ways

[29:03]their university system in the 13th and 14th centuries and and you

[29:07]know the Thomas Aquinas was a Dominican and st.

[29:11]Albert his teacher was a Dominican so he's a very learned group

[29:14]of scholars and this particular Dominican is an Italian by name Ricardo

[29:21]Montera Croce he's called you his given name was recalled oh he

[29:25]was called the Monta de Croce because he had actually traveled to

[29:31]the Middle East to the Mount of Calvary multi-deck Croce and he

[29:35]had actually spent a long time in the Holy Land in the

[29:41]and then in the Arab and Persian Islamic world perhaps up to

[29:46]ten years travelling including spending a lengthy period of time in the

[29:50]great intellectual center of Sunni Islam in the in this period and

[29:56]that was Baghdad and according to his own autobiography says he even

[30:02]discussed religious issues with great Imams in Baghdad now recalled Oh in

[30:09]addition to all of his travels learned Arabic really well and when

[30:14]he got back from traveling in the Middle East in about the

[30:21]year 1300 he proceeded to write a treatise called against the religion

[30:25]of Islam and this is a short little book it's really not

[30:28]much more than a pamphlet maybe 40 50 pages long but it

[30:33]was highly influential and from this period for the next 500 or

[30:38]so years if you read a book against Islam you've probably read

[30:46]recall dose it was widely enough read that even Martin Luther hundreds

[30:50]of years later would take this text and translate it into German

[30:54]because he thought his Protestant readers ought to know about about what

[30:58]Ricola says about Islam now the further interesting thing about Ricardo is

[31:05]that remarkably enough his own copy of the Quran in Arabic survives

[31:10]to this day in the same library in in Paris the national

[31:16]library of Paris throughout France in Paris and here it is this

[31:22]is a copy of the Quran actually made in the Middle East

[31:25]in Egypt or Syria the end of the 12th century and you

[31:31]can see that in the margins we maybe can't see it from

[31:34]where you are but we have writing in another language this is

[31:38]these are latin notes and they're actually written in two different hands

[31:43]we have one set in a smaller set of handwriting here and

[31:49]here and actually here and then a set in bigger flowery language

[31:52]and one of the one of the cool little things I was

[31:58]able to figure out in my scholarly career is that the notes

[32:01]in the small hand are written by Riccardo himself and that this

[32:05]was recalled owes own copy of the Koran and in fact he

[32:11]was reading this particular copy of the Quran when he was writing

[32:14]that treatise against Islam so we have the very remarkable ability in

[32:20]his case to actually watch him read the Quran and think about

[32:26]it and then write about it in this treatise that became so

[32:34]widely read and we find really interesting things when we do that

[32:39]one of the things we find is that Ricardo was no dummy

[32:44]he knew that Iran was a really hard book as most holy

[32:46]books are and that it would be really useful to have another

[32:50]translation that he could refer to even though he knew Arabic himself

[32:58]and it's very clear that he as he read this copy of

[33:01]the Quran what had beside 'add another Latin translation which itself was

[33:07]almost a verbatim translation of Arabic into Latin in other words the

[33:12]Arabic word order is preserved in the Latin so that you can

[33:17]which makes really weird Latin by the and so you can use

[33:23]it to follow along the Arabic text really carefully and we know

[33:26]that he was doing this because very often when he writes his

[33:32]notes in his own copy of the Quran they are directly from

[33:35]that translation not always a lot of times he translates them anew

[33:42]himself but very often he follows this translation by this man named

[33:47]Mark of Toledo who was a who was a Spaniard but we

[33:49]find something else when we follow through his Quran reading and that

[33:56]was that even though Ricardo himself was no particular friend of Islam

[34:01]remember he's writing a treatise against Islam he was nevertheless fanatically dedicated

[34:07]to understanding the Quran properly he really wanted to make sure he

[34:14]understood every word correctly and we can see this as he keeps

[34:19]going back and fixing problems that he sees and either this earlier

[34:24]translation or his own as he works through these verses so let

[34:29]me give you a little example of this and this will be

[34:31]this will feel like a little bit of heavy lifting there'll be

[34:33]a little bit of Latin here a little bit of Arabic here

[34:35]but but stay with me and and we'll we'll plow our way

[34:41]through it so there's a verse in the third Sura of the

[34:43]Quran in which God the God is the one speaking here is

[34:51]telling Muhammad and his followers about what what kind of food is

[34:56]halal what kind of food is allowable to eat and and we're

[35:03]having kind of a dispute god is having a dispute in a

[35:05]way with the Jewish community who live in the vicinity of Muhammad

[35:08]and he says look all food was made listed to the children

[35:15]of Israel all except what Israel that is Jacob made you illicit

[35:19]for himself before the Torah was revealed and then we have this

[35:22]striking sentence produce the Torah get out the Torah get out the

[35:30]Hebrew Bible and read it if you are faithful so God is

[35:38]telling Mohammed to tell them go check but the Torah check the

[35:40]Torah and you'll see that I'm right okay so Rakolta is really

[35:45]interested in the last part of that verse he's interested in it

[35:51]because it suggests that the Quran is saying that the Torah is

[35:55]a authoritative scriptural book just like Christians bully so here's the Quran

[36:00]telling us that our Bible is is an authoritative Scripture so he's

[36:06]very excited about that verse and when he comes to it but

[36:10]let me back up just a second so mark of Toledo that

[36:16]earlier translator had come to this verse and when he translated it

[36:19]he gave us the Latin that you see in front of us

[36:24]a fair tale Ejim Decalogue a at Sukhoi mini AMC voz st's

[36:27]virata's which means almost the same thing as the Arabic to us

[36:32]as the English of that sentence does it says produce the law

[36:36]of the Decalogue and follow it if you are truthful the big

[36:40]difference is this phrase Lex Decalogue II the law the law of

[36:46]the Decalogue the Decalogue is a word that refers to the ten

[36:49]commandments right the Arabic word in question Torah means just what Torah

[36:55]does in Hebrew it means the first five books of the of

[37:00]the Hebrew Bible or the whole Hebrew Bible one or the other

[37:05]it doesn't mean the Decalogue at all strikingly enough when Ricardo gets

[37:09]to this passage in his own copy of the Koran he copies

[37:13]in mark of to lay those translation except he changes it this

[37:20]is his note right up here and it reads like this affair

[37:27]teh Pentateuch 'm at sacrimoni a you see vas s days borracho

[37:31]s produced the Pentateuch that's a Greek word that means the same

[37:34]thing as Torah so here here our friend recall though this very

[37:41]intense Dominican is following along this other translation and he says wait

[37:43]there's a mistake here and he corrects it and puts in Pentateuch

[37:50]because he's that kind of intense he really wants to understand what

[37:54]the Quran says itself but then something else happened he noticed that

[37:59]there's another little problem with that translation and it's this word said

[38:05]criminy follow in Latin the problem is that it translates a word

[38:09]it's this word right here in Arabic Lou which can mean two

[38:16]things it can mean to follow or it can mean to read

[38:18]and Ricardo when he got to the point where he wanted to

[38:23]use this verse in his actual treatise against Islam said wait a

[38:30]second that's not right either and when he got to the point

[38:33]of including that verse in his treatise against Islam he corrected that

[38:37]too and he changed the translation one more time a fair tape

[38:44]in total come CSDs watches at legit a and read it so

[38:49]here's a guy and there are multiple examples of this here's a

[38:52]Christian reader a Dominican there's nobody sort of more hyper Christian than

[38:57]the Dominicans they're the order of the preachers after all he's writing

[39:02]against Islam but when he does so he is passionate about getting

[39:07]the text right making sure I understand what the Quran says properly

[39:13]and I so what he's doing is related in a way to

[39:19]that hostile vision that hostile way of engaging the Quran and yet

[39:22]there's something quite different here as well there's a kind of a

[39:28]deep respect for the Quranic text and for getting it right and

[39:30]he goes to great lengths to do that our friend Ricardo does

[39:34]so that's vignette number two so we're halfway through if you're if

[39:39]you're keeping track we're halfway through two more to go the third

[39:45]vignette comes from a few hundred years later and we are covered

[39:49]that and it deals with this manuscript copied in about the year

[39:56]1516 in the city of Four now this is a copy of

[40:01]the Koran in Latin it's that same Latin translation that we started

[40:05]with that had the the notes to tell us where to be

[40:10]offended in it but this is a copy for much much later

[40:13]and it doesn't have any of those notes in it at all

[40:14]none of them are there rather what we have is the Koran

[40:21]copied in a kind of handwriting that geeky scholars like myself called

[40:28]humanistic cursive handwriting which flourished in this period especially in Italy it

[40:34]is the direct ancestor if you're wondering of what we call italics

[40:39]and in this period there were a couple of different ways you

[40:44]could write Latin you could write it in the new humanistic scripts

[40:53]like humanistic cursive or you could write it in the old-fashioned gothic

[40:58]scripts and the tendency was that you wrote churchy stuff in the

[41:02]Gothic script so you copied the Bible in Gothic and you copied

[41:06]canon law and theology in Gothic and you copied classical texts from

[41:11]ancient Rome and Latin translations of Greek words works in humanistic script

[41:17]so think about that here we have a copy of the Koran

[41:19]copied in the type of alphabet that in the period they use

[41:27]for classical texts suggesting maybe that the Koran might be understood not

[41:33]so much for not only as the holy book of another religion

[41:35]but as a kind of a classical text and there's something else

[41:40]that indicates the same thing and it's this thing right at the

[41:48]bottom which I'll show you a detail of who do you suppose

[41:53]that is that is Mohammed this is Mohammed depicted again erroneously from

[42:03]the Muslim point of view but depicted as the author of the

[42:07]Koran and such portraits are very common in Italian manuscripts of this

[42:13]period so you might be reading a book by Cicero and on

[42:17]the first page at the top or the bottom very often the

[42:21]bottom in the middle there'd be a picture of Cicero and we

[42:23]would know this is an important text that we all ought to

[42:29]be kind of impressed by and in this case we have the

[42:31]Koran and we put an author portrait of Mohammed and he's holding

[42:34]his book he's dressed like contemporary Turk because those are the Muslims

[42:42]that were known in 16th century Italy and the interesting thing about

[42:46]this portrayal of Muhammad is that we know what it looked like

[42:51]when Renaissance artists wanted to depict Turks as meanies because we have

[42:57]lots of depictions of that like these ones so these are depictions

[43:01]of the contemporary a great Sultan a magnate the Ottoman Sultan depicted

[43:08]as this fierce warlike powerful leader which in many ways he was

[43:14]he was one of the great generals and and political leaders of

[43:17]his age and you can see that the artists have put a

[43:22]lot of effort into making him look like he's a severe kind

[43:25]of guy it's quite a contrast I think to the images we

[43:31]have in the image we have of Muhammad there and I what

[43:33]I want to compare that image of Muhammad to is something else

[43:38]that's contemporary just a generation before in one of the first printings

[43:43]of the works of Aristotle there's a beautiful illumination right at the

[43:47]beginning of Aristotle learning from his teacher Plato and noticed that they

[43:56]are both dressed up as if they were oriental kind of Turkish

[43:59]looking wise men this very common depiction for the great Greek thinkers

[44:05]of the past that they were somehow equivalent to the to the

[44:09]sort of turban wearing wise men of the Ottoman world and if

[44:18]we put Muhammad's image woops pressing the wrong buttons here side by

[44:22]side we kind of see that similar sort of depiction this is

[44:28]not Muhammad as a fierce warlike leader this is Muhammad as a

[44:32]kind of an oriental wise man who is the author of a

[44:35]classical tax that we copy in humanistic cursive letters and the first

[44:44]time I ever gave a academic paper about this particular copy of

[44:48]the Quran a longtime friend of mine was in the audience erased

[44:51]his hand at the end and he said you know Tom what

[44:56]this what this version of the Quran makes me think of is

[45:01]the Penguin Classics and I think he was exactly right about that

[45:04]this is this is sort of the penguin classic edition of the

[45:08]Quran in 1516 in in Italy there are no polemical hostel notes

[45:14]in it there's nothing in there to tell you where to be

[45:16]outraged or horrified this is a copy of the Quran that you

[45:23]might own to show that you are a sophisticated educated worldly person

[45:28]who knows the importance of Islam and and that kind of thing

[45:32]there's no hostility toward Islam at all in this in this particular

[45:39]version of the Quran and one of the interesting things about it

[45:43]that I didn't mention earlier is that we know for whom this

[45:47]manuscript was made because on that first page up at the very

[45:55]top there's a fancy M and it has a design nested in

[46:02]it that is the the sort of the brand of a particular

[46:04]order of Friars in Florence were called the survive friars and whose

[46:10]church still exists in Florence not very far from the Duomo the

[46:18]Church of this Santissima Annunziata this was a this was the penguin

[46:24]version of the Koran made for Servite Christian friars okay a very

[46:29]different way of experiencing the Koran then that hostel when we started

[46:33]with okay one more to go one more vignette and now I'm

[46:40]jumping back into the past back to the 10th or 11th centuries

[46:48]and to Spain or what was called then al-andalus Islamic Spain and

[46:53]the group of people I want to talk about are people whom

[46:58]scholars call Mose Arabs this from an Arabic word most Arab which

[47:02]means someone who has become like an Arab someone who has become

[47:09]a rabbi sized and the Mose Arabs were a group of fairly

[47:12]large when Christians living in Islamic Spain for centuries literally generation after

[47:21]generation who gradually took on all kinds of Arabic qualities they began

[47:26]to speak Arabic as their native language they began to take on

[47:31]Arabic names they might name there than they might name their son

[47:34]Jakub rather than rather than jacob they began to write in arabic

[47:43]they even began to translate the Bible into Arabic so all the

[47:47]same processes happen to produce them that eventually produced groups like the

[47:52]Maronite Catholics with a Melkite Greek the Melkite church in the Middle

[47:57]East the cops which all became Arabic speaking Christian groups and one

[48:05]of the striking things about this process is that in on in

[48:10]almost every case as these Christian groups became Arab a sized they

[48:16]became a little bit is llama sized at the same time partly

[48:22]this has to do with the great prestige of the Koran in

[48:25]all Arab society if you meet a well-educated Arab Christian today somebody

[48:34]from Egypt or somebody from Lebanon it's very likely that though they're

[48:39]Christians they've memorized the whole Quran and they can recite big portions

[48:42]of it and that they actually enjoy listening to the famous reciters

[48:47]of the Quran on the radio the Quran is the great literary

[48:53]work of the Arabic language and so it it it tends to

[48:55]suffuse the Arabic language and Christians take on many of its much

[49:04]of its terminology and and and some of its ways of thinking

[49:07]and we find this interestingly enough among the Moe's Arabs and I

[49:11]want to give you a few examples as my last vignette to

[49:15]do that I want to talk a little bit about a work

[49:16]that's in this amazing manuscript which is not in Paris it's in

[49:23]the Vatican Library in in Rome and it is a copy of

[49:25]the Psalms in Arabic now these are Psalms translated from the latin

[49:36]vulgate psalms into arabic for the use of these moze Arabs and

[49:40]so this title right here says Moses Morden amia went to Southwest

[49:45]Saloth the hundred and thirty ninth Psalm I'm going to do a

[49:51]little bit of that a little bit of a sidebar here because

[49:54]there's something so interesting about this manuscript that I can't has a

[49:56]can't help liking about it this manuscript went through a lot of

[50:00]different people's hands and it demonstrates how widely books could travel in

[50:06]the Middle East so it's translated from Latin into Arabic right but

[50:11]very quickly after it was copied down in Arabic somebody got a

[50:17]hold of it and they said wait a second I'm Christian probably

[50:21]living in al-andalus but I know Latin better than I know Arabic

[50:24]and I need to find where the beginning of each of the

[50:32]important Psalms is and so what I'm gonna do is add in

[50:35]the first lines of every Psalm in Latin and that in general

[50:41]was how people talked about the Psalms in the Middle Ages you

[50:44]didn't talk about Psalm 128 or whatever you talked about the song

[50:51]that began with X words right and so what are what our

[50:54]scholar has done is written right up here domine a probe asti

[51:01]may Lord you have tested me the beginning of that beautiful hundred

[51:05]thirty-nine so I'm Lord Lord you have tested me and he's written

[51:08]it there so that as a Christian who knows Latin a little

[51:12]bit better than Arabic he can flip through the book and he

[51:16]can find the song he wants to pray quickly all right so

[51:22]all of this was being done maybe about the 14th century 13th

[51:25]14th century but you notice something else if you look here other

[51:33]words written about here's the Arabic word the Arabic words here and

[51:38]then above them we have something else and what this is is

[51:43]Hebrew and that's because eventually this book got into the hands of

[51:50]a Jewish rabbi whose name we know because he wrote his name

[51:53]in it and this rabbi went through this copy of the Psalms

[51:57]translated from Latin into Arabic and wrote in above every word what

[52:05]the original Hebrew word was and that isn't the and that isn't

[52:08]the final journey of this book either this was probably a rabbi

[52:11]in North Africa you did that by the early 16th century this

[52:17]what got into the hands of an Italian scholar who was interested

[52:21]in Hebrew stuff and he was interested in it because of the

[52:25]Hebrew words in it and he wrote his name in it as

[52:29]well and from him it went into the Vatican library so that's

[52:34]how this book that's the sort of journey of this book that

[52:37]gets it to be available to us now in in the Vatican

[52:41]City but what I really want to talk about are what we

[52:44]find not so much in the Psalms themselves although there's plenty of

[52:49]examples of it there but in an amazing document that's at the

[52:56]beginning of this manuscript which is a preface about the Psalms and

[52:59]why Christians should be praying them and thinking about them and conscious

[53:03]of them so it's a preface written in Arabic about why Christians

[53:07]should do this and one of the striking things about this preface

[53:13]is how much of the language it's all Arabic but how much

[53:17]of it is thoroughly Islamic it's so thoroughly quranic' in fact phrases

[53:24]words whole sentences taken straight out of the Koran and put into

[53:30]this Christian theological context so for example right at the beginning of

[53:35]the preface we have the same words with which the Imam began

[53:38]tonight bismillah ar-rahman ar-rahim in the name of God the merciful the

[53:43]compassionate Christians very often used the same it's called the buzz mullah

[53:52]in Arabic they used the same buzz mala that Muslims did in

[53:55]their own Christian documents so it's not at all unusual to see

[53:59]this they just borrowed that and and and this phrase begins every

[54:04]single Sura of the Koran except one so just like the Koran

[54:09]they're beginning this document about why Christians would pray the Psalms with

[54:13]the buzz mullah when the author of this text wants to talk

[54:21]about Jesus's disciples he uses exactly the same word for Jesus's disciples

[54:26]that the Koran uses the Koran use is a very unusual word

[54:29]al-hawa youn it's a very unusual word in the Arabic language itself

[54:36]and there's a great big long discussion over the centuries about where

[54:39]this word came from in the Quran there are other possible words

[54:42]that that are our the author of our preface could have used

[54:46]but he says up I'll use the Quranic word there the horror

[54:50]even just as they are in the Quran one of the most

[54:57]common phrases in the Quran about God is that God is the

[55:03]one who halaqah somehow at a simão at well out of the

[55:05]one rabbi nachum a god is the one who created the heavens

[55:10]and the earth and what is between the two of them Arabic

[55:14]is unusual in having both a singular a plural for each word

[55:21]and a dual to have a special ending when you want to

[55:25]talk about things in pairs of two and this phrase has that

[55:30]do in the end of it by now whom at between the

[55:31]two of them it's very very quranic' it appears in the crane

[55:38]maybe a dozen different times and in this text at one point

[55:40]while telling Christians why they should pray the Psalms it says that

[55:45]Jesus is the one who created the heavens and the earth and

[55:50]what is between the two of them quoting the Koran directly in

[55:54]doing so and kind of you see turning the tables on the

[55:59]Quran a little bit - there's something a little bit aggressive about

[56:03]this we're gonna take your language and and we're gonna turn it

[56:06]toward toward our own ends but it's vividly quranic' language and finally

[56:10]one more another of the most common phrases on on a Muslims

[56:19]tongue to this day one of the most important parts of the

[56:23]daily prayers five times a day is this phrase of HMDA now

[56:30]rub an amine praise be to God the Lord of the Worlds

[56:33]it appears that in that first short Sura of the Quran called

[56:39]the fatiha which is repeated over and over a number of times

[56:42]each day by Muslims as they pray two or three different times

[56:47]in this Christian document when the author is about to shift gears

[56:52]and he's going to tie off the end of one subject and

[56:58]move on to the other he puts in the humbly law an

[57:00]amine at the very end of it so here are Christians living

[57:05]in medieval Spain who have taken on the Arabic language in a

[57:09]huge way have become like the Arabs they've become Mustafa Boone but

[57:19]they also have taken on quranic' language in a very big way

[57:22]so much so that it filters right into their Christian theology and

[57:27]they are by no means unique in that so those are my

[57:34]four vignettes of different ways that in the pre-modern world Christians could

[57:39]encounter the Quran what might I say and conclude to all of

[57:45]this well historians sometimes their jokes historians say like historians don't try

[57:53]to ever predict the future because we can't even predict the past

[57:57]but one of the other things we often say is that the

[58:03]best thing that historians can do is to complicate the past is

[58:07]to take the past which all of us including us who have

[58:14]spent our life studying history always want to make a lot simpler

[58:18]than it was and show that it was a lot more complicated

[58:24]than we can imagine a lot more complicated than we would expect

[58:27]and the important thing about doing that is that if we can

[58:30]remember to complicate the past we can also remember to complicate the

[58:38]present that just as people in the past we're capable of very

[58:42]different reactions in different circumstances we're capable of being hostile toward the

[58:48]Koran in one moment and kind of seeing it as a classical

[58:50]text in another moment so our people in the present all people

[58:57]in the present capable of reacting to the world around them in

[59:00]complicated ways and almost nobody is simply a black-and-white creature the past

[59:10]maybe is the best way we can see that and I hope

[59:12]that you will take this complication of the past and be willing

[59:17]in this age of that badly needs it to apply that complication

[59:22]to the present and to recognize that sure there is potential in

[59:27]everyone to read everybody else's holy book with hostility but there's also

[59:32]potential in everyone to take it seriously and there's potential in everyone

[59:37]- maybe admire this other book as a classic and there's maybe

[59:44]potential in everyone to somehow learn something from that other holy book

[59:48]I'll stop there and welcome any any questions any comments you have

[59:52]feel free and I think there's a microphone so if you have

[60:01]a question raise your hand and and this gentleman good evening I

[60:10]have a question in your translations with the Latin the Italians and

[60:20]all that when they translated the Arabic into those languages how different

[60:25]are the translations over time the three four hundred years I mean

[60:29]like we have English Old English Latin you know and they translate

[60:36]things would change you know Aramaic to that no I'm wondering how

[60:40]much they changed or were they very accurate well a couple a

[60:47]couple of things to say about that first of all yeah languages

[60:53]are moving targets every language that you translate out of in most

[60:59]cases is a moving target it's it's it's at some point in

[61:02]an evolution and when you translate into a living language that that

[61:06]language is a moving target it's changing its shifting its going in

[61:11]other directions and and moreover every language is an immensely complex thing

[61:15]in fact perhaps the most complex entity in the world other than

[61:20]the human mind are human languages which are just vastly complicated things

[61:24]so what that means is that even if two people translated the

[61:29]Quran from arabic into latin at the same time their latin versions

[61:34]are likely to be quite different from each other it doesn't necessarily

[61:39]mean that one is better than the other it means that there's

[61:43]never a single word that by itself adequately translates a word of

[61:48]another language or very rarely is there ever and that there are

[61:56]different parts of that source text that you capture with different ways

[62:02]of translation so i mentioned that that first Latin trance elation did

[62:07]something very interesting instead of translating it word for word as the

[62:13]second one did it said the translator seemed to say look the

[62:22]Arabic of the Koran is this beautiful high status Arabic I have

[62:26]to find a kind of Latin that is equal in status to

[62:33]that and so what he did is he took the Quran and

[62:35]he paraphrased it into very complex Ciceronian kind of Latin very elevated

[62:41]quite difficult to read and it's a very different feel from the

[62:49]translation seventy-five years later in which it's done word-for-word so I mean

[62:54]in a way the answer to your question is that every translation

[62:59]is an interpretation to translate and to interpret are virtually the same

[63:06]thing and as a result there's a great deal of variation over

[63:10]time even within time over how a text is translated and this

[63:17]is true of Quranic translation is made by Muslims as well so

[63:20]there's been a lot of writing recently about early Persian translations of

[63:25]the Quran made by Persian Muslims for themselves great deal of variation

[63:31]even in the same period because that languages is really complicated and

[63:37]translation is really really complicated so my answer is game sort of

[63:43]you know it I hope that responded somehow other questions or comments

[63:53]professor a couple thoughts on it the manuscripts were they vellum what

[64:05]were they in how were they saved and then secondly the Shiite

[64:09]and Muslims how did they fit into the whole story so to

[64:13]speak yeah okay so the first question let's see we looked at

[64:22]about three or four different manuscripts the the initial one of the

[64:25]the Koran in Latin that's a vellum manuscript so on she poor

[64:35]calf hide the manuscript of the beautiful manuscript from Florence that's actually

[64:42]a paper manuscript because by the 16th century it became a hit

[64:46]had become very common to copy manuscripts on paper although some were

[64:51]so copied on on vellum the the Mo's Arabic Psalms at that

[64:57]period their paper was not being used so that's on vellum as

[65:00]well so generally speaking in Latin manuscripts if it's before about 1200

[65:05]it's virtually always vellum gradually after 1200 more and more and more

[65:11]manuscripts are copied on paper although deluxe ones are still often in

[65:14]vellum the sunni-shia ee Division of Islam doesn't fit much into the

[65:24]story that I have told and that has to do with geography

[65:26]mostly I have spent my career mostly looking at Latin Christian responses

[65:33]to Islam and so that that tends to mean the western part

[65:39]of the Mediterranean world and there are virtually no sheee Muslims in

[65:42]that part of the world in the Middle Ages so in general

[65:47]Latin Christians had very little interaction with the Shiite branches of this

[65:55]long farther east that's a different story but in general the the

[66:01]places where Shiites are in high concentrations in Persia in Lebanon in

[66:08]southern Iraq are farther away from from from territory where there's much

[66:13]interaction with Christians and so there isn't there isn't in the Middle

[66:20]Ages nearly as much interaction between Latin or Greek Christians and Shiite

[66:26]Muslims as there is with Sunni Muslims okay so the question is

[66:40]about the what's called the Sufi tradition the the tradition Sufi is

[66:46]is a Muslim ascetic who often not only practices asceticism a little

[66:53]bit like a Christian monk or a hermit but also may well

[66:58]be a mystic and in fact eventually the word to Sal wolf

[67:00]which comes from the word Sufi means means mysticism a mystical direct

[67:05]experience of God Sufism existed everywhere in the Islamic world and it

[67:14]existed recent scholarship especially emphasizes it in a much higher degree than

[67:19]most scholars thought 30 or 40 years ago Sufism was much more

[67:26]mainline throughout the Middle Ages than then we've long thought and so

[67:31]we have important Sufi shakes all the way in Morocco and in

[67:35]al-andalus one of the great theorists of Sufi mysticism Nibin Elaraby is

[67:43]from Islamic Spain all the way to the far ends of the

[67:47]Islamic world in the East and Sufism associated it in a way

[67:52]with the Sunni tradition but but it crosses the Sunni Shiite boundary

[68:02]as well this is a broader question but Muslims Christians and Jews

[68:11]all believe in one God if they all believe in one God

[68:17]and I think there is one god that says they all believe

[68:20]in the same God now he may have different names and he

[68:24]may have manifested in divinity in a different way but if that's

[68:28]there all believe in the same God why is there so much

[68:30]discord between those three people is it it's a very good question

[68:37]and and a very timely one because there are there are there

[68:41]are people on several different sides of the modern sort of shouting

[68:46]about this who who are saying things I think are profoundly untrue

[68:53]at least from a historical point of view historically speaking in the

[68:57]Middle Ages Jews and Christians and Muslims agreed entirely that they believed

[69:01]in the same God the this modern notion that has developed I'm

[69:05]sorry to say among certain have angelical Protestants that the God of

[69:09]Islam is a different God is is an innovation of the modern

[69:15]period and one of the ways you know how we know this

[69:19]we know in a very simple way they all used exactly the

[69:21]same word to talk about God if you were a Jew or

[69:25]a Christian or a Muslim living in the Islamic world in the

[69:28]Arab world you all pray to Allah that was the normal word

[69:33]you used and so if you open a medieval Christian liturgical book

[69:37]or a translation of the Bible where it says Elohim and in

[69:45]Hebrew it says Allah in Arabic and Jesus is called the Son

[69:48]of Allah no one had the notion that somehow Muslims worship a

[69:52]different God the second part of your question is I think why

[69:59]is there so much hostility I often think that the reason there's

[70:04]so much hostility is precisely the same reason that there can be

[70:09]so much hostility within the same family it's because these groups know

[70:13]very well what they're talking about when they talk about God they

[70:17]know each other really well they know how to poke each other's

[70:20]push each other's buttons when medieval Christians got far to the east

[70:26]and and this happened Christian scholars got far to the east and

[70:32]they met Buddhists they found they had almost nothing to talk about

[70:37]because none of their language about matters divine none of their weight

[70:41]very few of their ways of thinking about matters divine were similar

[70:44]they didn't have much to talk about they didn't have much the

[70:49]art about Jews and Christians and Muslims because they have so much

[70:51]in common that's precisely why they have so much to argue about

[70:56]is because there are these places where there are differences so it's

[70:59]it's the family resemblance I think and I've always thought that that

[71:03]leads to the conflict but otherwise and and and I could go

[71:11]farther with that that that the way in which God Allah in

[71:13]Arabic is is defined by scholars is almost identical in all the

[71:22]traditions so Jews Christians and Muslims all said that this God has

[71:28]certain qualities about him that we can identify because our scriptures tell

[71:33]us about him about them he's not a completely unknowable God in

[71:37]other words he has certain qualities they usually called them attributes in

[71:42]Arabic see fat and the attributes they identified God as having or

[71:48]almost all the same God is omnipotent God knows all things God

[71:51]is merciful God is a judge God is just when they made

[71:56]their lists of what are the attributes of God Jews and Christians

[71:58]and Muslims mostly agreed about that so yes the shirt follow-up question

[72:08]if in the Middle Ages they all believed that same God used

[72:12]the same name how can they consider people nowadays to be infidels

[72:18]well so there's a distinction between believing in the same God and

[72:28]believing the same things about other aspects of religion so Muslims believe

[72:33]that God is one Christians believe that God is one but Christians

[72:37]believe that God is also a Trinity which Jews and Muslims do

[72:44]not believe and Christians believe that that the one God became incarnate

[72:49]in the in the person of Jesus Christ which Jews and Muslims

[72:52]do not believe so you can believe in one God but then

[72:58]that's only part of the story because the big store for Christians

[73:02]is that this God emptied himself out became a child in a

[73:09]manger it took on humanity sin and and died and and gave

[73:12]salvation for it Muslims say no that's not how that's not God's

[73:16]Way of interacting with humanity God's Way is a merciful way in

[73:23]which God God is pleased to show us a way that we

[73:24]can follow that we can and it's laid out beautifully for us

[73:29]in this in this beautifully poetic book the Koran God mercifully gives

[73:34]us away he doesn't need to become incarnate to do that so

[73:41]they agree about the belief in one God but they disagree about

[73:45]these other aspects that both sides take very seriously and so for

[73:49]a Muslim a Christian is is a Kaffir is an unbeliever in

[73:58]the final revelation of that came to Mohammed so you know I

[74:03]said I said what we do is complicate things some of these

[74:09]things were really complicated to start with could you comment on some

[74:16]of the common elements between the Quran and the Bible like the

[74:20]story of Abraham and the chapter on Mary and the Quran yeah

[74:28]well yes so there there are many many passages of the Quran

[74:32]that are very similar to passages in the Bible many of the

[74:35]many figures in the Quran are very familiar to all Jews and

[74:41]Christians because they appear in in the Bible so so Mary actually

[74:44]shows that more in the Quran than she does in the Bible

[74:49]for example Jesus is a very important figure in the Quran he's

[74:52]always called however Jesus ISA even Maruyama Jesus son of Mary so

[74:57]that one does not believe that he is Jesus son of God

[74:59]Abraham is a key figure at ibrahim is a key figure in

[75:04]the in the quran but there are and there are there are

[75:10]very clear thematic similarities a lot of scholars would say that much

[75:13]of the Koran is very similar to the prophetic books of the

[75:20]Hebrew Bible so a lot of the Koran has this prophetic call

[75:23]like the major and minor prophets in the in the Hebrew Bible

[75:30]the Koran is different from the Bible in some other ways that

[75:34]have always kind of thrown Christian readers the Quran doesn't have very

[75:41]much extended narrative in other words much of the great majority of

[75:47]the Quran consists of relatively short units that are followed by another

[75:52]short unit that may not have much to do with it directly

[75:57]followed by another one the exception to that is the surah yousuf

[76:01]the story of Joseph which is a kind of an extended narrative

[76:08]but the the structure of the Quran is quite different from the

[76:10]Bible and from the very beginning Christian readers have always found it

[76:16]a little bit disorienting but so yeah some some some of the

[76:20]the themes are very very normal before a Christian reader that that

[76:28]God is God created all humans God will judge all humans on

[76:30]the last day humans need to be ever thinking about the youma

[76:33]qiyamah the day the day of resurrection someday they're going to meet

[76:38]their maker and they're going to be judged and they need to

[76:40]live up to a code of righteousness so the the the kind

[76:49]of scriptural monotheism that first becomes really vivid in the Hebrew Bible

[76:56]is very vividly present in the Quran and that's one of the

[77:01]most striking sort of common threads in all all of those revelations

[77:07]some of the current concerns about Islam address Sharia law is Sharia

[77:16]law part of the Quran and and are we misunderstanding it or

[77:20]is it a matter of taking something too literally yeah versus figuratively

[77:26]yeah well it would it would take a much better scholar than

[77:32]me a month and a half to answer that question well it's

[77:35]easy to say Sharia and there is a there is a thing

[77:40]there there is a Sharia law but what the Sharia law consists

[77:44]of is an immensely complex body of law highly sophisticated worked out

[77:50]over many many many centuries covering the whole range of of the

[77:58]human experience everything from ritual acts to inheritance to marital law to

[78:06]to all matters of all things but if you want to think

[78:09]of the closest analogue that may be North Americans will be somewhat

[78:12]familiar with the closest analogue is rabbinic law in the Jewish tradition

[78:17]Sharia and law and rabbinic law are similar in a number of

[78:25]ways especially in the Sunni Muslim tradition and one is that there

[78:28]isn't any Pope for Jews and there is no Pope for Sunni

[78:35]Muslims there is no single Authority with the authority to teach and

[78:39]that means that the law is hammered out by agreement among scholars

[78:44]over a long period of time involving an enormous amount of debate

[78:49]and so if you know you know you know the joke about

[78:55]if if you have three rabbis you've got four opinions that's very

[79:00]true a Sharia law is Sharia law is very complex supple sophisticated

[79:05]tool and it's not like you can go and find the 20

[79:11]page version of Sharia law and say we're gonna impose it in

[79:17]X place that's not how this works it is a long complex

[79:20]erudite legal tradition full of all kinds of checks and balances it's

[79:31]no it's no simplistic barbarous kind of system of law at all

[79:35]and by the way you might want to know this in the

[79:39]Middle Ages it was perfectly conceivable to talk about the shabbiha a

[79:44]yahood the Sharia of the Jews but also the Sharia the Masada

[79:51]the Sharia of the christians christians talked about themselves in arabic as

[79:54]having a sharia that is a set of canon law a set

[79:59]of canon law that governs their their life so sharia isn't just

[80:03]a this is the easy question to answer because this is when

[80:33]I get to say look I'm a pre-modern scholar you know after

[80:35]1600 I'm lost but but what I will say is this that

[80:42]throughout throughout the Middle Ages there's much more interaction between Sunnis and

[80:48]she then then then either side would like to think and certainly

[80:53]then history has recorded it we it's well known that there are

[80:57]certain figures who are Shia writers who are held to be great

[81:01]authorities in the Sunni tradition and vice versa furthermore there are a

[81:09]lot of different kinds of both Sunni Islam and Shia Islam and

[81:13]it a lot depends on which of these individual groups you're talking

[81:17]about just as it just says this to of Christians we got

[81:22]you know 4700 different versions of Baptists right just just that right

[81:26]and we have all of these other ones and so it's very

[81:29]difficult to say even what the Protestant versus Catholic sort of dispute

[81:36]might be about because there's a lot of different kinds of Protestants

[81:38]there's a lot of different kinds of Catholics too right so my

[81:43]sense actually is that there is both a parting of a ways

[81:50]that that is very stride the the really rigorous Salafi Sunni Islam

[81:57]that is behind a lot of the really radical terrorism of the

[82:06]modern world has no does had no fondness whatsoever for Shia Islam

[82:14]there's for the Salafi the Shia or unbelievers but the Salafi do

[82:19]not make up anything like the majority of senior Muslims they make

[82:25]up a small but influential group of them and I know in

[82:29]some contexts where Sunni and Shiah believers interact very regularly and I'll

[82:35]tell you a story about this before I moved to Notre Dame

[82:38]I taught at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville Tennessee for a

[82:43]long time and I got to know people in the local Muslim

[82:45]community quite well it's a much smaller Muslim community than here and

[82:50]so the tendency was that all Muslims whatever their background nationally or

[82:55]religiously they all kind of hung out together in the same mosque

[83:02]and the Shiite a number of Shiite Muslims in Knoxville Tennessee called

[83:08]themselves Sushi's because they were Shiites who went to a Sunni mosque

[83:12]because they didn't have any choice and and I'm sure that's half

[83:15]that happens in a lot of places in in the world so

[83:19]I think we alway it's always best for us to remember how

[83:22]many varieties of Christians that we are there are and then remember

[83:26]that there are just about as many varieties of Muslims out there

[83:30]before we make any generalizations about either group we really love Knoxville

[83:43]Tennessee but I'll tell you that color of orange I I never

[83:48]cared for good God God help me I may be stricken down

[83:55]for that but I I like Notre Dame blue and gold a

[84:01]whole lot better any other credit I probably bored you to death

[84:05]well thank you very much for your time and attention oh there

[84:10]one question in the back [Applause] copy of the Quran in English

[84:32]yeah cool very cool yes thank you very much

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Christians Reading the Quran Across the Ages - An Interfaith Program

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Christians Reading the Quran Across the Ages - An Interfaith Program

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