Historiography of the Perception of Islam through Manuscripts, Korans and their Displacement
Scientific Coordinators: Roberto Tottoli and Fernando Rodríguez Mediano
Venue and Date: University of Naples, Naples (Italy) – February 11, 2020
Meeting call:
The aim of this workshop is to approach the question of the relationship between Christianity and Islam through the study of the production, circulation and uses of Arabic manuscripts, and mainly Korans, in the late medieval and early modern Mediterranean Europe. Our assumption is that the Balkans, Italy and the Iberian Peninsula form an axis of circulation which is especially significant for our understanding of the Mediterranean Sea as a comprehensive space of cultural, political and religious contact.
The history of Arabic manuscripts in Europe is closely linked to the evolution of the relationship between Christianity and Islam in this period. During the Middle Ages, the knowledge of Arabic and Islam was strongly determined by the imperatives of religious controversy, but gradually it stirred a genuine interest in wider cultural and intellectual issues. The emergence of modern Orientalism has to do with the creation of philological, historiographical and critical tools, that produced commentaries, marginal notes, glosses, translations…; an amount of knowledge that drastically transformed, not only the European perception of Islam, but the very conception of religion as a historical and sociological phenomenon. The constitution of great modern libraries, with their respective collections of Oriental manuscripts, illustrates the logic of the integration of Arabic texts into the new geography of knowledge.
The circulation of manuscripts was linked to the circulation of persons. The logic of economic exchanges, political and imperial rivalries, determined also the displacements of cultural artefacts. The overlapping of networks of communication that work at a global scale with new political formations often confronted among them, designs a complex map in which the circulation of manuscripts means also their re-signification. A manuscript produced in Spain by Moriscos is brought to the papal Rome, and examined by Maronite Christians born in Aleppo, whose main concern was the constitution of a canonical Christian Arabic. Each of the persons involved in this story had their own interests, their own skills, and their own position in society. The circulation of texts supposes not only the movement of an object through a frontier, or the translation from one language to another, from one culture to another, but also a continuous shift of meaning that works at different scales.
The Workshop is jointly coordinated with the MINECO Project “Orientalismo y verdad: la influencia de la erudición oriental en el desarrollo del pensamiento crítico en la España Moderna”, (FFI2017-86538-P), IP’s: Fernando Rodríguez Mediano y Mercedes García-Arenal.
