Project Details
Projekt
Biblia Arabica: The bible in arabic among Jews, Christians and Muslims
Applicants
Professor Dr. Andreas Kaplony, since 1/2016; Professorin Dr. Meira Polliack
Subject Area
Islamic Studies, Arabian Studies, Semitic Studies
Term
from 2013 to 2020
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 228303530
The Bible's pivotal role in the conception of divine revelation among Jews, Christians and Muslimshas enabled it to exert a profound influence on the literary interface as well as the religious andcultural interaction between the three faiths throughout their historical encounter. The idea that thethree religions have a common core which we now call "Abrahamic" was first conceptualized bymedieval Islamic thinkers who identified a literary tradition and ideational heritage common to theirreligion and that of the Christians and the Jews. This tradition was not only conceived as scripturalin its expression, in the sense that the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament and the Qur’an havecommon narrative histories, prophetic notions and dramatis personae, it also played a role in theintellectual encounters between adherents of the three religions held in the main cities of themedieval Muslim world. In other respects, too, the idea of a common scriptural heritage fed intomore popular notions of a shared, mutual past which sprung from the coexistence of variousreligious communities in the medieval Arabic-speaking cultural zone, encompassing the MiddleEast, North Africa and significant parts of Spain and southern Europe. The Bible in Arabic becametherefore an integral part of the three religions' intellectual histories, self-consciousness and culturalpositioning vis-à-vis one another, and so came to serve as a source both for interreligious dialogue aswell as discord, which informs their wider political and cultural dynamics to this very day. A vital and largely unstudied aspect of this idea was the grand scriptural translation movement, which fromthe 9th — 11th centuries C.E. was engaged in the production of a great many written translations ofthe Christian and Jewish scriptures into Arabic. These have survived and come down to us in a vastcorpus of thousands of manuscript sources and fragments of Arabic Bible versions, which hail frommedieval monasteries and synagogues, especially in the Near East, dating from as early as the 8thcentury C.E. By this period, Arabic had become the language used by members of all three religionsnot only for social and intellectual interaction, but also for scholarly works. Much research has beendevoted to the Arabic translation enterprise of the Greek scientific, philosophical and mathematicalworks produced in medieval Baghdad (c. 750-1050 C.E.), whereas the parallel translation enterprise,both in scope and importance, undertaken in the same period in respect of the Jewish and Christianreligious texts has been little explored and mapped out. Our research project aims to redress thisimbalance by way of an integrative and internationally-led study which will uncover and describethe different medieval schools which took part in this scriptural translation enterprise, their aimsand techniques, as well as the social and cultural implications of their innovative and ambitiousinter-religious endeavour. In addition, though scholarship has long been occupied with defining therelationship of Islamic literature (Qur’an and the hadith) to a former body of Jewish and Christianreligious texts, our project will focus on a crucial yet neglected dimension, namely, the Islamicreaction to the dissemination of written Arabic Bible versions by members of these protected faiths,and the wider effect of these versions on the Muslims' perception of the Qur’an as the ultimately revealed scripture, and of Muhammad as the Seal of the Prophets.
DFG Programme
DIP Programme
International Connection
Israel
Ehemalige Antragstellerin
Professorin Dr. Sabine Schmidtke, until 1/2016
