Eighth to the Sixteenth Century - Rashid Islamic Center

134 • The Making of Islamic Scienceal-Andalus. The purpose of these writings was to justify the “holywar.” Muslims appear in these writings as polytheistic, polygamous,promiscuous, worshippers of Muhammad, and wine-drinkers. Theseimages passed from generation to generation and their remnants arestill reflected in certain perceptions about Islam and Muslims heldin the West.The European Renaissance attempted to rebuild a civilizationbased on its antiquity. This incessant return to the past is apparenteverywhere—in art, in the sciences, in poetry. At the same time,European intellectuals, writers, scientists, and artists of this perioddeveloped an intense hatred for Islam, its Prophet, and his family.Dante Alighieri (1265–1321), for instance, placed Ibn Sina andIbn Rushd in Limbo, in the First Circle of Hell, with the greatestnon-Christian thinkers—Electra, Aeneas, Caesar, Aristotle, Plato,Orpheus, and Cicero—where they must live without hope of seeingGod, in perpetual desire, though not in torment (Dante 1971, CantoIV: 142–144). But he placed the Prophet and his son-in-law, Ali,among a group of “sowers of scandal and schism,” whose mutilatedand bloody bodies, ripped open and entrails spilling out, bemoantheir painful lot: “See how Mohomet is deformed and torn!/In frontof me, and weeping, Ali walks,/his face cleft from his chin up to thecrown” (Dante 1971, Canto XXVIII: 31–33).The first Latin paraphrase of the QurāĀn, made by Robertof Ketton at the behest of Peter the Venerable, Abbot of Cluny,was completed in 1143. (It still exists with the autograph of thetranslator in the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal in Paris.) An Italianversion was published by Andrea Arrivabene in 1547, and “thoughits author claims that it is made directly from the Arabic, it is clearlya translation or paraphrase of Robert of Ketton’s text, publishedby Bibliander. Arrivabene’s version was used for the first Germantranslation made by Solomon Schweigger, which in turn formed thebasis of the first Dutch translation, made anonymously and issued in1641” (Pearson 1986, 431). Most of the subsequent translations of theQurāĀn in various European languages were derivative products ofthese works (which were themselves not accurate in the first place),and it was not until the second quarter of the twentieth century thatMuslims produced their own translations of the QurāĀn in European