Juan de Segovia and the Fight for Peace by Anne Marie Wolf

Author:Anne Marie Wolf [Wolf, Anne Marie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Europe, Spain & Portugal, Religion, Islam, Christian Theology
ISBN: 9780268096700
Google: yU8FDgAAQBAJ
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess
Published: 2014-03-24T02:42:43+00:00

The Qur’ān in Juan de Segovia’s Work and Thought

Because many of the falsehoods that Segovia thought animated the Muslims’ attacks on Christian lands were not merely popular misconceptions about Christianity but actual teachings in the Qur’ān, it would have been unthinkable for him to correct the Muslims’ misunderstandings regarding Christianity without showing that their sacred text itself was not accurate. When they learned that Muhammad had asserted such great falsehoods, Juan reasoned, they could not possibly regard the Prophet highly.46 Their conversion would be the natural consequence of Christians challenging the slander against their own religion, and it was the only way to end that slander permanently. This explains the importance of the Qur’ān in his approach to this problem.

Although his most intense encounter with the Qur’ān occurred while in Aiton, he had been trying to secure a good translation much earlier, even before his 1431 discussions with Muslims in Castile. In his Preface to the trilingual Qur’ān, he recalled that in 1429, when he was in Rome, the patriarch of Constantinople had asked him to find a copy. Since he could not find a copy in Italy, he requested that one be sent from Spain. The experience taught him something he said he had not known before: that very few Christians and few libraries had a copy. In 1437, he said, he found a copy, a chained one, in Germany, and had it copied. But afterward, he saw that this copy deviated significantly from the contents of the Arabic text. It is not clear how he would have known that, since he did not know Arabic. Perhaps it conflicted with things he had heard from his Muslim interlocutors in Spain, or maybe he recognized that some of what he was reading could not have been in the Qur’ān, and this caused him to lose confidence in the translation. He was alarmed at the depiction of Muslims that he found there, saying that it portrayed them as “far from being men of reason, almost bestial, and childish.”47 In his letter to Cusa, he referred to a translation that he had used with Cusa’s permission (vestra concessione), which he said he had read and “lifted out” the errors.48 There was still another attempt to secure a faithful translation. He traveled to the Dominican library in Basel to look at a copy he had previously seen there, but found that that translation was the same as one he already owned.49 Toward the end of his life, when he was writing his Donatio, he possessed three Latin translations of the Qur’ān.50

Still, he was determined to obtain a more faithful translation, and his efforts toward that goal were more persistent than most. They even included writing back to Spain to find a Muslim scholar who could come and help him produce a better translation. Remarkably, this effort finally succeeded. Segovia must have been overjoyed when, in December 1455, just a couple weeks before he finished his reply to Germain, the renowned Castilian Muslim scholar Yça Gidelli arrived at his little priory in the Alps.

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