Two Hungarian Jesuits and the Qur'an: Understanding, Misunderstanding, and Polemic. Issue 3 (October 2018)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Shore, Paul
• Is Part Of: Journal of Qur'anic studies. Volume 20:Issue 3(2018)
• Page Start: 81
• Page End: 93
• Publication Date: 2018-10
• Subjects: Stephanus Arator -- Hungary -- Jesuit -- Peter Pázmány -- polemic -- Qur'an translation; 297.1226
• DOI: 10.3366/jqs.2018.0352
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1465-3591

Abstract

Abstract : Two Hungarian Jesuits active in the early seventeenth century, Stephanus Arator and Peter Pázmány, wrote polemical pieces drawing on the Qur'an. Arator's work, Confutatio alcorani (1610) relies on the 1543 Bibliander edition of the translation made by Robert of Ketton and on Juan Andrés' Confusión o confutación de la secta Mahomética y del Alcorán . Pázmány, in his Az mostan tamat uy tvdomaniok hamissaganak (1605) also draws on Bibliander, while presenting his own translations of, and commentaries on, Bibliander into Hungarian, the language of Pázmány's work. Both Arator and Pázmány were influenced more by the political and confessional dynamics surrounding them than by any apparent desire to grasp the meaning of the Qur'an. The crisis that both Catholicism and, more broadly, European Christianity, faced in the early seventeenth century overshadows these Jesuits' efforts to explore the Qur'an. Pázmány, in particular, uses the Qur'an to make a case against Protestant sects and Unitarians, whose influence and numbers had greatly increased in Hungary. However further study of the Jesuit Austrian Province, in which both men worked, is needed to understand more fully the factors shaping these two examples of anti-Qur'anic literature.