Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia, University of Tokyo is pleased to announce the Tobunken Seminar on “Approaches to Arabic and Islamic Knowledge in the Early Modern Period: The Ottoman Empire and Europe Further West.” Two distinguished scholars from the institute’s partner institution, Università di Napoli L’Orientale, will share the fresh findings of their respective research. The seminar is open to the public and no registration is required.
(Kazuo Morimoto)
Speakers and Titles:
Francesca Bellino (Università di Napoli L’Orientale),
“Arabic Encyclopedic Activities during the Ottoman Period.”
Roberto Tottoli (Università di Napoli L'Orientale),
“Reading and Editing the Qur’an in Modern Europe (16th-17th Centuries).”
Date and Time: 7 April (Sat.), 2018 at 15:00-17:45 (Bellino: 15:00-16:15, Tottoli: 16:30-17:45).
Venue: Room 304, 3rd floor, Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia, University of Tokyo (東京大学東洋文化研究所; 7-3-1 Hongo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo)
Note: The seminar is open to the public and no registration is required.
Contact person: Kazuo Morimoto (morikazu[at]ioc.u-tokyo.ac.jp)
Abstracts:
Bellino
The conference will provide an overview of encyclopedism in the Arab-Islamic world during the post-classical period. The first part summarizes all the main issues related to this genre that may contribute to the broader understanding of the various literary trends in transition towards modernity. The second will focus on a number of works written in Arabic and dating back from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries which fall into this genre outlining their specificities and differences. Particular attention will be paid to the criteria of division of the sciences and the organization of knowledge in these works.
Tottoli
The lecture will deal with the recent finds and research upon the study and approach to the Qur’an in Arabic in 16th- and 17th-century Europe. Between the printing of the Arabic Qur’an in Venice in 1537-8 and then the editions by Abraham Hinckemann (1694) and Ludovico Marracci (1698), many attempts and various partial editions were realized. All this evidences a strong interest in the community of European Christian (Catholic and Reformed) scholars in reading, understanding and printing the Qur’an in Arabic. Polemics, inter-religious and inter-Christian rivalries also played a role in this regard. Thanks to the recently discovered personal manuscripts of Marracci and J. Zechendorff and new research on the personal manuscripts owned by Hinckelmann in Hamburg we can now better appreciate the effort, limits and problems European scholars had in the comprehension of the Arabic Qur’an. The problematic condition of the Qur’an manuscripts at disposal in Europe, their graphic differences and the reliance on the exegetical literature affected and influenced the pioneering work of scholars who produced the first printed Qur’ans between the 16th and the end of the 17th century.