Representations of Arabic culture in early modern Europe relied primarily on second-hand accounts, and the first Dutch translations of the Qur’an were no exception.¹⁵ Neither of the two translations was modelled directly after the Arabic source. Each rendering emerged from a different series of intermediary translations (cf. Genealogy A and Genealogy B in fig. 1).¹⁶ Berentsma’s edition contains a Dutch version of the German translation Alcoranus Mahometicus, das ist Des Turcken Alcoran (1616) by the Protestant minister Salomon Schweigger. In turn, Schweigger had translated his version after Giovanni Battista Castrodardo’s Italian translation L’Alcorano di Macometto (1547), published by Andrea Arrivabene in Venice, which also provided the source for manuscript translations into Hebrew and Spanish.¹⁷ Castrodardo translated the text after the first Latin translation by Robert of Ketton, produced between 1141 and 1143 and first printed in Basel in 1543 by Theodor Bibliander.

Glazemaker’s translation had a completely different genealogy. It was based on the first full translation of the Qur’an into a European vernacular language: André du Ryer’s French translation of the Arabic text, published in Paris by Antoine de Sommaville, L’Alcoran de Mahomet (1647). Although several errors in Du Ryer’s translation evoked criticism from contemporaries, the French translator clearly made an effort to reproduce his source faithfully. He retained the regular composition of the Surahs and he was probably the first European translator who consulted the tradition of Qur’an commentaries known as the Tafsir to find solutions to problems of translation.¹⁸ In addition to Glazemaker’s Dutch rendering, Du Ryer’s version was translated into English by Alexander Ross (1649) and twice into Russian, by Petr Vasilyevic Postnikov (1716) and Mikhail Verevkin (1790).¹⁹ Moreover, the chain did not end in the Dutch Republic: Johann Lange included a German translation of Glazemaker’s Mahomets Alkoran in his ‘Vollständiges Türckisches Gesetz-Buch, oder des Ertz-betriegers Mahomets Alkoran’ (1688), published in Hamburg by Thomas von Wiering.²⁰

During its journey across Europe, the translated text of the Qur’an was accompanied by a wealth of paratextual elements (fig. 2 and appendix 2). European translators and publishers usually enriched their editions of the Surahs with apologies for the need of Qur’an translations, commentaries on Islamic doctrine, ethnographic accounts of Islamic rituals, or biographies of Muhammad. Bibliander, for example, included prefaces and apologies by himself, by the twelfth-century translator Robert of Ketton, by the original commissioner of Ketton’s translation Peter the Venerable, and by Philip Melanchton – whose support played an important part in persuading the authorities in Basel to grant Bibliander permission for this controversial publication.²¹ Bibliander furthermore enriched his edition with a ‘Short summary against the heresies of the Saracens’, a dialogue on Islamic doctrine between a rabbi and Muhammad (‘Doctrina Machumet’), a biography of Muhammad, and a history of the Saracens. In his Italian translation, Castrodardo merged the latter three parts into a separate ‘First Book’ of the Qur’an (‘Il Primo Libro dell’Allcorano’), which was retained by both Schweigger’s 1616 German translation and the anonymous translator of Berentsma’s 1641 Dutch edition. Berentsma also included translations of paratextual elements introduced by the German intermediary edition: a brief note on the title page, a preface, and a number of concluding remarks by Schweigger (‘Den Translateur besluyt’).

A similar chain connects the paratexts from Genealogy B. The preface by André du Ryer and his summary of the Turkish religion (‘Sommaire de la religion des Turcs’) reappeared in translated form in the subsequent Dutch and German editions (fig. 2). Additionally, the 1657 Dutch edition included paratextual elements that did not originate in Genealogy B. Below, I will reconstruct the origins of these additional paratexts appended to the material from Du Ryer’s edition. There was even one cross-over between the two genealogies: the edition by Rieuwertsz also contained a translated version of the aforementioned Doctrina Machumet introduced by Bibliander in 1543.

Ketton’s translation only provided a paraphrased abbreviation of the Qur’an and significantly restructured the holy book.²² It introduced a tripartite structure comprising 123 Surahs, seven more than traditional. Modern scholars have revealed numerous semantic flaws and translation errors in this early Latin representation of the Arabic source.²³ All translated editions that were directly or indirectly based on Ketton’s interpretation – including Berentsma’s – merely reproduced this heavily edited but immensely influential version. Apparently, Berentsma and his predecessors (Ketton, Castrodardo, and Schweigger) thought it sufficient to print translations of Ketton’s summarised interpretation focusing on the most important disagreements between the Bible and the Qur’an.

The manipulation of the text in this genealogy was considerable: on average, 58.7% of all ‘word tokens’ in each Surah were removed.²⁴ Fig. 3 shows the extent of their abbreviation by Surah, generated through a computational comparison of all Surahs in Berentsma’s version and the equivalent Surahs in a modern Dutch translation of the full Qur’an. For this comparison I used the digitised copy of Berentsma’s translation available on the Digitale Bibliotheek voor de Nederlandse Letteren (dbnl) and a digital copy of De Heilige Koran (1953).²⁵ The latter edition was selected for the pragmatic reason that it was available online in a machine-readable format, but the results would be similar with any other modern Dutch edition. In fact, any edition offering a complete representation in Dutch would suffice for the goal of this analysis: quantifying the abbreviation per Surah in Berentsma’s version.

It is difficult to discern an ideologically informed editing strategy behind this abbreviation, as most Surahs were abbreviated to an equal degree, except for the second and longest Surah, ‘Al-Baqarah’, which was copied in full. In general, the editors and translators from Genealogy A made sure to specifically include both outright rejections of Christian doctrine and retellings of Biblical stories about Adam, Moses, Joseph, Noah, Mary, Jesus, and others. This focus was in line with Schweigger’s justification for his effort to translate the Qur’an into German. In his preface he describes how Muhammad had strategically emphasised the similarities between his revelation and Biblical tradition. With this emphasis on the agreement between the Qur’an and the Bible, the prophet was believed to be attempting to make it difficult for ‘simple-minded’ Christians to reject Islam without simultaneously denying a part of their own confession. This confusion could cause them to fall away from faith ‘just as worm-eaten fruit falls from the tree’.²⁶ By making the Qur’an available to German and Dutch readers in a version highlighting the contradictions with Christian doctrine, Schweigger and Berentsma wished to strengthen resistance against Muhammad’s presumed plot to convert Christians.

A closer look into the paratext of Berentsma’s edition confirms that the first Dutch Qur’an translation mostly functioned as a summary of the Islamic holy book, presented as a means to arm Dutch readers against Muhammad’s misleading message. Berentsma borrowed his apology for the publication from his German colleague by including a translation of Schweigger’s ‘Vorrede über den Alcoran, an den gutherßigen Leser’ (‘Preface about the Qur’an, to the good-hearted Reader’). The Dutch edition opens with a brief preface, ‘De Arabische Translateur tot den Leser’ (‘The Arabic Translator to the Reader’), borrowed from Schweigger’s title page, which leaves no doubt about the latter’s sympathies for the ‘ridiculous and foolish doctrine’ in this ‘fictional work’, revealed by the ‘false Prophet Muhammad’.²⁷ Similar condemnations of Muhammad’s revelations were expressed in brief concluding statements labelled ‘Den translateur besluydt’ (‘The translator concludes’), which Berentsma borrowed from Schweigger and printed at the end of the three parts from the tripartite structure of the Qur’an.²⁸ In the longer Vorrede following the note on the title page, Schweigger further elaborated on various blasphemies propagated in the Qur’an, such as the rejection of the Trinity and the denial of Jesus Christ as the son of God.²⁹

Besides a justification for his translation, Berentsma adopts Schweigger’s incorrect claims about the source of his translation. He identifies Schweigger as the Arabic translator (‘Arabische Translateur’), following Schweigger’s misleading ‘Vorrede’ uncritically. In that preface, the German translator states falsely that his version was based on the ‘true text of the Qur’an’ rather than the partial extracts once published by Bibliander, which were themselves the source of Schweigger’s source, Castrodardo’s Italian translation.³⁰ The other editions from Genealogy A were also unclear as to the origins of Bibliander’s text. Andrea Arrivabene bluntly advertised his 1547 Italian edition as a direct translation of the Arabic source. His trick worked: Joseph Justus Scaliger, desperately looking for a more reliable translation than Ketton’s, repeatedly pestered his connections in Venice to obtain a copy of Arrivabene’s edition for him, only to be disappointed when the postman finally delivered yet another incomplete abbreviation.³¹ Obscuring the true source thus became a commercial and rhetorical strategy for the Italian and the German publishers from Genealogy A. Either willingly or unwillingly, Berentsma continued that strategy by upholding their incorrect claims in his edition.

Both Schweigger and Berentsma seemed to have an interest in stating their own position regarding Islam very clearly. The fake imprint on Berentsma’s title page (‘Hamburg’) and the omission of the translator’s name demonstrate the controversial status of the Qur’an in the Dutch Republic. Berentsma may have feared repercussions: the 1618 Synod of Dordrecht had explicitly condemned the dissemination of ‘heretical books’, including the Qur’an. Before the end of the year, the States-General enforced the Synod’s theological condemnation by accepting a resolution prohibiting the import, printing, sale, and dissemination of religiously disruptive books.³² By violating this law, Berentsma risked severe penalties ranging from fines to confiscation of his goods and even banishment. Copying Schweigger’s polemical and dismissive tone regarding the Qur’an probably served as an act of self-preservation, as it may have worked to conceal Berentsma’s personal motives. Whatever his true intentions may have been, Berentsma effectively reinforced the hostile attitude towards Muhammad that had characterised Christian representations of Islam for centuries.

Jan Hendriksz Glazemaker was a highly productive translator who translated more than eighty different texts from French, (neo-) Latin, Italian, and German into Dutch. He is mostly known for his translations of the collected works of Benedictus de Spinoza and René Descartes, but he also translated Seneca, Livy, Erasmus, Montaigne, and many others.³³ Scholars who have studied his work agree that in general he refused to abbreviate, manipulate, or extend his sources.³⁴ In his prefaces, Glazemaker often notes with pride his insistence on source-based poetics, refusing to let the author ‘speak of anything in our language that he did not say in his own’.³⁵ He was dedicated to offering reliable Dutch representations of his exemplars, enabling readers to develop their own opinion on the source.

Glazemaker did not deviate from these principles when translating his Mahomets Alkoran. A computational comparison with a modern Dutch translation offers quantitative evidence that he did not abbreviate any of the Surahs (fig. 4). It is likely that a major motivation behind Rieuwertsz’s and Glazemaker’s Mahomets Alkoran was the creation of a complete Qur’an in Dutch. Apparently, Berentsma’s Arabische Alkoran had not fully satisfied the demand among Dutch readers who wished to read the full extent of Muhammad’s teachings. Du Ryer’s 1647 Paris edition made it possible for Rieuwertsz to meet that demand, especially after two pirated versions by Louis Elzevier and Johannes Janssonius appeared in Amsterdam in 1649.³⁶ The publication of Berentsma’s edition in 1641 had allowed Dutch readers access to only 58.7% of the Arabic source in their native tongue. In 1657, Glazemaker gave them access to the entire text.

Gary Waite has pointed out that Rieuwertsz may have expected to find customers for the Alkoran within his own Mennonite community in Amsterdam, encouraging its members to ‘use the Qur’an to reconsider the nature of their own belief system’.³⁷ Both Rieuwertsz and Glazemaker sympathised with the radical religious tolerance propagated by the teacher of their Mennonite congregation, Galenus Abrahamsz de Haan (1622-1706). Galenus’s relativist Collegiantism caused a painful conflict between the liberals and the orthodox members of their church Bij het Lam (‘By the Lamb’, named after a brewery known as ‘the Lamb’, also located on the Singel). Galenus, inspired by the interconfessional tolerance of the Collegiants, rejected the idea that their congregation was to be based on a shared Mennonite faith among its members. The conservative members firmly disagreed. This dispute about orthodoxy versus freedom of conscience, known as the Lammerenkrijgh (‘war of the lambs’), started in the early 1650s and eventually led to a schism within the Mennonite community in 1664. During and after those years, Glazemaker and Rieuwertsz collaborated on several publications exploring the supposed unicity of the Christian world.³⁸ While the harmony and confessional identity of the Mennonite community was at stake, they fed the discussion with translations of travelogues and ethnological accounts of foreign cultures challenging the distinctiveness of Christian beliefs. Their efforts to produce a full translation of the Qur’an should first of all be considered in the context of this anthropological interest in the non-Christian world sparked by the confessional relativism that caused the Lammerenkrijgh.

Glazemaker and Rieuwertsz explicitly asserted their position within the early modern discourse about Islam. In a preface ‘to the Reader’ they complain about the lack of neutrality in existing accounts of Muhammad’s life. Friends and foes alike, they observe, produced contradictory and ideologically charged biographies of the prophet. Rather than resolve these contradictions, Glazemaker and Rieuwertsz chose to accept them as an inevitable flaw in their source material. They embraced the multitude of perspectives by including two different versions of Muhammad’s biography, they explained,

Glazemaker and Rieuwertsz thus tried to equalise the prejudices in their sources. By refusing to pick sides they claimed to neutralise the ideologically sensitive content of their material.

Counterbalancing animosity in a predominantly anti-Islamic discourse was, however, in itself an ideological act. But Glazemaker knew how to use the subtle politics of translation. By maintaining Du Ryer’s condemning preface in Mahomets Alkoran, the Dutch translator first echoed the generally held attitude of hostility towards Islam. Du Ryer had dismissed the Arabic Qur’an scholars whose exegesis of the text, he suggested, remained ‘as ridiculous as the text itself’.⁴⁰ The French translator also lamented the deception of the ‘best part of this world’ by the ‘false prophet’, preparing the reader to be surprised by the ‘absurdities’ in this book.⁴¹ Glazemaker diligently copied Du Ryer’s criticism in an attempt to be transparent about the ideological background of his source.

The Dutch translator nevertheless tried to counterbalance the hostility from his French predecessor. Besides his refusal to manipulate the text of the Qur’an, he expressed his opinions through a careful selection and editing of various sources, which he translated and combined into four paratexts printed after the material adopted from Du Ryer’s edition. The first of those sources was the Historia Saracenica, qua res gestae Muslimorum (1625) by the aforementioned Leiden professor of Arabic Thomas Erpenius, which was based on a text by Georgius Elmacinus (Ibn Al’Amid), a thirteenth-century Coptic historian whom Glazemaker mistook for a Muslim. Glazemaker translated only 12 of the 372 pages of Erpenius’s version.⁴² He interrupted his translation mid-chapter, after a remarkable passage about Muhammad’s friendly attitude towards Christians. In that passage, Elmacinus describes Muhammad’s conviction that anyone who oppressed a Christian should be prepared to be punished at the Last Judgment. The prophet reportedly warned his followers that he would consider any insult to a Christian as a personal insult to himself: ‘Et, Qui Christiano nocet, mihi nocet.’⁴³ By ending his translated excerpt from Elmacinus’s extensive history with this statement attributed to Muhammad, Glazemaker highlighted the peaceful nature of Islam.

The second text is a compilation of various accounts of Muhammad’s life, taken from no fewer than six different French and neo-Latin histories written by Western historians between the twelfth and the seventeenth century: Illustrations sur l’histoire de Chalcondile Athenien, de la decadente de l’Empire Grec, & establissement de celuy des Turcs (1650) by the French diplomat Blaise de Vigenère (1523-1596); Historia Arabum by the archbishop of Toledo, Roderigo Jiménez de Rada (1170-1247), which was included in Erpenius’s 1625 Historia Saracenica; Mémoires des Gaules depuis le deluge jusques à l’establissement de la monarchie française (1619) by the French historian Scipion Dupleix (1569-1661); De Turcarum Origine, Religione, ac immanissima eorum in Christianos tyrannide (1654) by the Austrian humanist Joannes Cuspinianus (1473-1529); and the second volume of the Histoire Romaine (1630), by the French historian Claude Malingre Sainct-Lazare (1580-1653). Glazemaker credits his sources with brief bibliographic references in the margins. Moreover, he repeatedly underlines the uncertainty in his fragmented reconstruction through phrases such as: ‘With regards to the time of Muhammad’s birth, there are various sentiments, also among those of his own belief and law.’⁴⁴ Uncertainty in the historical sources is furthermore marked by Glazemaker’s tendency to consistently name the historians he quotes: ‘says Jiménez’, or ‘Joannes Cuspinianus writes as follows’. Emphasizing uncertainty thus became a remedy to prejudice.

Another strategy to highlight contradictions was to include multiple versions of the same story in the compilation of Christian histories. Summarising ‘various fables’ about Muhammad, Glazemaker retells a story from the Hadith of a four-year-old Muhammad whose chest was cut open by two men to remove a ‘black grain’ (symbolising Satan) from his body.⁴⁵ Elsewhere, Glazemaker provides a different version of the story, as told by Jiménez de Rada. In this version, the surgery was performed by two angels taking a black clump of solidified black blood from the prophet’s heart.⁴⁶ The same story also occurs in Berentsma’s edition, illustrating the overlap between Genealogy A and B as a result of Glazemaker’s eclectic selection of sources.⁴⁷ But in contrast to Berentsma’s version from Genealogy A, Glazemaker acknowledged that there are multiple versions of this legend, which he viewed as one of many ‘fables’ about Muhammad. The Dutch translator refrained from offering only one ‘official’ perspective on Muhammad’s life. Instead, he created transparency about the complexity and inconsistency in this contested historical tradition.

The third text Glazemaker appended to Du Ryer’s edition is a ‘tale, told by Muhammad and his followers, of a journey that he, riding the beast Alborach, made to Jerusalem where he ascended to Heaven’.⁴⁸ It concerns an uncharacteristically free translation by Glazemaker of a chapter from Confusio Sectae Mahometanae (1595, reprinted in 1643 and 1656), which was in turn a translation by Johannes Lauterbach based on a 1540 Italian translation by Dominicus de Gazelu of the Spanish treatise Confusion de la Secta Mahomatica (1515) by Juan Andrés.⁴⁹ In this chapter Andrés provides a version of the canonical stories about Muhammad’s night journey to Jerusalem (the isrā’) and his ascension to heaven (the mi’rāj), which were often combined in Islamic tradition.⁵⁰ The narrative of the isrā’/mi’rāj, in part inspired by Surah seventeen (Al-Isrā), usually starts with a scene where the archangel Gabriel visits Muhammad by night to take him on a journey riding on the mythical flying horse Burāq. During his journey, Muhammad climbs a ladder to heaven, where he meets key biblical figures and prophets such as Adam, Noah, and Christ. Finally, he arrives at the highest levels in heaven, where (according to Andrés’s version) God grants him unique privileges. The story legitimised Muhammad’s status in Islamic doctrine, representing him as the final and most important among God’s prophets. Muhammad’s ascension to heaven may have appealed to Glazemaker and his Mennonite readership because it stressed the similarities rather than the differences between Islam and Christianity. The ladder climbed by Muhammad symbolises his position in a long lineage originating in Christian and Jewish tradition. Muhammad’s respectful approach of the Christian prophets in heaven made it possible for readers to imagine interreligious pacifism between Christians and Muslims (or between Christians of different denominations). Glazemaker probably expected such imaginations to resonate with Galenus Abrahamsz’s relativist opinion regarding Mennonite orthodoxy.

After the tale of Muhammad’s night journey, Mahomets Alkoran closes with one final paratextual supplement: a translation of the aforementioned Doctrina Machumet.⁵¹ This dialogue between Muhammad and the rabbi Abdias was a Latin translation by Herman of Carinthia (1110-1154) of an unknown Arabic source. The Doctrina Machumet became part of the collection of twelfth-century translations of Arabic texts included in Bibliander’s 1543 edition. All later editions based on Bibliander’s included translations of the dialogue (cf. fig. 2, Genealogy A). Glazemaker used the Latin version from Bibliander’s edition as his exemplar.⁵² Like the story of the night journey, the dialogue opens with a visit from the archangel Gabriel to Muhammad. Gabriel announces that four men of excellent wisdom are about to visit the prophet. They will question him about his teaching and about a number of obscure matters in Jewish law. As soon as they arrive, Abdias starts firing questions at his host. The questions cover a wide range of theological issues, from Muhammad’s relationship to God and the status of previous prophets, to the specifics of life in heaven. Muhammad patiently answers all questions, satisfying his guest, who often states his agreement with Muhammad’s explanations. At the end of the dialogue, Abdias is overwhelmed by Muhammad’s wisdom and decides to convert to Islam. Glazemaker may have appreciated the Doctrina Machumet, like the tale of the night journey, as a story illustrating the common ground beneath Islamic and Jewish doctrine. During Abdias’s barrage of questions (the Doctrina Machumet is also known as the ‘Book of Thousand Questions’) the rabbi finds no fundamental disagreements between Muhammad’s answers and his own beliefs. Instead, the dialogue between Abdias and Muhammad leads to interreligious unity – although the relationship is no longer interreligious after Abdias’s conversion.

This overview of the paratexts in Mahomets Alkoran shows that Glazemaker enriched his translation of Du Ryer’s L’Alcoran de Mahomet with fragments collected from no fewer than seven different editions (see appendix 1). Whereas Berentsma’s version was entirely based on Schweigger’s anti-Islamic German edition, Glazemaker’s Qur’an combines translations of texts written or translated by André du Ryer, Thomas Erpenius, Blaise de Vigenère, Roderigo Jiménez de Rada, Scipion Dupleix, Johannes Cuspinianus, Claude Malingre Sainct-Lazare, Johannes Lauterbach, and Herman of Carinthia. Instead of reproducing only the hostile views propagated by his French predecessor André du Ryer, Glazemaker’s Alkoran wove together a variety of contemporary and historical perspectives on Islam. Glazemaker’s encyclopaedia of paratextual supplements offered a companion to the Qur’an text and created an ideological polyphony to counterbalance Western prejudice regarding Islam.

This philological inclusivity became an identifiable trait of Glazemaker’s ‘poetics of translation’.⁵³ Mahomets Alkoran is not the only example of Glazemaker’s tendency to combine multiple versions of his sources into one translation. Previous scholarship has demonstrated the translator’s search for what Fokke Akkerman has called the ‘textual surplus’: whenever Glazemaker had multiple versions of a source at his disposal, he incorporated everything he found in the variant editions.⁵⁴ He used, for example, four different versions of Descartes’s Discours de la Méthode as exemplar for his second edition of that text, Proeven der Wijsbegeerte (1659). The 1659 edition contains traces of the original French from 1637, Glazemaker’s Dutch translation from 1656, the Latin translation from 1644, and the Latin translation of La Geometrie by Franciscus van Schooten from 1649.⁵⁵ This habit of collecting and combining different text variants is also reflected in the catalogue of his library, auctioned after his death in 1683, which listed thousands of books.⁵⁶ It shows that Glazemaker collected several editions of the sources he translated. For example, he owned nine versions of Erasmus’s influential Annotations of the New Testament, which he translated into Dutch in 1663: his catalogue listed two editions of The New Testament by Erasmus (1516), three editions of Paraphrases of the New Testament by the same author (1517-1524), and four different editions of the latter’s Annotations on the New Testament (1516). Glazemaker’s bookshelves also held seven editions of (adaptations of) John Barclay’s prose story Argenis (1621), which he translated twice, once from French and once from neo-Latin.⁵⁷ These cases show that Glazemaker’s editing strategy of the Qur’an was not exceptional: giving readers access to texts unavailable to them was more important than maintaining the authenticity and integrity of his sources.

Glazemaker’s quest for ideological balance through the ‘textual surplus’ continued to shape Dutch encounters with the Qur’an for centuries: although Johann Lange omitted the four paratexts added by Glazemaker in his 1688 German translation of Mahomets Alkoran, they were maintained in each of the eight Dutch reprints to be published after 1657.⁵⁸ The most remarkable of these re-editions was the 1696-1698 reprint by Timotheus ten Hoorn, a controversial publisher of pornographic and dissident works located in the Nes in Amsterdam.⁵⁹ To finance this edition, Ten Hoorn collaborated with Adrianus van Dijk, a bookseller in Rotterdam.⁶⁰ Ten Hoorn would also become the first publisher to include illustrations in an edition of the Qur’an: he ordered six engravings from Caspar Luyken to illuminate the text. Four of them were printed alongside the actual text of the Qur’an, and two were inserted into the appended biographies of Muhammad. Including the engravings was probably a commercial strategy, one which met with a modicum of success, if the reprinting of the images in later editions, printed by Hendrik (ii) van Damme (1707) and Jan vander Deyster (1721 and 1734), is anything to go by. Interestingly, the images in part reverse the tolerant position expressed in Glazemaker’s paratexts: the engraving on folio 496, for example, depicts Muhammad as a trickster who trained a dove and a bull to deceive bystanders into thinking that he was God’s chosen prophet (fig. 5).⁶¹ In this manner, we can see how Ten Hoorn in his turn enhanced the Orientalist ambivalence in Glazemaker’s compilation.

Besides indicating his ideological support for Galenus Abrahamsz’s views on the freedom of conscience, Glazemaker’s philological inclusivity also signalled a broader philosophical development: the rise of Cartesianism during the Dutch Early Enlightenment. Descartes’s influential philosophical project not only resulted in a reappraisal of reason and rational knowledge, but also implied a growing scepticism regarding knowledge accumulated in books. His famous maxim ‘cogito ergo sum’ was an attempt to regain solid ground after he demolished the foundation of Western knowledge by abandoning the philosophical tradition entirely. Having established that philosophers fail to reach consensus on almost any topic, the French philosopher reasoned that the house of philosophy was to be rebuilt on new grounds. In his Discours de la Méthode he argued that ‘considering how many diverse opinions learned men may maintain on a single question – even though it is impossible for more than one to be true – I held as well-nigh false everything that was merely probable’.⁶² Disagreements between philosophers, Descartes observed, arise due to their inability to agree on the meaning of their terminology: ‘[I]f philosophers always agreed about the meaning of words, their controversies would almost all be at an end.’⁶³ He argued, therefore, that the axioms and assumptions of philosophy were to be anchored in mathematical logic instead of words. Although the philosophical confusion as a result of the inevitable ambiguity in language had been a topic of debate for centuries – as Lodi Nauta has recently demonstrated – it fuelled the epistemological uncertainty that was fundamental to the Dutch Early Enlightenment.⁶⁴

Inspired by Descartes’s radical dismissal of the knowledge preserved in books and words, various Dutch freethinkers started to re-evaluate the foundations of their own world views. Linguistic politics became a key ingredient of their Cartesian philosophy and politics. Freethinkers closely related to the diverse group of dissidents known as ‘Spinoza’s circle’, including Glazemaker, hoped to further the Dutch arts and sciences by repairing misleading elements in the vernacular – starting with loanwords.⁶⁵ Radical thinker Adriaan Koerbagh and playwright Lodewijk Meijer published loanword dictionaries with a clear political goal: arming the common people against their theological and legal oppressors, those who deliberately used Latin and French terminology as a method of keeping them in the dark. In order to achieve this goal, the language had to be purified, purged of its foreign influences: especially Meijer’s language criticism went beyond the linguistic purism that authors like Dirck Volckertsz Coornhert and Hendrik Laurensz Spiegel had been propagating since the sixteenth century. His controversial Philosophia S. Scripturae Interpres (1666, translated a year later into Dutch as De philosophie d’uytleghster der H. Schrifture), a Cartesian attempt to rebuild theology on the solid rock of philosophy instead of the sand of Protestant doctrine, opens with a long exposition of the function of language and the many ways it can lead to confusion. His survey of linguistic ambiguity – Meijer used the beautiful purist synonym twijffelsinnigheydt – served to support his point that theologians would never agree about the true nature of Scripture if they failed to grasp the many semantic instabilities in (biblical) language.⁶⁶ Pieter Balling, another member of the Bij het Lam congregation who also translated Spinoza’s works, opened his pamphlet Het licht op den kandelaar (1662) with a similar Cartesian complaint about the endemic religious and political discord in early modern society that resulted from linguistic ambiguity.⁶⁷ He considered the possibility of redefining language as radically as Descartes had redefined philosophy: ‘If, then, one should wish to better instil the things [i.e., concepts] into someone through words and arguments, one would be required to invent new words, and ultimately a whole new language.’⁶⁸

Glazemaker’s refusal to prioritise one of the various sources collected in his Mahomets Alkoran over the others aligns with the linguistic politics voiced by many other authors related to Spinoza’s circle. Glazemaker sent his Alkoran to the printer at the time when his career was dedicated to translating Descartes – most of his translations of the French philosopher were first published between 1656 and 1661. It seems plausible that this immersion in Descartes’s oeuvre shaped his poetics of translation while working on the Qur’an. The translator’s explicit recognition of the disagreement among Muhammad’s biographers echoed Descartes’s criticism of philosophical discord, and anticipated Meijer’s radical attack on the never-ending theological quarrels. But while Descartes and Meijer tried to resolve intellectual disagreements by a new scientific or hermeneutic method based on rational foundations, Glazemaker simply accepted the impossibility of repairing the ambiguity present in his sources. His solution was total transparency, treating the relevant sources equally regardless of their historical and ideological background.

Glazemaker’s relativist hermeneutics can be read as an early example of the denial of Christianity’s moral superiority, identified by Jonathan Israel as a key feature of the Radical Enlightenment and famously interpreted by Paul Hazard as a main cause of the ‘crisis of the European mind’ emerging in the late seventeenth century.⁶⁹ The radical refusal to attribute more value to Western authorities than to non-Western accounts opened the door to a willingness to weigh Christian and non-Christian world views equally. These interreligious comparisons led Pierre Bayle and Voltaire to believe that the Islamic world was more tolerant than the Christian West.⁷⁰ Jean-Frédéric Bernard even turned the widespread stereotype of the blood-thirsty Muslim on its head by asking his readers to imagine the severe impact of having to endure the brutal violence of the crusades for centuries.⁷¹ Glazemaker prefigured such provocative claims, emphasizing Muhammad’s tolerant nature through his editing strategies and source selection.

Besides their tolerance, Muslims were admired by the philosophes because of the supposed rational superiority of Islam and the great philosophical achievements of Islamic learned culture. This representation of Islam as a ‘rational’ religion had a long history. It already appeared in De rationibus fidei (1246) by Thomas Aquinas, who mocked Muslim attempts to challenge doctrine of the Holy Trinity with rational arguments.⁷² During the seventeenth century, this Orientalist projection turned from yet another strategy to keep Islam at bay into a source of curiosity and admiration. A formidable example was the seventeenth-century rediscovery of Abu Bakr Mohammed ben Abd-al-Malik Ibn Tufayl’s twelfth-century philosophical coming-of-age story about an orphan boy named Hayy Ibn Yagzan.⁷³ In 1671 the English Orientalist Edward Pocock and his son published the Arabic text with a Latin translation, which was then translated into Dutch by the playwright Johannes Bouwmeester, a key member of Spinoza’s circle. The title page of the Dutch edition from 1672, Het Leeven van Hai Ebn Yokdhan, summarised the story’s allegorical meaning: ‘Wherein is shown, how someone, without any contact with other people, or any education, could obtain knowledge of himself, and of God.’⁷⁴ The story’s main character, who is raised on an island by a gazelle (or a goat, in Bouwmeester’s version), learns about God and the natural world through reason, experimental observation, and systematic deduction. When Hai is finally introduced to human (Muslim) society on another island, he soon realises that the members of this society are unable to understand God as well as he had come to during his spiritual isolation. Disappointed, Hai returns to his island and spends the rest of his days meditating, relieving himself from all bodily and material desires and studying the nature of God without any further interruptions. Although Spinoza’s role in the creation and reception of Het Leeven van Hai Ebn Yokdhan remains unclear, the novel’s many parallels with the Cartesian quest for intellectual autonomy and the Spinozist search for the amor intellectualis dei were probably not lost on Spinoza’s friends.⁷⁵ These freethinkers eagerly adapted a philosophical allegory from a five-centuries-old Islamic tradition into early Enlightened discourse.

The intellectual blend of Cartesianism, linguistic politics, and cultural relativism thus inspired new forms of early modern Orientalism projecting Western beliefs on Western representations of texts, narratives, and images from the East. Glazemaker functioned as a key broker of such representations. Besides travelogues of Pietro Della Valle and Marco Polo, he translated influential ethnographies of non-Western cultures such as Athanasius Kircher’s China illustrata (1667) and Paul Rycaut’s The Present State of the Ottoman Empire (1665), which included an extensive description of the ‘Turkish Religion’.⁷⁶ These richly illustrated (and therefore expensive) editions apparently met a demand for first-hand accounts of Arabic and Asian cultures. Besides the local discussions within Mennonite communities during the 1650s and 1660s, the appeal of Glazemaker’s specific approach to the Qur’an should be situated from within this growing interest in the non-Western world among freethinking circles from the Early Enlightenment.

The first two Dutch translations of the Qur’an once again demonstrate how the holy book became a canvas for the projection of Western ideas. The two editions sold by the booksellers Berentsma and Rieuwertsz originated in vastly different, yet partly overlapping genealogies of intermediary translations. But a different choice of exemplar was only one of the many differences between them. In this article I have built upon existing bibliographic descriptions of the first Dutch Qur’an editions by quantifying the (absence of) abbreviation in the two editions, identifying the sources of the paratexts, and examining the differences in translation poetics. I propose to view these differences in light of two discourses that profoundly shaped Glazemaker’s career: the Mennonite dispute about freedom of conscience known as the Lammerenkrijgh and the rise of Cartesianism. Because of this resonance of the holy book in specific local, intra-Christian discussions, the Dutch translation history of the Qur’an offers a case in point for what Jan Loop and others conceptualised as the ‘European Qur’an’: a textual tradition of its own that reflected ‘the European self in varying religious, political, philosophical, and cultural contexts’.⁷⁷

Based on paratextual analysis I furthermore argue that the differences in editing choices between Berentsma’s and Rieuwertsz’s Qur’ans did not just exemplify different ideological attitudes, but also different epistemologies. Whereas De Arabische Alkoran (1641) only included the paratextual material from its German source, Mahomets Alkoran (1657) contained paratexts originating in no fewer than seven discrete editions in addition to its prime source, Du Ryer’s L’Alcoran. Inspired by a Cartesian scepticism towards the reliability of textual traditions, Glazemaker accepted ideological disagreement and linguistic ambiguity as inevitable and irredeemable features of his sources. Instead of striving for a rationalist solution to the contradictions he faced, the translator opted for philological inclusivity. He included the textual surplus in the sources he collected and refrained from giving his own interpretation, leaving such judgment to his readers. Such a relativist conception of the ‘truth’ represented a radical Cartesian position, because taking historical, linguistic, and theological uncertainty for granted could have serious philosophical and political consequences. Glazemaker’s oeuvre can be read as a unique archive of a translator who was willing to take that risk.