islam - Naima Afif

‘The Circulation of the Masāʾil ʿAbdallāh ibn Salām (Liber de doctrina Mahumet) in Europe’, Webinar 29 April 2022

The Masāʾil ʿAbdallāh ibn Salām (Abdallāh ibn Salām’s Questions) is a fictional dialogue between a learned Jew who converted to Islam and the prophet Muḥammad. Originally written in Arabic, it enjoyed a great popularity in the West. The text was translated into Latin as part of the Corpus Toletanum in the 12th century under the title Liber de doctrina Mahumet and then served as the basis of several translations in European vernaculars. In this online seminar we will discuss the transfer and wide European reception of this work, and assess how it influenced European knowledge of Muḥammad and Islam over centuries.

This online seminar “The Circulation of the Masāʾil ʿAbdallāh ibn Salām (Liber de doctrina Mahumet) in Europe” will be held on the 29 April 2022, 14 – 4 PM CET.

New publication: « De Leipzig à Fès: une copie sépharade de la traduction hébraïque du Coran d’Hermann Reckendorf »

Publication_Naima_Afif_Hebrew — Jerusalem, National Library of Israel, Ms. Heb. 8° 6453. Sura 1 in Hebrew, with a transliteration of the Arabic text in Hebrew script.

The first Hebrew translation of the Qur’an directly from Arabic was produced by Hermann Reckendorf (1825–1875) in Germany during the Jewish Enlightenment.

While Reckendorf’s translation circulated primarily in Ashkenazi intellectual circles, it also survives in a remarkable manuscript copied in nineteenth-century Morocco. This article examines this unique Sephardic witness and explores how a European Hebrew translation of the Qur’an was transmitted in a North African Jewish context.

Read the publication in Open Acces.