Robert of Ketton and the Translation of the Meanings of the Holy Qurʾān into Latin: Context, Function, and Characteristics

The history of relations between medieval Latin and Arabic textual cultures is generally understood to be a multifaceted history of transmissions, contacts, and hybridizations. The study of these relations has become an entire subfield of medieval textual studies. The nature of the links between these two textual cultures raises many questions indeed, at different levels and in different fields. What forms of interaction were characteristic of the areas where Latin and Arabic coexisted over long periods, such as on the Iberian Peninsula, or in Sicily, More generally, what were the mechanisms that facilitated the transmission of Arabic knowledge or textual forms to the Latin West. The current study is concerned with translating the meanings of the Holy Qurʾān into Latin, which was carried out by Robert of Ketton in 1143 AD in Toledo, and the study falls within the framework of comparative textual studies between the two cultures, and it seeks to know the political and intellectual context in which the translation was made, as well as to know its purpose, nature and proximity to the source text. It also sheds light on the language and style of the translator and is interested in identifying the most important controversial issues that Christian apologetics exploited in refuting the Qurʾān and thus Islam, and how these issues prompted the translator to use certain vocabulary, and also pushed him to distort the Qurʾānic text, with the extreme freedom he exercised in it from deletion, addition, and substitution, And how the translation was a speech addressed to the Latin reader, in which he used many rhetorical devices that affect him, while adding a dictionary in which he explained some vocabulary and added comments that also contribute to influencing that reader. The study is based on the comparative analytical approach, to analyze some examples of the translated verses from some surahs, and to compare the translation with the original, to identify the translation technique, the translator’s style, and to shed light on the most important problems facing medieval translators from Arabic into Latin.