The collection of essays in Latin and Arabic: Entangled Histories is the fruit of a workshop held at the Heidelberg Cluster “Asia and Europe in a Global Context” on September 28 and 29, 2016. The idea of organizing a workshop on the entanglement of Latin and Arabic resulted from the desire to avoid and circumvent well-trodden paths of scholarship on the political, economic, social, cultural, and religious history of the Euromediterranean. Scholars interested in this history cannot avoid being confronted with well-known binary oppositions—“Islam and the West,” “Christianity and Islam,” “tolerance and intolerance,” “convivencia and the clash of civilizations,” and so on. The focus on Latin-Arabic entanglement was deliberately chosen in the hope that a historical socio-linguistic approach to Euromediterranean history would open up the possibility of using different, maybe even more “neutral” categories and thus of providing a conceptual alternative to seemingly endless and ultimately pointless culturalist debates. In addition, a focus on Latin-Arabic entanglement also seemed to yield the prospect of highlighting the relevance of themes so far deemed secondary by historians of political, social, economic, and religious history, but highlighted in other fields of historical research.

Variants of Latin-Arabic entanglement currently play a role in various scholarly milieus. In the Arab world of the early twenty-first century, Latin-Arabic entanglement mainly results from scholarly engagement with the Latin language and its literature, as well as with Latin primary sources in various departments of classics and ancient and medieval history, most of them situated in Egypt.1 The foundation of a “Centre d’Études Latines” at the Lebanese Université Saint-Esprit de Kaslik in 2009 points to the fact that, due to historical relations between Rome and various Oriental churches since the medieval period, the study of Latin-Arabic entanglement is also of interest to Arabic scholars of ecclesiastical history.2

Before Western academia abandoned Latin as a language of scholarly endeavour over the course of the nineteenth century, Latin-Arabic entanglement in European and North American scholarly milieus was a by-product of scholarly engagement with the Arabic language. Today, however, Latin-Arabic entanglement has come to represent an object of analysis nurtured and advanced by a rather small number of specialists in niche areas of various academic disciplines. Forms of Latin-Arabic entanglement play a prominent role in several fields of research, such as the medieval history of philosophy and the sciences, Ibero-Romance philology and literature, and medieval and early modern European and Mediterranean history. They are of relevance to a much lesser extent in the fields of Islamic studies or Arabic and Latin philology and literature, excepting scholars whose areas of specialization include the Iberian Peninsula and southern Italy.

It is only in the fields of the history of philosophy and the sciences, however, that Latin-Arabic studies have achieved a certain degree of institutionalization in the form of research projects and research centres, often of a temporary nature. The project “Speculum Arabicum: Objectifying the contribution of the Arab-Muslim world to the history of sciences and ideas: the sources and resources of medieval encyclopaedism,” was conducted by a group of researchers at the Université catholique de Louvain between 2012 and 2017.3 The Centre for the History of Arabic Studies in Europe, hosted by the Warburg Institute in London4 and the “Digital Averroes Research Environment,” hosted by the Thomas-Institute in Cologne,5 will hopefully prove more durable. This is also to be hoped for the “Forschungsstelle Philosophie- und Wissenschaftsgeschichte der griechisch-arabisch-lateinischen Tradition,” hosted by the Department of Philosophy at Würzburg University,6 and the project “Ptolemaeus Arabus et Latinus,” hosted by the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities.7

As academic fields of research, the history of philosophy and the history of the sciences indisputably boast a long and respectable tradition of Latin-Arabic studies, but there are still large corpora of sources awaiting thorough investigation.8 This volume will prove beyond doubt, however, that it is impossible to reduce the history of Latin-Arabic entanglement to the field of intellectual history with its focus on processes of cultural transfer, the mobility of specific texts and ideas, the concomitant emergence of Arabic studies in early modern Europe, and related themes. Latin-Arabic entanglement also plays an important role in the fields of political, economic, social, legal, and religious history. It forms an integral part of the history of the ancient Roman Middle East and plays a role in the regional histories of medieval North Africa, the Iberian Peninsula, and southern Italy. Trans-Mediterranean phenomena such as the Crusades or the late medieval Catalan and Italian trade networks cannot be fully understood if one fails to consider the interaction of various Mediterranean idioms, including the Romance languages and different forms of Arabic. Late medieval and early modern Roman-Catholic missionary policy in the Middle East produced many Latin–Arabic translations and milieus. The establishment of Latin studies in the Arab world of the twentieth century resulted in additional forms of Latin-Arabic entanglement, which feature clear links to the history of the ancient and medieval Mediterranean. Thus, to gain a fuller understanding of the macro-history of Latin-Arabic entanglement, it seemed necessary to move beyond the scope of intellectual history, with its focus on the transmission of philosophical and scientific texts.

Against this backdrop, the aim of the workshop was to bring together a large array of scholars from different fields of research on Latin-Arabic entanglement, and to foster communication and an exchange of ideas on how this topic relates to the wider history of the Euromediterranean. Various factors have prevented the production of a volume of collected essays that would provide a balanced, representative, and—as far as this is possible—a relatively exhaustive overview on the many existing forms of Latin-Arabic entanglement that played some part in approximately two thousand years of Euromediterranean history. Among these factors were limited resources and various impediments that prevented invited scholars from participating in the workshop or from contributing to this publication, but also the sheer mass of topics related to one form or other of Latin-Arabic entanglement. The bibliography at the end of the volume opens up further fields of enquiry and points to the achievements of many an important scholar in this area of research. These bibliographic references show clearly that this volume cannot claim to be more than a preliminary effort at understanding the various facets and ramifications of Latin-Arabic entanglement. It tries to draw together different research traditions, but cannot cover them all. Consequently, this volume only partly, often only implicitly, answers the research questions raised in the invitation to the workshop.

The invited scholars were asked to reflect upon the question of when, where, how, and why certain phenomena of Latin-Arabic entanglement—often several at a time—appeared, while others did not. Moreover, they were asked to interpret the phenomena under scrutiny within the larger historical context of Latin-Arabic entanglement, e.g. by considering:

All of these questions were raised with the aim of acquiring the material necessary to understand the interdependency between different forms of entanglement and their respective milieus of origin and to acquire an understanding of the different micro-histories of Latin-Arabic interaction and interpenetration. Such an understanding was deemed necessary in view of the self-evident observation that forms of Latin-Arabic entanglement emerged and existed in distinct social milieus. The latter formed part of a particular geopolitical framework and often stood at the crossroads of intersocietal relations, and/or resulted from a particular intrasocietal constellation marked by specific demarcations and boundaries. The respective geopolitical, intersocietal, and/or intrasocietal constellation supplied some of the resources necessary for the production of certain forms of Latin-Arabic entanglement, in particular linguistic mediators. It seems possible that specific forms of Latin-Arabic entanglement came into being thanks to unintended, “quasi-organic” processes of amalgamation involving different linguistic milieus and traditions. However, the respective constellation often required a particular reason, maybe even a social necessity, for creating the respective form in a given place and period of time. A systematic and comparative investigation of this complex of interdependencies might explain, for example, why the earliest documented translations of longer texts from Latin to Arabic were produced between the late ninth and the early tenth century, whereas the earliest substantial translations from Arabic to Latin only appeared in the eleventh century. It could also highlight shifting regional and chronological asymmetries, e.g. in the flows of texts and loanwords, or the occurrence of hybrid phenomena. An understanding of these shifting asymmetries is a prerequisite to writing a macro-history of Latin-Arabic entanglement.

The six chapters that make up this volume do not even come close to fulfilling the above-mentioned research objectives. However, thanks to the intellectual enthusiasm, moral support of, and close cooperation with Benoît Grévin, the workshop and this volume have succeeded at making certain inroads into a preliminary analysis and systematization of the macro-history of Latin-Arabic entanglement. The volume is divided into two parts, the first featuring two different macro-historical perspectives, and the second consisting of four case studies from the late medieval, the early modern, the late modern, and the contemporary periods. Part One approaches the macro-history of Latin and Arabic first from a comparative structuralist view, then from a perspective that depicts the different phases of Latin-Arabic entanglement from Antiquity to the present. In its effort to cover the most relevant topics, this rather encyclopaedic overview exceeds the usual page limit of an article in a collected volume, but hopefully manages to give an overview that allows the reader to contextualize the case studies in the second part of the volume.

Although the authors of the first two chapters, Benoît Grévin and myself respectively, struggled to address the entire range of topics relevant to the comparative and to the entangled approach, it is clear that only micro-historical analysis can provide more detailed insight into the workings of individual Latin-Arabic milieus. The contributions of Part Two thus serve to elucidate how particular milieus of Latin-Arabic entanglement came into being and functioned. Chapter 3, by Daniel Potthast, focuses on bilingual or translated administrative and juridical documents produced in late medieval Iberia. In Chapter 4, Benoît Grévin offers a regional study that explains the roles played by Arabic in the different but interconnected milieus of late medieval and Renaissance Italy. This is followed, in Chapter 5, by Katarzyna K. Starczewska’s analysis and contextualization of an Arabic-Latin Qurʾān manuscript produced by the Scottish Orientalist David Colville in the seventeenth century. In Chapter 6, Jan Scholz leads us into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the final case study dealing with the reception of what could be defined as the “Graeco-Roman” tradition in modern Arabic rhetorical manuals, many of them referred to for advice on preaching Islamic sermons.

Apart from the authors, whom I would like to thank very much for their contributions, many people participated in the production of this volume. The University of Heidelberg’s “Field of Focus 3: Cultural Dynamics in Globalised Worlds” generously financed the initial workshop and parts of the publication process. I would like to express my sincere gratitude, not only for the possibility of bringing together scholars working on different facets of Latin-Arabic entanglement, but also for being able to offer a form of hospitality that facilitated an intensive intellectual exchange. Petra Kourschil and Patrick Zerner from the Cluster’s finance office expertly handled concomitant financial matters and thus allowed me to focus on non-administrative matters. Many thanks are due to Rosanna Sirignano and Jan Scholz, both of whom ensured that the workshop itself ran smoothly and later lent a helping hand in the initial phase of the publication process. Dr. Andrea Hacker and, in particular, Russell Ó Ríagáin have accompanied the latter with great enthusiasm and helpful professional advice, thus giving the final touch to texts pre-edited by Thérèse Wassily Saba and subjected to conscientious final copy-editing by Amanda Gomez, and, in the last stage, by Joshua Elwer, Anna Larsson, and Chelsea Roden. In the stage of preparing the final manuscript, the comments of two anonymous external reviewers were very helpful in improving the quality of the book. The latter received its present form thanks to the efforts of several members of Heidelberg University Publishing, including Anja Konopka, Frank Krabbes, and Daniela Jakob. Finally, I would like to thank the directors, administrators, and researchers of the Cluster “Asia & Europe in a Global Context” for having provided an intellectually stimulating atmosphere encouraging forms of research that cross the boundaries of established fields of academic investigation. Working in this environment has been a highly enriching experience.

Last but not least, I would like to gratefully mention Jan Rüdiger, who first made me aware of the relevance of sociolinguistic issues for historical research, as well as Jocelyne Dakhlia, Bert Fragner, John Wansbrough, Dag Nikolaus Hasse, ʿAlī Fahmī Ḫušaym, and Benoît Grévin, whose research on mid- to long-term linguistic phenomena and developments encouraged me to approach the issue of Latin-Arabic entanglement from a macro-historical perspective.9

Konstanz, July 2019,

Daniel G. König