I Bet you Did Not Know | 37

I Bet you Did Not Know that "The first Qur’an in Arabic type" was printed in Venice for the Ottoman market. Let's see what happened to it.

Mavi Boncuk |

Before printing with movable type became common practice in the Islamic world in the early nineteenth century, it had long been forbidden there to print books, especially holy ones. In the Ottoman Empire, the latter even constituted a capital crime. As a result, the first printed Qur’an in Arabic is a Western production. It was printed in Venice by Paganino and Alessandro Paganini in 1537/1538. For centuries, no one has seen a copy of it. In his Rudimenta lingua Arabicae (Leiden 1620), the Dutch Orientalist Thomas Erpenius mentions an Alcoranus Arabice printed circa 1530 in Venice, but notes that “exemplaria omnia cremata sunt.” This gave rise to the rumour that the Catholic Church had ordered the burning of the complete print run. Yet why would the Pope order the destruction of a Qur’an in a language hardly anyone could read while Arrivabene could print a vernacular edition in the same city only ten years later? The mystery remained unsolved until 1987, when the Italian scholar Angela Nuovo discovered a surviving copy in a monastery in Venice.[1] As could now be reconstructed [2], father and son Paganini printed their Qur’an in order to export it to the Ottoman Empire. Unfortunately, it contained a heap of errors, which corrupted the meaning of the holy text. In addition, the Qur’an itself explicitly forbids “those who are not purified” to touch it (Q. 56:79). So when Alessandro Paganini travelled to Istanbul to sell his product, the Ottomans did not welcome him warmly. Through Jean Bodin’s Colloquium heptaplomeres (written ca. 1580) we can assume with some certainty that they destroyed the whole print run and chopped off Alessandro’s right hand. [3]


[1] Angela Nuovo, Il Corano arabo ritrovato (La Bibliofilia), 1987, disp. III, p. 237-271. English
translation published as A lost Arabic Koran rediscovered in “The Library”, 6th series, v. 12, n. 4, dec. 1990, p. 273-292.
[2]The history of the Paganini Qur’an has been reconstructed by Angela Nuovo in the article mentioned in note [1] and by Hartmut Bobzin in his article Jean Bodin uber den Venezianer Korandruck von 1537/38 (Wiener Zeitschrift fur die Kunde des Morgenlandes, 81, 1991), p. 95-105. A new article on “The enigma of the first printed Arabic Koran” by Hartmut Bobzin is in preparation and will be published in the Sitzungsberichte der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften.
[3] Bodin, Jean, Colloque entre sept scavans qui sont de differens sentiments des secrets cachez des choses relevées. Traduction anonyme du Colloquium Heptaplomeres de Jean Bodin. Texte présenté et établi par Francois Berriot. Genève: Droz, 1984. On p. 352, the story that is likely to relate to Alessando Paganini is told.

Source:Early Printed Korans: The Dissemination of the Koran in the West