Last night, as I was wondering whether my attempts at penning sentences in Latin had fared well with some of the search engines (using ‘Visita, quaeso, Domine, scripta mea et omnes insidias inimici ab eis longe repelle’), I was pleased to come across a transcription of a sixteenth century edition of the first translation of the holy book of the Muslims, the Qur’an. This translation, which was made by an Englishman who worked in Spain in the twelfth century, Robert of Ketton, is in Latin. It is generally ‘regarded as the first complete translation in any language’ (Kritzeck, p. 100) of the Qur’an. As such, I was very curious to find out how this twelfth century translator had rendered in the international language of the day in Europe, i.e. Latin (on page 217), a very short but still very important surah (chapter) of the scripture which Muslims believe to have been revealed to their prophet Muhammed (may peace be upon him) by God via the archangel Gabriel as Al-Falaq, the daybreak, is one of three surahs upon which Muslims believe they can call for protection from supernatural powers. In particular, I was hoping to find out how Robert of Ketton had translated one of that surah’s most problematic phrases (sometimes translated as‘the women who blow on knots’). Unfortunately, the twelfth century English translator Robert of Ketton either decided to exercise some poetic licence or his knowledge of the Arabic language and of pre-Islamic Arabic culture was not sufficiently good for him to grasp what is being described in this particular surah.

As the text in Latin I had read is from a printed version (1543, Basle, Theodor Bibliander, with the passage available either here or here), I wanted to read the Latin translation in the manuscript which was copied some 400 years earlier. Given that surah 113 is the penultimate surah of the Qur’an, it did not take me very long to find the chapter in the twelfth century manuscript: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b52511844g/f289.highres. Because Robert of Ketton took the liberty of dividing the text of the Qur’an into additional chapters here and there, in his translation of the Qur’an, surah 113 becomes azoara CXXII (122)!

Here is my transcription of the passage as it appears in the manuscript:
In nomine domini pii et misericordis. In nomine dei, domini circuli uisibilis; te sanctifica, postulans ipsum; ut ab opera suo [crossed out] pessimo, malisque tenebris noctis, magorum ac inuidorum, et fascinantium nocumentis; te protegat.

Here is how I would translate rather literally the Latin translation of Robert of Ketton into English:
In the name of the pious and merciful Lord.
In the name of God, the Lord of the visible circle [a reference to Job 26:10?], sanctify you, asking him to protect you from the worst work, from the evils of the darkness of the night and from the harms of the magicians, of the envious and of the bewitchers.

Now it is important to note that the Qur’an is meant to be RECITED (yes, words do have power!!!). As such, should you be interested, please take the time to listen to this surah being recited in Arabic here: https://recitequran.com/113:1.


Further reading:
[a multilingual compendium of European translations which can all be selected according to a specific verse] https://coran12-21.org/fr/sourates/s113
https://corpus.quran.com/wordbyword.jsp?chapter=113&verse=1
https://carm.org/islam/quran-surah-113
https://al-quran.info/#113

Ms-1162 (12th century) https://archivesetmanuscrits.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cc79186c

The text published by Bibliander in 1543
https://archive.org/details/McGillLibrary-rbsc_machumetis-saracenorum-principis_FOLIO-1379-19727
https://collections.thulb.uni-jena.de/receive/HisBest_cbu_00000104

La circulación del Corán y textos Islámicos en la Cristiandad a través de las traducciones latinas, José Martínez Gázquez
https://books.openedition.org/pumi/38113

On Robert of Ketton
https://brill.com/display/book/edcoll/9789004216167/Bej.9789004195158.i-804_080.xml
https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110702712-023/pdf

The earliest translation into French of surah 113
https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k87050263/f612.item
https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k109735r/f606.highres