A dissertation on the Al-Fatihah

Nagel, Johann Andreas Michael (praes.) / Holste, Jakob Christoph Wilhelm (resp.). Dissertatio inauguralis de prima Alcorani sura [...].

€ 950.00

Very rare sole edition of this detailed study of the Al-Fatihah, the first Surah of the Holy Qu'ran. By the mid-18th century the text of the Qu'ran had become less of a heretical menace to European scholars and more of a document of serious study: the present work focuses on philological subtleties within the various manuscripts of the Qu'ran known to Europeans including Erpenius, Hinckelmann, Wasmuth, and Schiefferdecker. A printed dissertation defended by one of Nagel's students, Jakob Holste, the text presents a word-for-word comparison of two manuscripts of the Al-Fatihah: one in the possession of Nagel himself, and the other of Christoph Fürer von Haimendorf (1541-1610), who had brought a copy back from his visit to the Middle East in 1565. To these are further compared printed editions of Marracio, Hinckelmann, Erpenius, and others. Because no Arab typeface was available in Nuremburg at the time, the author is forced here to write the text of the Al-Fatihah in Hebrew characters (!). The last section of the work gives no less than 17 translations into Latin of the Al-Fatihah drawn from Arabic, Persian, and Turkish. Nagel and his student Holste finally propose a 'perfect' conglomerate translation of the Surah based on their findings. Much space is devoted to the question of whether Al-Fatihah was revealed in Medina or Mecca, and Nagel's discussion of this point even includes topographical details collected from previous authors (cf. pp. 13-15, 31-36).

OCLC shows just a handful of copies in institutions worldwide, including one in America at the University of Chicago. The present copy is deaccessioned from the library of the Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich with small release stamps on verso of title-page. Printed glosses trimmed closely, with occasional loss of a few letters; otherwise a good copy.