When Did Printing of Quran Begin in Germany?

IQNA – German scholars were interested in studying Islam and the Holy Quran, and from the 17th century, Germans printed the Holy Quran in their country to facilitate its study and translation.

According to the MuslimsAroundtheWorld website, studying the history of the printing of the Quran in Europe is of particular importance in understanding the beginning of Western interest in Islam and the Holy Quran and how early Orientalists dealt with the text of the Quran, from scientific research to deliberate distortion.

In this context, Dr. Amin Al-Qasim, a researcher specializing in the field of history, has presented an in-depth study that sheds light on the most prominent stages of the printing of the Quran by the Germans since the 17th century, highlighting the characteristics of these copies and any observations and errors that were made.

German scholars were interested in studying Islam and the Holy Quran since long ago. Therefore, from the 17th century, they printed the Holy Quran in their country to facilitate their study and translation.

Abraham Henkelmann (1652-1695), a German Protestant monk and university professor, published a copy of the Holy Quran in Hamburg in 1694. This copy is considered by many scholars to be the first complete printed copy of the Holy Quran in Arabic in Europe. It was an untranslated copy with some marginal notes in English.

This manuscript had 560 pages, each page having between 17 and 19 lines. The introduction to this manuscript states that his aim in publishing it was to promote awareness of the Arabic language and Islam.

This manuscript was not without errors and distortions; from the title of the manuscript to the introduction to the manuscript and beyond. There are spelling and punctuation errors, missing verses, and errors in the names of the Surahs.

However, this version remains one of the oldest known, and several copies exist, one of which is kept at the King Faisal Center for Islamic Research and Studies in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

Gustav Lebrecht Flugel (1802-1870), a German orientalist, published a new edition of the Holy Quran, first published in 1834. This edition was published by the Tauchnitz publishing house in Leipzig, Saxony, Germany.

Flugel then reprinted this Quran a second time in 1837 and a third time in 1841 with some revisions.

Based on this version, he published a book in 1842 titled “Stars of Furqan in the Margins of the Quran”, which is a thematic list of the words of the Holy Quran in Latin. Flugel reprinted the Quran again in 1849, 1858, and 1869.

It should be noted that the Leipzig version was generally good and was widely distributed among European scholars. However, it was not without several points noted by experts, including violations of Ottoman orthography, reliance on multiple readings in a single version, and errors in the number of verses and division of Surahs, among others.

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