In 1695, disturbing news from Isfahan reached the Vatican, as the appointed Bishop Louis Marie Pidou de Saint Olon (d. 1717) informed his superiors about a case of apostasy. A Portuguese Augustinian missionary by the name of António de Jesus (d. circa 1722) had embraced Islam, adopting the name of ᶜAli Qoli Jadid al-Eslām.Footnote 1 And although he was not the first member of the Catholic clergy in Iran that had done so,Footnote 2 his case was deemed more scandalous because the culprit had allegedly become “a doctor of the Qur’an” and was working on a book that attacked the Christian faith.Footnote 3
In this article I will analyze the context that led to the composition of ᶜAli-Qoli’s major work—a treatise against Christianity entitled Seyf al-muʾmenin fi qetāl al-moshrekin (The Sword of the Faithful to Fight the Idolaters)—and the role that this book played within the wider history of scriptural translation and refutation projects in the early modern period. The following article does not intend to provide an exhaustive analysis of this work, but rather to focus on how it responded to a debate that originated in India almost two centuries before. I argue that the language and argumentation in his book attest to a deep knowledge, not only of the Christian polemical works to which he was responding, but also to the broader preoccupations of the Muslim scholarly tradition into which he was seeking to integrate.
Biographical Information on ᶜAli-Qoli
Very little is known about ᶜAli-Qoli’s life. The announcement of his conversion is briefly mentioned in missionary correspondence, while a couple of documents from the Dutch East India Company say that he had become a translator at the shah’s court.Footnote 4 Furthermore, the Chronicle of Carmelites mentions that, in May 1708, the Carmelite Basil of Saint Charles (d. 1711) asked Rome for permission to translate and hand out to the shah a refutation of an attack on Christianity produced by a renegade who worked at the shah’s court, which seems to be an allusion to ᶜAli-Qoli.Footnote 5
His date of birth and death are unknown, although Francis Richard believes that he might have died during the 1722 Afghan invasions.Footnote 6 As for his arrival in Isfahan and his date of conversion, there is a certain degree of confusion. Richard identified his conversion date as September 1697,Footnote 7 while Reza Pourjavady and Sabine Schmidtke dated it to 1696.Footnote 8 However, as previously mentioned, a letter from the Bishop Pidou de Saint-Olon already refers to ᶜAli-Qoli’s case in 1695,Footnote 9 and a 1697 account recorded in the Chronicle of Carmelites claims that the apostasy had taken place three years before, thus pushing the date back to 1694.Footnote 10 To add to this confusion, Richard cites another source saying that Padre António succeeded Gaspar dos Reis (d. circa 1690s) as the prelate of the Augustinians in Isfahan in October of 1696, which of course could not have happened if he had already converted.Footnote 11 The Chronicle of Carmelites does mention his presence among Gaspar dos Reis’ retinue in 1694,Footnote 12 but this is also the source that mentions 1694 as the date of his conversion. Further, John Flannery has also identified two documents dated 1697 that speak of the apostasy and of the “recent” appointment of the Augustinian Prior Padre António.Footnote 13
Equally ambiguous are the circumstances of such a conversion. Richard has identified a citation in which ᶜAli-Qoli complained about the Capuchin Raphaël du Mans (d. 1696) and his retinue for bribing Muslims into conversion.Footnote 14 Richard also cites a letter from du Mans stating that ᶜAli-Qoli had informed him of his intentions to convert and that he had tried to dissuade him with the following anecdote: One day Du Mans was approached by the prime minister (Eᶜtemād al-dowleh), who asked him why he refused to embrace Islam. Showing him his priestly gray garments and his bare feet, Du Mans replied that had he been Muslim and rich he would not have had access to the palace. This story did not impress Padre António, who—while understanding the advantages of wearing religious attire—did not fall for Du Mans’ “deceitful arguments” (arguments mensongers).Footnote 15
In any case, what ᶜAli-Qoli had to say about his own conversion can only shed more light on the matter if taken at face value, as he presents it as a purely intellectual and spiritual transformation that happened through the study of scripture:
at the time when I belonged to the Christian faith, I had a privileged position amongst priestly circles, to such a point that I was known as a leader of them [Christians]. Their men and women, who believed that I had been infused with the Holy Spirit, would come to me for the forgiveness of their sins; until the Grace of God and the Light of Faith illuminated the hovel of the heart of this poor man. In a matter of a few years, it [my heart] was released into a path illuminated by the lamp of Islam, aided by the love of the Leader of the Imams (may salutations and praise be upon him). Then, the alley of doubt was closed, and the darkness of the Christian path was completely removed and extinguished from my mind, and thus I spent much time diligently seeking Christian books and putting all my endeavors in refuting their false arguments. By comparing the terminology of their books, through blessings and pride I bore witness to the Truth of the Islamic Faith and to the prophetic mission of the Messenger of the Final Days and to the guidance of the Leader of the Imams until the Last among Them (pbuh).Footnote 16
Apart from this, as has been pointed out before, we know that after embracing Islam ᶜAli-Qoli became an interpreter of European languages at the court of Shah Solṭān Hoseyn (r. 1105‒34/1694‒1722). Before him, Du Mans had held this position; however, contrary to the latter, ᶜAli-Qoli would actually receive a salary for this.Footnote 17 Further, the Chronicle of Carmelites also indicates that he had an active role in anti-Christian hostilities, not confined to intellectual polemics, but even plotting against the prominent Catholic Armenian Shahrimanian family.Footnote 18 In any case, his intellectual output far outweighs the documentation available on his life; therefore, I now shift to the analysis of his work and of the milieu in which it was produced.
Interreligious Polemics in the Age of Confessionalization
Interreligious polemics, translation projects and commentaries of religious scriptures, and conversion narratives were common throughout the early modern period in the Muslim world. For instance, the first translation of the Gospels into Turkish was completed in 1666 through a joint English‒Dutch sponsorship.Footnote 19 At the same time, many important projects of biblical translation and polemics would also take place in the Persianate world, as I will later explore in more detail. I think that the analytical framework used by Tijana Krstić in her study of conversion narratives in the Ottoman empire is structurally relevant: she sees the recurrence of these kinds of works as a cultural manifestation of the Age of Confessionalization. This term was originally used in the context of western Europe to refer to the faith-based self-fashioning of Catholic and Protestant polities, but she broadens the applicability of the term to also account for the gradual demarcation of the Ottomans as a Muslim power vis-à-vis the Habsburgs, as well as a Sunni state vis-à-vis Shiite Iran. As a consequence, Ottoman polemicists needed not only to assert their Muslimness, as it were, against western Christendom, but in some cases also their specific Sunni identity.Footnote 20
As for the case of Iran, the phenomenon of its conversion to Shiism during the Safavid period and the role of Levantine ᶜulamāʾ in this process has been well studied.Footnote 21 However, it has rarely been examined through this wider regional and epochal prism, which is why the study of these kinds of materials in the Iranian context fills a lacuna in the body of scholarship. While the early sixteenth century was the height of the sectarian self-fashioning of Iran, when the Safavid empire was adopting Shiism as an official religion, the late seventeenth century also witnessed the recrudescence of sectarianism with the escalation of frontier wars against Sunni Afghans and Baluchis in the east and southeast, and against the Lezgis in the Caucasus.Footnote 22 I exercise caution in establishing causal links between these conflicts and parallel developments in intellectual history, there is indeed a correlation between these events and the proliferation of anti-Sunni and anti-Sufi discourse among certain circles of the ᶜulamāʾ in the late 1600s, which is when ᶜAli-Qoli arrived in Iran. This trend is often attributed to the growing influence at the court of ᶜulamāʾ like Moḥammad Bāqer Majlesi (d. 1111/1699), who is credited with the forced conversion of Armenians, the destruction of Hindu temples, the deportation of Banyan merchants to India, as well as with favoring oppressive measures against Jews, and even against Sufis and Sunnis.Footnote 23 The extent of Majlesi’s responsibility is also a matter of debate, but that is beyond the scope of this study. Let it suffice for now to say that, given the prevailing environment of the time, it is hardly surprising that ᶜAli-Qoli would also write a polemical resāleh attacking Sufis, and that in it he would choose to compare them to Christians and Sunnis.Footnote 24
While we should be careful in painting a simplistic picture of the situation of non-Muslim minorities in this period, many accounts from the late 1600s do provide evidence for the scapegoating of groups that had previously fared relatively well, such as Armenian Orthodox Christians. For instance, in 1671 the Armenian bishop of Isfahan converted to Islam and a year later Armenian Christians were banned from entering the Muslim quarters of the city.Footnote 25 In addition, the importance of western European Catholic missionaries factors into history. Since the early years of the Safavid empire these groups had served as the diplomatic branch of European powers that sought to establish a common anti-Ottoman front with Iran,Footnote 26 and most of them had desisted from the idea of converting Muslims and limited their efforts to converting Armenian and Georgian Orthodox Christians into Catholicism.Footnote 27 However, in the late seventeenth century the anti-Ottoman alliance became less relevant, since peace with the Ottomans had been established in 1639. At the same time, relations between the state and the missionaries began to erode, as French Jesuits pursued a more aggressive agenda of conversion that sought out even Muslim targets. One of them, Aymé Chezaud (d. 1664), went as far as to organize debates against Shiite religious scholars and to write polemical treatises against Islam, as we will see later.Footnote 28
The Genesis of an Interreligious Debate: The Work of Jerome Xavier
The origins of the debate in which ᶜAli-Qoli’s project arose can be traced back to the last decades of the sixteenth century and the first of the seventeenth. It started with the arrival at the Mughal court of a Navarran Jesuit missionary by the name of Jerónimo de Ezpeleta y Goñi, better known to posterity as Jerónimo (or Jerome) Xavier (d. 1617). Although his presence in India cannot be dissociated from European imperial ambitions, his easy access to Akbar’s (r. 963‒1014/1556‒1605) court should also be understood within the context of the monarch’s well-known interest in theological debates. Although Portuguese chroniclers such as Diogo do Couto (d. 1616) mention that already Bābur (r. 932‒37/1526‒30) and Homāyun (r. 937‒63/1530‒56) had manifested some interest in Christianity;Footnote 29 Akbar would pursue this intellectual endeavor in more depth. He is credited with the attempt to establish a syncretic religion, which would be known as the “Divine Religion” (din-e elahi), and which would incorporate elements of the Abrahamic religions, Zoroastrianism, Hinduism, and Jainism. Because of this, his court patronized religious scholars from different traditions to debate theological concepts, in order to incorporate some of them to his spiritual project.Footnote 30 It is important to mention that recent scholarship has questioned the mystification of Akbar's ecumenism as a spiritual pursuit and has sought to understand it more as a need to reconcile the differences of a diverse ruling class. This is quite plausible, but a detailed debate on this is beyond the scope of this study.Footnote 31
In 1578, Akbar summoned to his court a Dominican priest by the name of Gil Eanes Pereira (d. sixteenth century), who had until then been based at Satgaon in Bengal. At Akbar’s own request, the latter started teaching the Gospels at the court using the 1558 Comentarios sobre el Catechismo Christiano, written by the Archbishop of Toledo Bartolomé de Carranza (d. sixteenth century).Footnote 32 However, the latter advised the king to recruit a more specialized instructor on the scriptures. Following this suggestion, Akbar commissioned a diplomatic mission led by the Armenian Domingos Pires to ask the Viceroy of India, the Archbishop of Goa, and the head of the Jesuits of Goa to send priests to the court, and to send with them copies of the Christian scriptures.
As a result, father Rodolfo Acquaviva (d. 1583), António de Monserrate (d. 1600), and Francisco Henriques (d. sixteenth or seventeenth century) arrived at Akbar’s court in 1580, bringing with them a seven-volume Bible in Hebrew, Chaldean, Greek, and Latin printed in Antwerp between the years 1567 and 1572 by the famous publisher Christophe Plantin (d. 1589).Footnote 33 Although Akbar took great pleasure in this acquisition, he remained keen on having a Persian translation of the Gospels. Thus, in 1582 he intended to send a letter to King Philip II of Spain (r. 1556‒98) with Father Monserrate explicitly asking for the Holy Books in Arabic or Persian. However, due to the overload of Portuguese ships, the embassy was never able to leave the port of Goa. Seeing this, Akbar instead commissioned his court chronicler Abu al-Fazl (d. 1011/1602) to undertake the translation project, perhaps overestimating the latter’s alleged knowledge of the Pentateuch and the Gospels.Footnote 34 Whether or not Abu al-Fazl ever even started the translation is hard to tell.
To Akbar’s satisfaction, a Greek sub-deacon by the name of Leon Grimon (d. sixteenth or seventeenth century) arrived in Fatehpur Sikri around the year 1591 with a generous load of Chinese silk. Akbar decided to profit from his presence and had him dispatched as an ambassador to Goa, requesting once again that Jesuit priests be sent to the court. In response, the Order of Jesus appointed Duarte Leitão, Cristobal de Vega, and Estevão Ribeiro to the Mughal court. However, they soon returned in disappointment after failing to convert the king, even if he had indeed shown appreciation for their work and wanted them to establish a school to teach Portuguese to the children of the nobility.Footnote 35
In 1594, Akbar pursued his third attempt to attract priests to his court to embark on the translation enterprise. It was then that Jerome Xavier, together with Manuel Pinheiro (d. sixteenth or seventeenth century) and Bento de Góis (d. 1607) entered Lahore around 1595. Upon arrival, neither one had any knowledge of Persian or Arabic. In accordance with Akbar’s earlier initiative, the priests were encouraged to establish a school to teach Portuguese to the princes and were granted Muslim instructors to help them learn Persian.Footnote 36 By Jerome Xavier’s own admission, as of 1598 he had made little progress in his language skills. But within a couple of years he claimed to have rapidly improved his philological abilities enough to be able to translate into Persian his own Fons Vitae (The Fountain of Life), through which he sought to refute the beliefs of all non-Christians.Footnote 37 Similarly, in 1602 he presented Akbar with a Persian version of his Life of Christ, which he had written originally in Portuguese.Footnote 38
However, Jerome Xavier did not work on his translations on his own. Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam have advanced the quite plausible hypothesis that Persian-knowing Armenians might have aided him with these tasks.Footnote 39 But more importantly, they have found evidence that he counted on the collaboration of the philosopher, theologian, and chronicler ᶜAbd al-Sattār b. Qāsem Lāhori (d. seventeenth century), with whom he often engaged in theological discussions at Akbar’s court. In a colophon from a manuscript dated 1602, Jerome Xavier acknowledges ᶜAbd al-Sattār’s assistance in preparing a translation of the Gospels, which he then presented at the court.Footnote 40 Further, ᶜAbd al-Sattār notes in his own autobiographical testimony, Akbar’s encouragement for his learning Latin, as well as how he then engaged in the translation of Christian texts. He recounted collaborating with Jerome Xavier, even if he had to distance himself at times from Xavier’s militant Christian orientation.Footnote 41
There is yet another layer of complexity to the story of these texts: at least part of Jerome Xavier’s (and ᶜAbd al-Sattār’s) “translations” might not have been much more than transcriptions of earlier Persian renditions of the Gospels. In a letter from 1604 Xavier says that he had sent to Rome a copy of the Gospels in Persian written 300 years before. He sent it with an Italian envoy by the name of Giovanni Battista Vecchietti (d. 1619), who had brought to him a 1591 bilingual Arabic‒Latin edition of the Gospels. In that same letter he mentions the fact that he was in the process of undertaking his own translation of the Gospels into Persian, which would include the Latin text from the Vulgate below the translation.Footnote 42
After Akbar’s death in 1605, Jerome Xavier feared that his successor Jahāngir (r. 1014‒37/1605‒27) would not share his father’s enthusiasm for theological debates. This was indeed the case at the beginning, but it changed gradually. In 1607 the Jesuits presented the king with a Persian translation of the Gospels, although it is not clear whether this was one of the older ones or the one prepared by Jerome Xavier.Footnote 43 Jahāngir thus became more favorable to having books about Christianity in the royal library and to having Persian translations of certain works. On many occasions, he even invited priests to explain to him the meaning of the imagery of some illustrated manuscripts and printed books.Footnote 44
Some of the latter books provide more detailed information regarding the circumstances behind their elaboration. For instance, Roberto Gulbenkian has identified a manuscript of the Gospels presented to Jahāngir, which contains a note from Jerome Xavier, in which he explains how he received a copy of the Gospels in Persian, brought to India by an Armenian priest:
It [the book of the Gospels] reached our hands in the following manner. The said priest who carried that book in arriving from Hierusalem to Persia left from there in the company of Manucher who was coming as Ambassador from Shah Abbas King of Persia to King Jehadin Acbar Mogor in the city of Lahore. And as the said priest for some reason was unable to continue the journey with the said Ambassador he remained behind and came in another caravan and died on the way. Some Armenians travelling with him brought his books including the said one of the Gospels to this city of Lahore and delivered them to Father Manuel Pinheiro of the Society of Jesus who was living there on orders from the holy obedience. The latter Father in returning the deceased Father’s book to Hierusalem kept this one of the Gospels and as stated a transcription was made without changing anything at all and it is faithfully reproduced.Footnote 45
As we can see here, Jerome Xavier himself recognized that the version of the Gospels that he would later present to the Mughal king was not a translation of his own making but rather a verbatim transcription of an earlier one. There was a reason for this: while it is undeniable that through local patronage some centers of learning flourished more than others (and chief among these was Fatehpur Sikri in the Mughal empire), Christian missionaries and Muslim ᶜulamāʾ participated in intellectual dialogues with scholars working in other locations throughout the Middle East and South Asia. Thus, Jerome Xavier’s desire to respect the text of the older translation should not be understood as a failure to produce one of his own, but rather as a necessity to ensure that there would be no contradictions or even minor editing discrepancies between the different biblical translations circulating in the region. This would contribute to establish common intellectual grounds with any scholars who could potentially be interested in using these texts for missionary purposes.
Gulbenkian has tracked down another manuscript of the Gospels in Persian held at the Academy of Sciences of Lisbon, which also contains a note from Jerome Xavier. The transcription is attributed to a man (possibly an Armenian)Footnote 46 called Sarkis Loudj ben Amir Maleik and it was produced between the years 718 and 728 Hijri (1318 and 1328 AD).Footnote 47
Having found lexical difficulties and contradictions between the latter version and the Arabo-Latin version he had obtained from Vecchietti, Jerome Xavier decided just to transcribe the 1328 Persian Gospels verbatim rather than using them as a guide for a translation of his own. Gulbenkian thinks this might have also been done out of prudence, given that any contradictions between the older translations and his own could have put his book at risk of being listed in the Roman Index of forbidden books.Footnote 48 In any case, it was in this context that all these translations/transcriptions of Jerome Xavier were produced. Thus, any subsequent references to Jerome Xavier’s “work,” except for his Fons Vitae and his well-known polemical treatises, may actually refer to the work that he and his collaborators transcribed.
A Cycle of Refutations
Jerome Xavier’s work in Iran
In 1622, Carmelite missionaries brought to Iran a work by Jerome Xavier that stirred up great controversy.Footnote 49 This book, known as the A’ineh-ye ḥaqq-nomā (The Truth-Reflecting Mirror), was to a certain extent a revised Persian version of Xavier’s own Fons Vitae. Reactions from the Iranian ᶜulamā’ did not take long to appear. The first intellectual response to this work came from Aḥmad b. Zeyn al-ᶜĀbedin al-ᶜAlawi al-ᶜĀmeli (hereafter referred to simply as Aḥmad al-ᶜAlawi; d. circa 1060/1650).Footnote 50 Having learned about Jerome’s work allegedly through his contact with Carmelite missionaries, he prepared a refutation of it entitled Meṣqāl-e ṣafā (Burnisher of Purity).Footnote 51 He then wrote two other treatises against Christianity and Judaism, which may have also been conceived as responses to Jerome Xavier.Footnote 52
In 1625, Carmelite friars brought a copy of the Meṣqāl-e ṣafā to Rome. The Vatican set up a commission to have it translated and refuted. Among the people involved in the translation was the famous traveler and chronicler Pietro della Valle (d. 1652). Bonaventura Malvasia (d. 1666) wrote the first refutation of it, published in 1628, but the most elaborate response was Filippo Guadagnoli’s (d. 1656) 1631 Apologia pro Christiana Religione.Footnote 53
Guadagnoli’s Apologia within the cycle of refutations
Guadagnoli played a prominent role in the Vatican and was associated with the missionary institution Propaganda Fide. His intellectual authority derived mostly from him having been the first person to teach Arabic and Syriac at the University of La Sapienza in Rome.Footnote 54 The original version of his Apologia was in Latin, but it was immediately translated into Arabic and printed in 1637, to have it circulate in the Levant. Guadagnoli was careful to make some amendments to the text in order to appeal to a Muslim readership. For instance, in the Arabic version he omitted a part in which he accused the Prophet of Islam of being a hypocrite. Furthermore, he also wrote a conciliatory reply to Aḥmad al-ᶜAlawi in which he said that the Qur’an was very similar to the Gospels in its essence. However, this text was swiftly suppressed by the Vatican, which—not surprisingly—disapproved of Guadagnoli’s tone.Footnote 55 Finally, in 1656 the Isfahan-based French Jesuit Aymé Chezaud, whom I have mentioned before, contributed to the debate by presenting his Masḥ-e meṣqāl-e ṣafā-ye ā’ineh-ye haqq-nomā, which to a certain degree was an extended Persian version of Guadagnoli's Apologia.Footnote 56 This version was most likely the one used later by some the ᶜulamāʾ in Iran, although little is known about its circulation.
Later on, in the eighteenth century, the story of Guadagnoli’s work became the object of legendary accounts, some of which went as far as to claim that he had managed to baptize Aḥmad al-ᶜAlawi and turned him into a passionate defender of the Christian faith.Footnote 57 Whether this was indeed the case is hard to prove. My research has only uncovered one reference to this anecdote, a short paragraph in Jean-Pierre Nicéron’s (d. 1738) Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire des hommes illustres de la république des lettres.Footnote 58 My research has also not uncovered any work attributed to Aḥmad al-ᶜAlawi after any alleged conversion or any pen name associated with him.
ᶜAli-Qoli’s Seyf al-muʾmenin
ᶜAli Qoli wrote his Seyf al-muʾmenin in response to Guadagnoli’s Apologia encouraged by the influential mujtahid Fāzel al-Hendi (d. 1137/1724‒25), who also benefited from courtly patronage.Footnote 59 Three manuscripts of this work survive and can be found at the Astān-e Qods-e Razavi Library in Mashhad, in the private collection of Seyyed Moḥammad ᶜAli Rozati in Isfahan, and in the Library of the Congregational Mosque (Masjed-e aᶜẓam) in Qom. As for the date of completion of this work, one of the manuscripts gives the date as 15 of the month of Rabiᶜ al-Akhar of the year 1123 Hijri, which corresponds to 2 June 1711 in the Gregorian calendar.Footnote 60
‘Ali Qoli situated his project within this intellectual context, describing it in the introduction of his Seyf al-muʾmenin in the following terms:
The intention of this translation was to collate the source of the Arabic Torah, which is a Latin translation, and then to translate it [into Persian] and interpret it so that it can serve as a proof to overcome the enemy. Were there to be any apparent discrepancies between it, its translation and interpretation, and its Arabic terminology, our brothers in the faith shall excuse [me], given that the source [of the Arabic Torah], is a Latin Torah translated from the Hebrew, and therefore the changes [made by] the impure Jerome [Xavier] contain many [instances of] tampering [taḥrīf]; and thus this Arabic translation has many differences with the Latin one. [Therefore,] somebody who is not familiar with the Latin terminology may not realize from [reading] the Arabic translation the degree to which Christian priests have tainted it with impurity.Footnote 61
In trying to show the superiority of the Muslim understanding of the Torah, he turned to the question of translation, which became an area of contention. ᶜAli-Qoli continued:
So, in translating the Torah, this humble servant has translated every non-equivocal translatable term. Otherwise, I have done this [translation of the] Torah so that anyone who wants to [use] the Arabic Torah to challenge Christians can verify it with the authoritative collation of it which I have done with the Latin, so that Christians will not be able to transgress its contents. For God is in whom help is sought.Footnote 62
Thus, as we can see, our author traced the genesis of his polemic back to Jerome Xavier’s Bible, which, as I have shown to be a prevalent practice, might have actually been a copy of the 1328 translation.
The fact that ᶜAli-Qoli’s approach consisted in arguing in favor of an Islamic reading of the Torah and the Bible as a foreteller of the coming of Islam is also relevant. This situates his work within the genre of aᶜlām (or dalā’il) al-nubuwwah (sings of the prophecy), a tradition that can be traced back to the Abbasid period (750‒1258), through the works of the Nestorian convert ‘Ali b. Rabban al-Ṭabari (d. 256/870) and his contemporary, Abu Moḥammad ᶜAbd Allah b. Muslim b. Qoteybeh (d. 276/889).Footnote 63 Equally important is the idea that Jews and Christians had exercised scriptural tampering (taḥrīf) on the Bible: accusing another religious community of tampering with the sacred scriptures was a common trope of interreligious polemics that preceded the rise of Islam. Sabians, Samaritans, and Christians had used this argument to discredit the authenticity of each other’s Holy Books since the second century AD, and it was later utilized by Muslim religious scholars.Footnote 64 Some polemics would add another layer to the theme of (taḥrīf) by attributing it to Saint Paul, who was known in polemical writings as Paul the Accursed (Bolus Laʻīn).Footnote 65 This tradition continued throughout the early modern period, with many works of this genre being produced especially in the Ottoman empire, as Tijana Krstić has shown.Footnote 66
ᶜAli-Qoli’s Seyf al-muʾmenin is a complex work with different sections engaging various theological debates which have been commonly explored by converts throughout centuries of Muslim‒Christian polemics. I have addressed a more detailed analysis of how his work is situated within the tradition of dalā’il al-nubuwwah elsewhere.Footnote 67 Instead, I now turn to his refutation of the major claims advanced by Filippo Guadagnoli in his Apologia and on some of his responses to Jerome Xavier. While these sections of the work are abstract and theoretical, insofar as they deal with theological issues, they are also some of the easiest ones to contextualize on account of their direct reference to Guadagnoli and Xavier.
Before looking at the specifics of ᶜAli-Qoli’s response to Guadagnoli, it is pertinent to advance a note of caution regarding the question of authorship. As we have seen in Jerome Xavier’s case, it was not uncommon for European academics and missionaries to work closely with native collaborators in their translation projects. It would not be unreasonable to suspect that ᶜAli-Qoli might have benefited from some assistance as well. Therefore, in referring to his work, we should keep in mind that the actual authorship or the translation of certain passages may be debatable. At the same time, it is fair to assume that had he not attained a considerable degree of linguistic skill, he would not have become such an attractive asset at Shah Solṭān Hoseyn’s court.
ᶜAli-Qoli’s Response to Guadagnoli in his Seyf al-muʾmenin
ᶜAli-Qoli began this section by discussing a claim from the first chapter of Guadagnoli’s Apologia, in which the Italian scholar allegedly accused the Prophet of Islam of being ambivalent on his attitude towards idolatry. Our author quoted him saying:
The Muhammad of the Arabs invented a religion that bans idol-worshipping and orders that only God be worshipped; yet at the same time he teaches idol worshipping. And he also issued an order [fermān]—although the accursed father [i.e. Guadagnoli] does not say in which bookFootnote 68—saying that on Friday, they [Muslims] should glorify [him], and he ordered that on that day, just like in ancient idolatry [beh dastur-e bot-parasti-ye qadim], everyone, male or female, should strip off their clothes and dance together.Footnote 69
ᶜAli-Qoli then continued to show how Guadagnoli considered the Muslim proclamation of faith—the shahādah—as an extension of this deviancy, considering the recognition of Muhammad as the Messenger of God as a kind of polytheism (shirk).
ᶜAli-Qoli first refuted the claim that Islam encouraged naked ritual dancing. He accused Guadagnoli of linking this practice to the well-known passage in Genesis 9 where Noah becomes intoxicated. ʻAli Qoli argued that this passage was a forgery by Jerome Xavier, and that its inclusion in the passage invalidated Guadagnoli’s scriptural argument.Footnote 70
To better refute Guadagnoli’s interpretation of the shahādah, ᶜAli-Qoli resorted to a parable. He narrated the story of a woman who had befriended Satan: one day the woman’s husband asked her whether she would approve of him enlisting in the army at a time when the king needed men to defend their country. She asked for three days to reflect on the matter. During this time, she asked Satan whether her husband was likely to be killed in the battlefield should he decide to join the war efforts. Satan answered with a letter, the meaning of which she interpreted as guaranteeing her husband’s safety. The husband then went to war and was killed by the enemy. She returned to Satan in despair, asking him why he had deceived her. But Satan replied that it was her who had misread the letter. She had read it thus: “You will go and come back, you will not die at the battle” (mi-ravi mi-āyi, nami-miri dar jang). Satan then told her she should have read it this way instead: “You will go and not come back, you will die at the battle” (mi-ravi mi-āyi nah, mi-miri dar jang).Footnote 71 ᶜAli-Qoli then compared Guadagnoli to the woman of the story, for being equally blinded by Satan and being unable to properly understand the subtleties of the Arabic language and for interpreting the shahādah as shirk.
A similar critique was then applied to Guadagnoli’s claim that no one but God could know the interpretation of the Qur’an. Guadagnoli relied for his interpretation on the phrase “mā yaᶜlamu ta’wīlahu illā Allah” (no one knows its interpretation except God). ᶜAli Qoli argued that Guadagnoli had left the Qur’anic reference incomplete, omitting the phrase “wa-l-rāsikhūn fī-l-ᶜilm” (and those who are rooted in knowledge), which he interpreted to be a reference to the Imams.Footnote 72
And finally, our author tied the discussion on the meaning of rāsikhūn fī-l-ᶜilm with a seemingly gratuitous—yet profoundly significant—comparison between Sunnism and Christianity. He used his critique of Guadagnoli as a pretext to accuse Sunnis of engaging in similarly selective readings of the Qur’an. For him, Sunni refusal to accept the teachings of the Imams was akin to Guadagnoli’s deliberate choice to ignore the statement “rāsikhūn fī-l-‘ilm.”Footnote 73 This analogy between Sunni and Christian misreading of the scriptures and how that had led them to ignore the sense of the original doctrines was anything but banal given the sectarian dynamics of the late seventeenth/early eighteenth centuries, which I have described earlier.
Addressing Guadagnoli’s Inquiry into Muhammad’s daʻwah
In another section titled Afkār-e Filip-e Pāderi dar bāreh-ye baʻsat Footnote 74 va daʻvat-e Moḥammad (Filippo’s thoughts on Muhammad’s Prophetic Mission and Preaching), our author addressed Guadagnoli’s questions regarding the authenticity of a number of accounts contained in the Prophet’s biography, the al-Sīrah al-nabawwiyah. Guadagnoli was keen to show that Muhammad’s message had no divine basis and was, hence, a fabrication. He thus started “investigating” whether Muhammad’s revelation was purely a product of his state of madness (divānegi) and he tried to “establish” whether Muhammad had indulged in pagan practices during his youth.Footnote 75 In response, ʻAli Qoli questioned once again Guadagnoli’s knowledge of Arabic philology, casting doubt on his ability to deal with Islamic scriptures, given that he had received all his Arabic training in Rome. ʻAli Qoli then discredited Guadagnoli as a mouthpiece of the devil, who took the message of Satan, “his helper” (muᶜāven-e khud) wherever he went: from Rome to India, Uzbekistan, and the Maghreb, a clear reference to Guadagnoli’s role in the missionary institution Propaganda Fide.Footnote 76
Our author then refuted other statements of Guadagnoli concerning the life of the Prophet. Among these was the idea that Halima, the Prophet’s wet nurse, took care of him and raised him until the age of sixteen, whereas Muslim scholars had established that he only stayed with her until the age of four; or that he had been an idolater before reaching the age of forty. ʻAli Qoli noted that Muslims believed that all prophets, from the time of Adam, had been monotheists.Footnote 77 And finally, our author closed this section by addressing Guadagnoli’s claim that Muhammad had converted people from faithful worshipers of the Trinity into a dubious kind of monotheism based on “one false God” (yek Khodā-ye dorugh).Footnote 78 Our author referred back to an older work of his, the Hedāyat al-zāllin (A Guidance for those who are Led Astray), where he had refuted—through a detailed textual analysis of the scriptures—the idea that any of the prophets of the Old Testament had ever said anything even slightly related to the Trinity.Footnote 79
On the Satanic Verses and Paganism
In another section entitled Khabar-e gharāniq va eshkāl-e Filip-e Pāderi va naqd-e moʾallef (The Satanic Verses, the Doubts of Filippo and the Author’s Critique) ᶜAli Qoli argued that based on Jerome Xavier’s rendition of the Book of Genesis in all its existing versions, God was pleased with Lot, Abraham, and Jacob, all of whom had worshiped various creatures prior to converting to monotheism. Christians, he insisted, recognized this fact and still accepted these men as prophets of God. Our author wondered how Guadagnoli could then be so overzealous about condemning Muhammad and discrediting his prophecy for having allegedly worshiped other deities before the age of forty.
ᶜAli-Qoli argued against Guadagnoli, who saw in Muhammad’s practice of ritual prostration a sign of paganism. In trying to prove his point, Guadagnoli cited Sūrat al-Ḥajj (22:52):
And We did not send before you any messenger or prophet except that when he spoke [or recited], Satan threw into it [some misunderstanding]. But Allah abolishes that which Satan throws in; then Allah makes precise His verses. And Allah is Knowing and Wise.Footnote 80
ᶜAli-Qoli could not deny this interpretation entirely but he insisted that only Sunni scholars took this verse to mean that Muhammad was seeking purification through ritual prostration. At the same time, he noted again that if indeed biblical prophets had engaged in the same ritual, it would be hypocritical of Guadagnoli to denounce it only in relation to Muhammad.Footnote 81 ʻAli Qoli argued that Muhammad could be excused for partaking in this ritual before the revelation of the Qur’an. However, if the biblical text were to be accepted at face value, and following Guadagnoli’s logic, there would be no excuse for the biblical prophets’ engagement in similar practices.Footnote 82
ᶜAli-Qoli continued this discussion by finding evidence for Muhammad’s prophethood in the biblical text. He quoted his rendition of Isaiah 53:
By his knowledge, this righteous (maʻṣūm) servant will justify many and will carry their sins upon his shoulders, and therefore I will grant him many children, and he will take a share from the spoils that he seizes from the brave ones [shojʻān], for he poured his soul among the dead and was counted among the sinners.Footnote 83
He treated this passage as a proof that the “Seal of Prophets” would be able to carry the weight of all sinners, which meant that the Prophet of Islam would redeem humanity through his revelation.
ʻAli Qoli then presented his “correction” of Guadagnoli’s interpretation of Sūrat al-Ḥajj by quoting from Hosea 13:Footnote 84 “Samaria shall perish, because they have embittered their God, so they shall succumb to the sword; and their children will be snatched and the wombs of their pregnant women will be ripped apart.”Footnote 85 He argued that, just as this passage referred to the people of Samaria and not to the walls, the alleys or streets of the city; the same applied to the statements in Sūrat al-Ḥajj: one should understand the precise meaning of its metaphors and figures of speech before attempting to draw a conclusion about the references to Allah, Satan, and the Prophet in this verse.Footnote 86
Our author then concluded that Jerome Xavier’s Bible (which Guadagnoli used) had invited his audience to embrace Saint Paul’s doctrines indiscriminately because it included the passage in which Jacob bows to his brother, Esau. He compared these doctrines to certain Sufi ones, particularly Ibn ʻArabi’s (d. 638/1240) unity of existence (waḥdat al-wujūd). He saw a sign of adherence to this doctrine in the words that Jacob uttered to Esau: “take this blessing [raḥmat] that God gave me at the time when he gave me everything.”Footnote 87 ʻAli Qoli indicted Xavier for tampering with the text, leading his readers to believe that God had revealed all existing knowledge to Jacob to the point of making his knowledge indistinguishable from God’s. Such a view, he insisted, was tantamount to blasphemy.Footnote 88
Confronting Guadagnoli’s Attack on Intra-Muslim Sectarianism
Finally, in a section called Eshkāl-e dīgar-e Filip beh Mosalmānān va pāsokh-e ān (Other Objections of Filippo and the Responses to These) ᶜAli-Qoli quoted Guadagnoli reproaching Muslims for the great number of internal conflicts that the Islamic world had experienced throughout its history. Guadagnoli emphasized the successive struggles between ᶜUthmān (d. 35/656) and ᶜAli (d. 40/661), ᶜAli and Muᶜāwiyah (d. 60/680), and between the latter and Ḥassan (d. 50/670), the son of ʻAli.Footnote 89 ʻAli Qoli did not deny the existence of such schisms. He rather embraced the “righteous” and “virtuous” struggles of the Shiites, exalting the merits of martyrdom and denouncing the corrupt faith of the first three caliphs and of the Umayyad dynasty (661‒750). Furthermore, he equated the sacrifice of the Shiite martyrs with that of the “prophets of the Bani Esrā’il,” such as Zacharias, John the Baptist, and Jesus. He also confronted the question of internal schisms by comparing intra-Muslim sectarian violence with the past strife between Catholics, Jacobites, and Nestorians, as well as the more recent altercations between Catholics, Lutherans, Calvinists, and Schismatics (Armenian Orthodox).Footnote 90
Some Aspects of his Response to Jerome Xavier
Overall, the Seyf al-muʾmenin includes more direct refutations to Jerome Xavier than to Guadagnoli, but a detailed analysis of all the responses to Xavier is beyond the scope of this article. However, let us look at one section that can easily be situated within the historical context of the debate with Jerome Xavier. According to the testimony of Xavier’s collaborator, ʻAbd al-Sattār, mentioned above, Jahāngir was keen on discussing the different dietary restrictions of Christians and Muslims. He recounted how the well-known prohibition of scale-less fish and the debate on animals with divided hoofs were raised during assemblies (majāles) at the court; and it was reported that both the ᶜulamāʾ and the Jesuits (presumably Xavier among them) participated in these discussions.Footnote 91 And although these discussions were common tropes in the history of Muslim‒Christian polemics, the fact that Jerome Xavier had engaged in these debates may explain why ᶜAli Qoli decided to address this topic so vehemently his Seyf al-muʾmenin.
Islamic Ritual Purity and Slaughtered Meat
ᶜAli-Qoli thus included in the Seyf al-muʾmenin a section entitled Aḥkām-e gūsht-e ḥeyvānāt dar Tūrāt va bāvar-e Naṣārā dar in bāreh (Rulings on Animal Meat in the Torah and Christian Beliefs in this Regard). He introduced this discussion by noting that it was suitable (monāseb) to write it “so that these infidels [Christians] will not have any excuse [to justify their dietary practices]” (barā-ye ānkeh in koffār hich ᶜazari nadāshteh bāshand).Footnote 92 He began by referencing Deuteronomy 14, which he translated thus:
Do not eat impure [najes] animals. Instead, the [kinds of] animals that you should eat are the ox, the sheep, the deer, the goat, the ibex, the ewe, the gazelle, the bull—which is the male of the cow—, the mūr—which is a male camel—, the seybil—which is a kind of mountain cow—, and any animal with divided hoofs and which chews the cud. But among those with a divided hoof and which chew the cud, do not eat those from the family of the camel, the rabbit, or the hyrax.Footnote 93
He then accused Jerome Xavier of having added the camel to the list of forbidden animals:
and because Jerome was a liar who did not hide his lies, since he wanted to forbid what was allowed [ḥalāl rā ḥarām konad], and since the general rule [for prohibition] was forgotten [that is, the rule of the divided hoof], he rendered the camel, through his pen, inside the category of forbidden meat.Footnote 94
He then noted how Moses had added pork to the list, precisely because of the criteria of the divided hoof, and how he forbade his community to eat aquatic animals without fins and scales.Footnote 95 Yet, ᶜAli Qoli noted, Jerome Xavier chose to transpose a ruling from Genesis 9, in which Noah was allowed to eat any terrestrial animal, to his reading of Deuteronomy 14. In Xavier’s view, since Moses’ ruling on water animals seemed to suggest that aside from animals without fins and scales, all other animals would be permissible (ḥalāl) and therefore all ground animals would be ḥalāl. Our author further claimed that since in Deuteronomy 14 the word “impure” (najes) was used instead of the word “forbidden” (ḥarām), Xavier (and allegedly Saint Paul before him) had taken advantage of this terminological distinction to render ḥalāl certain ḥarām animals. Thus, ᶜAli Qoli felt the need to refute this logic:
[One] way of thinking aiming at removing this inconsistency [that is, the textual contradictions regarding the permissibility of eating certain animals] [is to say] that [the scriptures] say that [these animals] are impure [najes] instead of forbidden [ḥarām]. But he [Jerome Xavier] did not know that this way of reasoning would disgrace him further, since wherever in this passage [Deuteronomy 14] Moses says about an animal that one should not eat it because it is ḥarām, its being ḥarām is recorded [in writing] as “impure” [najes]. Thus, whatever is najes is ḥarām. Jerome [Xavier] continued this reasoning about [certain animals] being only najes, wanting to make ḥalāl every animal that he had added himself [to the list]. However, since this line of reasoning does not stand its ground, he himself transgressed what is forbidden [khodesh niz ḥarāmzādeh birūn amad], because other than on [the question of] prohibitions [beh gheyr az ḥarāmzādeh] nobody else has introduced any forgery into the Holy Books and into what they say.Footnote 96
Here we see the deep implications of the theme of scriptural tampering (taḥrīf) in our author’s vision: Xavier would have tampered with the scripture in order to circumvent the law, here resulting in an endorsement of illegal dietary practices. But the argument became even more complex:
the disciples [that is, Christians] of this leader of men and jinn [Paul] will see that whatever God Almighty considered as impure [najes] and forbidden [ḥarām] in the Torah—which he brought through Moses—is also impure and forbidden in the book that this Paraclete [Christ] brought on behalf of the Creator. And, if there are reports in the books of the prophets about the impurity [najāsat] and the interdiction [ḥaramat] [of something], and if it is also considered forbidden and impure in the book of this Paraclete, it is then also considered as such in the Torah of Moses and in the books of the prophets. And although at certain times and for certain [Holy] persons it is permissible [jā’iz] to abrogate [naskh] divine rulings [aḥkām-e ellahi], it is not proper of the essence of existing beings [aᶜyān-e mowjūdāt] that certain animals that had been impure in essence [najes al-ᶜeyn] in the old days could become pure [pāk] in later times; or that an animal could have been ḥalāl before and become ḥarām after, because if such were the case it will all be a changing matter [qalb-e ḥaqā’iq mi shavad] and this does not make sense rationally [in nazd-i har ᶜaqli maḥāl ast].Footnote 97
Here, ᶜAli Qoli refuted Jerome Xavier not only in terms of the accuracy of the latter’s scriptural references, but also in terms of the legal rulings that Christians could potentially draw from them. Our author argues that Jerome Xavier used the term najes to avoid the use of ḥarām and thus render forbidden animals permissible. ᶜAli-Qoli responded that impurity [najāsat] was a sufficient condition to make an animal ḥarām. In this case our author seemed to implicitly be pointing towards the ratio legis (in Islamic terms, the ᶜillah) behind the prohibition of certain kinds of meat. Something similar seemed to occur when he noted that Moses ruled on pork being ḥarām because of the rule of the divided hoof. This seems to imply that ᶜAli-Qoli acknowledged that certain judgments could be made by analogical thinking (qiyās): if animal X is ḥarām and the reason for it is its divided hoof, then animal Y should also be ḥarām if it has a divided hoof. This quasi-legal presentation conforms to the general approach of some major jurists, even if there is no complex syllogistic reasoning here or any elaboration on rationalist procedures known to mujtahids.
Finally, ᶜAli-Qoli added to the discussion a passage from Deuteronomy 12 in which God forbade the consumption of blood:
Christians from this age have not only disbelieved with respect to God and the prophets, but they have also become disbelievers with respect to Paul and Jerome; for not only have Paul and his disciple Jerome authorized [the eating] of certain animals, both pure and impure, the eating of which God has forbidden; but they have also authorized [drinking] the animals’ blood, which God has also forbidden. This is the sense of what Jerome has written, given that the word of God says that “you can take as food any creature that is alive and moves except those which have blood”; which Jerome interprets for them [Christians] as the justification for the proscription of blood [which comes] from the tongue of Moses in Deuteronomy 12, saying: Do not eat the blood of any animal, for in them their blood substitutes their souls, and therefore you should not eat their flesh and their souls. You should instead spill the blood like water on the ground.Footnote 98
ᶜAli-Qoli constructed his refutation of Christian doctrine not by dismissing its core beliefs as false, but by pointing out its internal contradictions and inconsistencies. What mattered for him in this passage was not just that Christians authorized dietary practices that would be forbidden in Islam, but mostly that in so doing they violated the logic of their own laws. In other words, in this particular example ᶜAli-Qoli considered that the fault of drinking blood was so blatantly illegal that it would even contradict the already tampered with texts of Paul and Jerome Xavier.
Having thus established that Jerome Xavier’s text itself pointed towards these prohibitions, ᶜAli-Qoli moved on to see how Christian practice betrayed this restriction:
These days, Christians make a snake’s venom out of any animal they want [to eat] [har ḥeyvāni rā keh mi khvāhand zahr-e mār konand], since they never slaughter it properly and never spill its blood on the ground. Instead they choke it and eat it with its blood. And whenever they host a dear guest, when they kill a pig, a cow, or a sheep, they set apart the flank of [the animal’s] throat [using] a bloody knife as long as a lancet, and they collect its blood in a vessel and they put salt and vinegar on some of it so that it will not rot, and then they cook a good quantity of that blood with spices and eat [it].Footnote 99
However, unsurprisingly, the apex of this scandal for ᶜAli-Qoli was the sacrament of communion. In it he saw Christians violating the proscription of blood-drinking to a further dimension, since they claimed to drink the blood of Christ. Even if he (or any Muslim) could of course question the alleged physical reality of this transgression, insofar as they would not believe in the transubstantiation of wine into blood, ʻAli Qoli condemned the mere idea of it. He reserved for this practice his harshest words, saying, “there could be no higher [act] of enmity against God” (doshmani bā Khodā az in bālātar nami bāshad).Footnote 100
Concluding Remarks
Perhaps the most salient feature of ʻAli Qoli’s responses to Guadagnoli was his insistence on the latter’s misunderstanding of Muslim scriptures, which he contrasted with his own profound knowledge of the Bible. This allowed him to assert his intellectual authority at both the philological and the hermeneutical levels. Yet, the passages devoted to Guadagnoli are noticeably less complex than the discussions on dietary practices, even if they share some rhetorical strategies, such the use of biblical quotations.
As for the suggestion that certain passages had been forged by Jerome Xavier, ᶜAli Qoli seemed to be adding more complexity to the traditional notion of scriptural tampering (taḥrīf), by implying that it was not (or not only) the original biblical text itself that was corrupted, but rather Jerome Xavier’s rendition of it. This certainly seems to be the case throughout most of his work.Footnote 101 However, in the passages in which Saint Paul is brought into question, ᶜAli Qoli adhered to a more traditional trope whereby Paul was seen as the original falsifier of apocryphal biblical passages. This theme, while perhaps being as old as Muslim‒Christian polemics themselves, was re-utilized in other polemical texts during the early modern period. Tijana Kristić has identified its occurrence in a sixteenth century Ottoman text, in which Paul is not only portrayed as a falsifier but as a drunkard and as a pork-eater.Footnote 102 It is interesting that in ᶜAli-Qoli’s text, both of these themes are also tied together and appear in the same sections. More research on the circulation of these texts would be needed to determine the extent to which polemicists in Iran were familiar with these Ottoman texts in particular. However, I suspect that the commonalities between these texts have more to do with the formulaic rhetoric of the dalā’il al-nubuwwah genre. In any case, what is clear is that the inclusion of the motif of Saint Paul as a culprit of taḥrīf might not have been the most original aspect of ᶜAli-Qoli’s work. However, the choice of it served an important rhetorical function in discrediting the sources used by Jerome Xavier and in paving the way to the more novel strategy of accusing an author closer to his time (Xavier) of furthering scriptural forgery. Further research should also explore the extent of the recurrence or lack thereof of attributing taḥrīf to biblical translators by their contemporaries. This may well be among the most defining features of interreligious polemics in the early modern period.
Another important aspect of the abovementioned excerpts concerns occasional references to Sunni and Sufi doctrines and their alleged affinities with Christian theological concepts. The inclusion of these arguments is hardly surprising in the sectarian context of late Safavid Iran. Our author’s coupling of his anti-Christian polemics to his anti-Sunni and anti-Sufi arguments serves a few functions. It allowed him to use his knowledge of Christianity to assert his authority among Muslim scholars who might have otherwise found his knowledge of traditional Islamic disciplines wanting, given his status as a latecomer to the tradition. It also served the obvious function of contributing to the political self-fashioning of the Safavids in opposition to both Christian Europe and the Ottoman Middle East. In this sense, his work fits perfectly within the framework of the Age of Confessionalization. However, it is interesting to consider more carefully what it meant to produce a book like ᶜAli-Qoli’s in the early eighteenth century and contrast it to the emergence of similar works in the Ottoman empire of the 1500s and early 1600s. By ᶜAli-Qoli’s time Iran had already been a Shiite state for almost 200 years. So the sudden revival of sectarian discourse and its patronage by the court seems symptomatic of the state’s need to reaffirm its legitimacy at a time when it saw itself threatened by political decay and frontier conflicts. Further, the peace with the Ottomans and the aggressive agenda of the French Jesuits, which I mentioned earlier, helped to create a perfect storm in which the need for a sectarian anti-Christian discourse became more relevant than before.
But perhaps the most revealing aspect of the abovementioned excerpts is that they suggest that ᶜAli-Qoli might have had a certain degree of familiarity with Islamic juridical methodology. The fact that our author would extract the ratio legis in the biblical proscription of non-ḥalāl meat and then present it to a Muslim audience indicates that he was aware of the importance of the use of these methodologies among jurists. This shows a degree of depth in his knowledge of the Muslim scholarly tradition that allowed him to go beyond the specifics of the debates with Guadagnoli and Xavier in order to address broader issues and engage his new peers and co-religionists. Further study of these rhetorical strategies and methodologies will allow us to fill in the biographical gaps of cases like his. If it is not possible to know more about the circumstances of his conversion and his training in traditional Islamic disciplines, we can at least evaluate the depth of his contribution to them and the degree to which he blended into the major intellectual preoccupations of his time. This will strengthen our understanding of the nature of courtly patronage of scriptural translations and refutations in this period, and of the institutional dynamics of transmission of knowledge within transregional scholarly communities at large.
