{"id":90988,"date":"2021-04-23T09:18:11","date_gmt":"2021-04-23T15:18:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/?p=90988"},"modified":"2021-04-24T15:21:59","modified_gmt":"2021-04-24T21:21:59","slug":"addendum-5-founding-the-middle-eastern-texts-initiative-at-byu","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/2021\/04\/addendum-5-founding-the-middle-eastern-texts-initiative-at-byu.html","title":{"rendered":"Addendum 5: Founding the Middle Eastern Texts Initiative at BYU (Part 1)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Joke<\/a>
My wife bought me this bag for Father\u2019s Day a couple of years ago. The writing on it reads, in my translation, roughly as follows: \u201cThere is no goal for this text except spreading terror in the souls of those who fear the Arabic language.\u201d I love it.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

***<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

The news, when it first arrived early Friday afternoon, was uncertain.\u00a0 But it\u2019s now clearly and sadly true:\u00a0 D. Michael Quinn, the well-known historian of the early Restoration and of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints<\/a>, has died.\u00a0 He became a controversial figure, and he wasn\u2019t especially fond of some of the things that I had written about his work.\u00a0 But he was always interesting, and I still remember when I first encountered his writing.\u00a0 I found it fascinating, and exciting.\u00a0 I wish all the best for him and for those he has now left behind.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

***<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Tonight!<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

***<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

I spent most of yesterday in meetings regarding, first, the approaching premiere of the Witnesses<\/em> theatrical film \u2014 which will open in Utah and certain other movie houses at 7 PM on Thursday, 3 June, with an official opening on the following day, Friday, 4 June \u2014 and, second, the way we plan to configure the 3-5-minute short features or \u201csnippets\u201d to which we\u2019ll shortly be turning some of our attention.\u00a0 I also devoted three hours to filming an interview with a scholar for inclusion in either the \u201csnippets\u201d or the docudrama or both.\u00a0 That, and grading my very last student papers, explains why this blog entry is late.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

***<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

After beginning my freshman year at Brigham Young University as a mathematics major, I changed my focus \u2014 no doubt to the great but curiously unexpressed joy of my parents \u2014 from mathematics to a major in classical Greek with a minor in philosophy.\u00a0 I\u2019ll probably comment further on that matter at some future point.\u00a0 For my current purposes, though, it will suffice to say that I graduated with a degree in Greek after several years of classes in Greek language and literature.\u00a0 Along the way, I became aware of the Loeb Classical Library<\/a>, which I still to this day consider one of the greatest publishing projects I\u2019ve ever encountered.\u00a0 It is a substantially complete collection of virtually the entirety of classical Greek and classical Latin writing, in dual-language Greek\/English and Latin\/English editions.\u00a0 Genuinely remarkable.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

But when, after I had graduated from BYU with my degree in Greek (and philosophy), I moved over to Arabic studies, one of the things that I noticed right away was the lack of an Arabic equivalent, or an Arabic and Persian equivalent, of the Loeb Classical Library.\u00a0 What that meant was that, unless people had grown up knowing Arabic or Persian or had spent years mastering them in academic settings, most works of classical Islamic literature and science and so forth were utterly closed off to them.\u00a0 And I began to notice general histories of science that minimized Muslim contributions to scientific fields, and that sometimes went so far as to declare that the Muslims had contributed essentially nothing \u2014 and that contained not a single Arabic title in their bibliographies.\u00a0 The same was true for general histories of philosophy.\u00a0 The Arabs, they would often say, had simply inherited Greek philosophy and then passed it on to the Latin West, without making any important contributions of their own.\u00a0 But how, I wondered, could they possibly make such a judgment?\u00a0 After all, their bibliographies contained no evidence of reading in the Arabic sources, and the Arabic sources hadn\u2019t been translated.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Candidly, it left me feeling just a bit indignant.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

But then I realized that the problem wasn\u2019t the fault of non-specialist historians of science, medicine, mathematics, and philosophy that they weren\u2019t in a position to render valid judgments about the contributions of the Islamic world.\u00a0 It was the fault of the specialists in Near Eastern studies, who had not given them the tools \u2014 the translations \u2014 that would have permitted them to make<\/em> such judgments.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

So, I began to think, an Arabic or Arabo-Persian or Islamicate analogue to the Loeb Classical Library would be a wonderful thing.\u00a0 Arriving on the faculty of BYU, though, I didn\u2019t really give the matter much more thought.\u00a0 Somebody ought to establish such a publication series.\u00a0 Obviously.\u00a0 But that somebody certainly wouldn\u2019t be me.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

And then, one day in the early 1990s, I received a phone call from the late Elder Alexander Morrison<\/a>, a former academic and a member of the Seventy.\u00a0 He wanted to know whether there might be a time that we could meet at BYU.\u00a0 He was hoping to discuss ways in which the University could help to build relations with the Muslims and to build relations with the Islamic world, ways that would not be available to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as such.\u00a0 We spoke for several hours, discussing a number of possibilities.\u00a0 Perhaps my favorite among them, in a sense, was the hypothetical establishment of an endowed chair of Islamic studies.\u00a0 After all, I was, at that point, probably the most obvious candidate for such a chair, for the simple reason that I was pretty much the only candidate available.\u00a0 But I couldn\u2019t in good conscience recommend going that route, because having a Latter-day Saint teach about Islam couldn\u2019t always be guaranteed to please Muslims.\u00a0 (Latter-day Saints aren\u2019t always pleased by what non-LDS scholars say about us.<\/em>). Given his own background, we also spoke about humanitarian projects in and with the Muslim world.\u00a0 And, in fact, Church has been engaged in such projects for many years now, to (for what little it\u2019s worth) my very great satisfaction.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

The idea that really captured his interest, however, was my suggestion of a dual-language translation series that would permit the Islamic world to speak for itself.\u00a0\u00a0<\/em>Such an idea, we reasoned, carried few if any downside risks, and it would be an obviously solid and fully legitimate academic undertaking.\u00a0 He took that proposal back to the First Presidency and the Twelve, whom he had been representing in our conversation, and they approved it.\u00a0 I should undertake such a project they said, offering no financial support.\u00a0 It was an unfunded mandate.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

To be continued.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

***<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

In my Wednesday blog entry, \u201cDerek Chauvin and I,\u201d<\/a> I said that the subject needed to be approached \u201chonestly and without demagoguery.\u201d\u00a0 On one predictable message board, predictable folks are reacting to what I said with predictable dishonesty and demagoguery.\u00a0 Consider me astonished.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0 \u00a0 *** \u00a0 The news, when it first arrived early Friday afternoon, was uncertain.\u00a0 But it\u2019s now clearly and sadly true:\u00a0 D. Michael Quinn, the well-known historian of the early Restoration and of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, has died.\u00a0 He became a controversial figure, and he wasn\u2019t especially fond of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1019,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[198,22738,22735,1152,1149,1809,15055,6348,6345,22744,66,2950,1776,2905,1812,1782,5240,1779,22741,788,55,1667,1769,1718,761,5246,1564],"class_list":["post-90988","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-arabic","tag-bi-lingual","tag-bilingual","tag-brigham-young-university","tag-byu","tag-church-of-jesus-christ-of-latter-day-saints","tag-classical","tag-classical-islam","tag-classical-period","tag-d-michael-quinn","tag-islam","tag-islamic","tag-islamic-translation-series","tag-latter-day-saint","tag-latter-day-saints","tag-meti","tag-michael-quinn","tag-middle-eastern-texts-initiative","tag-mike-quinn","tag-mormon","tag-mormonism","tag-mormons","tag-muslim","tag-muslims","tag-persian","tag-quinn","tag-translation"],"yoast_head":"\nAddendum 5: Founding the Middle Eastern Texts Initiative at BYU (Part 1)<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"    ***   The news, when it first arrived early Friday afternoon, was uncertain.\u00a0 But it's now clearly and sadly true:\u00a0 D. 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