Two Hungarian Jesuits and the Qur'an

What is it about?

Two Hungarian Jesuits active in the early seventeenth century, Stephanus Arator and Peter Pázmány, wrote polemical pieces drawing on the Qur’an. Both Arator and Pázmány were influenced more by the political and confessional dynamics surrounding them than by any apparent desire to grasp the meaning of the Qur’an. The crisis that both Catholicism and, more broadly, European Christianity faced in the early seventeenth century overshadows these Jesuits’ efforts to explore the Qur’an. Pázmány, in particular, uses the Qur’an to make a case against Protestant sects and Unitarians, whose influence and numbers had greatly increased in Hungary.

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