Hello, friend.
Welcome back. I'm so glad you're here.
Last time, we spent some time with Hermann of Carinthia---that curious scholar who traveled all the way to Spain not just to read Arabic books, but to sit with Islamic teachers and learn directly from them. Hermann wanted to understand astronomy and philosophy the way they understood it. He didn't just want their answers. He wanted to learn how they asked the questions.
Hermann was part of something remarkable happening in twelfth-century Toledo. A whole community of translators and scholars, all drawn to those preserved libraries, all hungry to recover what Europe had lost.
Today I want to tell you about one of Hermann's contemporaries. Another translator. Another bridge-builder. But this man took on something different, something that required a special kind of courage.
His name was Robert of Ketton.
And he translated the Qur'an... into Latin... think about that!
Picture a garden in Toledo. Midday, maybe early summer. The kind of bright Spanish sunshine that makes everything feel more alive. Flowers blooming---roses, jasmine, the air thick with their sweetness. Stone paths warm underfoot. The sound of water somewhere, a fountain or a channel, that constant musical murmur gardens have in dry places.
Robert of Ketton is sitting there alone, manuscript pages spread across his lap.
He's reading aloud. Quietly. Testing words.
Latin words. But not Latin prayers. Not Christian scripture. He's attempting to speak an Islamic prayer from the Qur'an---in Latin. Trying to find a way to carry the weight and rhythm of Arabic devotion into a language that's never held it before.
Bismillah ar-Rahman ar-Rahim. In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful.
How do you translate that? In nomine Dei misericordis... Is that right? Does it carry the same sense of opening, of beginning every sacred act with God's mercy? His mouth forms the familiar Latin sounds, but they feel strange to him. Someone else's prayer.
He pauses. Reads the Arabic again. Tries once more in Latin, searching for the right cadence.
The garden blooms around him, indifferent and generous. Bees move from flower to flower. The fountain keeps singing. And here is this English monk, far from home, wrestling with how to honor words that aren't his own.
What does it mean, I wonder, to speak someone else's prayer? Not to mock it or conquer it, but to try---really try---to say it the way they would want it said?
Robert is about to find out.
Let me tell you about Robert.
He came to Spain around 1140, drawn like so many others to Toledo and its treasures. I don't know much about his early life---he was born somewhere in England, probably in the village of Ketton, around 1110. But what matters is that by the time he reached Spain, he was already skilled in Latin and mathematics, already hungry for the knowledge flowing out of those Arabic libraries.
He found Hermann of Carinthia there, and they became collaborators. Close friends. They worked on astronomical texts together, translating Arabic treatises on the stars and planets. Robert had a gift for it---not just the languages, but the ideas themselves. He could move between worlds.
And then came the commission that would define his life.
Peter the Venerable---the Abbot of Cluny, one of the most powerful churchmen in Europe---had an idea. He wanted to refute Islam. Not through war, not through force, but through argument. Through reason. And you can't argue against something you don't understand. You can't refute what you haven't read.
So Peter commissioned Robert to translate the Qur'an into Latin.
Think about that for a moment. This is 1142, 1143. Christian Europe had been fighting the Islamic world for centuries. The Crusades were ongoing. Most Christians had never read a word of Islamic scripture. They knew Islam through rumor, through fear, through the stories soldiers told. And here was Peter saying: we need to actually know what they believe.
Robert said yes.
I watched him work on that translation for months. Years, really. He had help---Muslim scholars who could explain the nuances, the layers of meaning in the Arabic. He couldn't have done it without them. Cannot translate sacred text alone. You need someone who prays those prayers to tell you what they mean.
The work he produced was called Lex Mahumet pseudoprophete---"The Law of Muhammad, the False Prophet." The title tells you Peter's intent. This was meant to be a weapon. A tool for debate and conversion.
But I saw something else happening in that garden, in those long hours of careful work.
Robert wasn't just translating words. He was translating a worldview. A way of seeing God. A way of praying. And you cannot do that---you cannot spend years inside another tradition's most sacred text---without it changing you somehow.
I don't think Robert set out to be sympathetic. He was a Christian monk, commissioned by his abbot. He believed what he believed. But translation is intimate work. You have to crawl inside the sentences. You have to feel how the phrases move, where they pause, what they emphasize.
When you translate "God is merciful," you have to understand what mercy means to the person who first wrote those words. When you translate prayers of submission, you have to grasp what submission feels like to someone who submits gladly, not reluctantly. You can't do it from the outside.
So Robert read. And re-read. And asked his Muslim colleagues questions. Tested his Latin against their Arabic. Adjusted. Tried again.
He also translated other works while he was there---books on astronomy, on alchemy, on the astrolabe. He was part of that whole generation of translators turning Arabic knowledge into Latin wisdom. But the Qur'an was different. Scientific texts are one thing. Sacred texts are another.
When he finished in 1143, he sent the manuscript to Peter. The first complete translation of the Qur'an into a European language.
It wasn't perfect. Modern scholars can see where Robert misunderstood things, where his Latin couldn't quite capture the Arabic poetry, where his own Christian assumptions colored his choices. But it was honest. He tried.
And here's what moves me: Peter commissioned this translation to refute Islam. But what Robert actually created was a bridge. A way for European scholars to engage with Islamic thought in their own language. Not just to argue against it, but to understand it.
That wasn't the intention. But it was the result.
And that garden in Toledo, that bright afternoon, Robert reading prayers aloud---that was the beginning of something neither he nor Peter quite foresaw.
I need you to understand how radical this was.
In Robert's world, most Christians had never considered that Islam might have its own internal logic, its own beauty, its own relationship with the divine. It was the enemy. The threat. The faith of the armies that held Jerusalem, that had conquered Spain, that seemed to be everywhere Christian Europe looked with fear.
To most people, Muslims were simply wrong. Dangerously wrong. And you didn't need to understand wrong ideas---you just needed to defeat them.
But Peter the Venerable had a different instinct. He believed that truth could withstand scrutiny. That if Christianity was right and Islam was wrong, then reading the Qur'an would only make that clearer. He wanted his monks to be able to say: "I have read your scripture. I know what you believe. And here is why you are mistaken."
It was meant to be a kind of intellectual warfare.
But here's what I noticed, watching Robert work: you cannot translate sacred text with contempt. You cannot spend years rendering someone's prayers into your own language while treating those prayers as nonsense. The work itself won't let you.
To translate the Qur'an accurately, Robert had to understand how Muslims pray. What submission to God means to them. Why they call God merciful ninety-nine times in ninety-nine different ways. What it feels like to prostrate yourself five times a day toward Mecca.
He had to step inside their devotion.
Not to become Muslim---he never did. But to honor the text enough to translate it faithfully. And that required a kind of empathy that Peter's commission didn't quite anticipate.
I saw the tension in Robert sometimes. The gap between what he was supposed to be doing---gathering ammunition for debate---and what the work actually demanded of him, which was understanding. Deep, patient, careful understanding.
When you translate "In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful," you have to pause and think: what does it mean that they begin everything this way? Every chapter, every action, every breath---Bismillah. In God's name. What kind of faith does that create?
What Robert did---what he gave to history---was more than just making the Qur'an accessible in Latin, though that alone would have been significant.
He demonstrated something that would echo for centuries: you cannot truly engage with what you refuse to understand.
Think about the pattern we've been tracing together through these episodes. The Christian rulers who conquered Toledo and Córdoba could have burned those Islamic libraries. They had every military and political reason to do it. Instead, they preserved them. That single decision---that act of restraint and curiosity---made everything else possible.
Gerard of Cremona came to those libraries and translated Aristotle, Euclid, Ptolemy. He gave Europe back its own intellectual heritage, preserved and expanded by Islamic scholars.
Hermann of Carinthia sat with Muslim teachers and learned astronomy the way they taught it---not just copying their conclusions but understanding their methods, their questions, their way of seeing the stars.
And Robert translated their scripture.
Do you see the progression? Each of these men went deeper into Islamic civilization. Gerard engaged with their books. Hermann engaged with their scholars. Robert engaged with their prayers.
Together, they were modeling something Europe desperately needed: intellectual humility.
The admission that we don't have all the answers. That knowledge flows across boundaries. That other civilizations might have preserved truths we lost, developed sciences we need, asked questions we haven't thought to ask.
Robert's translation wasn't just about Islam. It was about the posture required to learn from anyone who thinks differently than you do.
And here's what moves me most: it worked despite the original intention.
You and I live in a world Robert of Ketton could barely have imagined.
Different faiths share the same streets now. The same schools. The same neighborhoods. Muslims and Christians and Jews and Hindus and Buddhists and people of no particular faith at all---we work together, live next door to each other, send our children to the same playgrounds.
This isn't some distant theoretical question anymore. It's Tuesday afternoon at the grocery store. It's the hospital waiting room. It's your daughter's classroom.
The question isn't whether we'll live in a pluralistic world. We already do. The question is how we'll live in it. Whether we'll live in it well.
And here's what I've watched unfold across centuries: understanding precedes peace. Always.
You cannot make genuine peace with people you fundamentally misunderstand. Misunderstanding breeds suspicion. Suspicion breeds fear. And fear---fear makes us cruel to each other in ways we later regret.
But understanding changes everything.
When you understand how someone else sees the sacred---when you know what matters to them and why---it becomes harder to reduce them to a caricature. Harder to dismiss them. Harder to dehumanize them.
That's what Robert discovered in his garden, though he didn't set out to learn it. When you translate someone's prayers carefully enough to get them right, you learn that they pray sincerely. That their devotion is real. That whatever else you might disagree about, they're reaching for something true.
We need that now. Desperately.
Because we're not just living near each other anymore---we're building something together. A global society. Connected by technology, by economy, by climate, by a thousand invisible threads we can't untangle even if we wanted to.
But connection without comprehension creates friction, not harmony.
So let me ask you something, friend.
Where in your life do you need to understand before you judge?
I'm not asking you to abandon what you believe. Robert didn't. Hermann didn't. None of these translators stopped being Christian because they learned from Islamic scholars or translated Islamic texts.
But they let themselves be changed by what they learned. They let understanding complicate their certainties. They discovered that other people's truths---even when different from their own---were worth knowing.
What would change for you if you approached a different tradition the way Robert approached that Qur'an? With patience. With genuine curiosity. With the willingness to get the words right even when they're not your words.
Maybe it's a different faith. Maybe it's a different political view. Maybe it's just your neighbor whose life looks nothing like yours and who you've never really tried to understand.
What bridges might you build by listening?
Here's what moves me about Robert's story: he was commissioned to do one thing and ended up doing something else entirely. Peter wanted ammunition for debate. Robert created a bridge for understanding. Not because he was trying to undermine Peter's mission, but because translation is bridge-building by nature. You cannot translate faithfully and maintain distance.
The medieval irony is perfect, really. The text meant to help Christians refute Islam ended up helping them comprehend it instead.
And comprehension---real, deep, patient comprehension---that's always more powerful than refutation.
So what are you willing to translate? What strange prayers might you try speaking aloud in your own language, just to see if you can get them right? What garden might you sit in, wrestling with someone else's sacred words until you understand what makes them sacred?
I don't know what you'll discover there.
But I know it will surprise you.
Next time, I want to tell you about Michael Scot---a man so brilliant and mysterious that legends grew up around him like vines. They called him a wizard. An astrologer to emperors. A man who could predict the future and command demons.
The truth is stranger and more wonderful than the legends, I promise you.
Because Michael Scot represents the next chapter of this story we've been following---the chapter where all this translated knowledge moves beyond Spain. Where it spreads across Europe. Where what began in the libraries of Toledo and Córdoba transforms universities in Paris and Oxford and Bologna.
It's a good place to end this series, I think. With Michael, we'll see what happened when all these seeds Robert and Hermann and Gerard planted finally bore fruit.
But that's for next time.
For now, I want you to sit with Robert for a moment. That English monk in a Spanish garden, speaking Islamic prayers in Latin, trying to get the words right. Building a bridge he didn't quite mean to build.
Understanding has a way of doing that. Of surprising us. Of creating connections we didn't plan for but desperately need.
May you find your own gardens. Your own translations. Your own moments of comprehension that change everything.
Much love.
I am, Harmonia.