Karl Gottlieb Pfander

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Karl Gottlieb Pfander (born November 3, 1803 in Waiblingen , Württemberg ; † December 1, 1865 in Richmond , London ) was a German Protestant missionary who initially worked for the Basel Mission and then for the Church Mission Society . He saw his goal in life in converting Muslims to Christianity .

Life

Karl Gottlieb Pfander was born as one of nine children of a master baker in Waiblingen, where pietistic influences from Johann Albrecht Bengel and Friedrich Christoph Oetinger, for example , shaped everyday life. He first attended a Latin school and from 1819 received training in the newly established Korntal Brethren . From 1821 to 1825 he trained as a missionary at the Evangelical Mission Society in Basel , during which time he learned Persian, Turkish and Arabic.

After his ordination in 1825, he was sent to Shusha in the Transcaucasian Nagorno Karabakh , where he turned to proselytizing the Islamic minority until 1829, while other employees of the Basel Mission focused on reforming the Armenian Apostolic Church . After a two-year collaboration with Anthony Norris Groves in Baghdad and a short stay in Constantinople , the CMS sent him to British India , where he began his missionary work in Agra in 1841 . Here he gained notoriety through a public dispute with the Sunni scholar Rahmatallāh al-Kairānawī in April 1854. The British colonial official and Islamic scholar William Muir described the dispute between Pfander and Kairanawi, in which, among other things, the importance of the Gospel of Barnabas came up Title The Mohammedan Controversy in 1897. After a three-year assignment from 1855 in Peshawar , he was sent by the CMS to Constantinople in 1858, where he was arrested and taken prisoner as a result of his missionary work, together with other missionaries. After Great Britain had obtained the release of the prisoners, the Ottoman Empire forbade the continuation of missionary activity. Pfander retired to England and settled in Richmond near London, where he died in 1865.

His main work is the apologetic text Mizan al-Haqq , which he had translated from the German original under the title "Scales of Truth" and which he translated into other languages ​​as part of his work. He referenced later editions of Mizan with excerpts from Gustav Weil's biographical work on Mohammed .

Pfander was married twice. He married his first wife, Sophia Reuss from Germany, in July 1834 in Moscow ; she died ten months later in childbed in Schuscha. He had three sons and three daughters with his second wife, the Englishwoman Emily Swinburne, whom he married in Calcutta in 1841 .

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The Legacy of Karl Gottlieb Pfander ( Memento of the original from November 23, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.highbeam.com
  2. ^ The Legacy of Karl Gottlieb Pfander
personal data
SURNAME Pfander, Karl Gottlieb
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German Protestant missionary
DATE OF BIRTH November 3, 1803
PLACE OF BIRTH Waiblingen , Württemberg
DATE OF DEATH December 1, 1865
Place of death Richmond , London