The first Christians to meet Muslims were not Latin-speaking Christians from the western Mediterranean or Greek-speaking Christians from Constantinople but rather Christians from northern Mesopotamia who spoke the Aramaic dialect of Syriac. Living under Muslim rule from the seventh century to the present, Syriac Christians wrote the first and most extensive accounts of Islam, describing a complicated set of religious and cultural exchanges not reducible to the solely antagonistic.
Through critical introductions and new translations of dozens of invaluable historical materials, Michael Philip Penn’s When Christians First Met Muslims allows scholars, students, and the general public to explore the earliest interactions between what eventually became the world’s two largest religions, shedding new light on Islamic history and Christian-Muslim relations.
* Description and cover image from publisher product page: http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520284944
I trust this message finds you well, and for those of us nearing the end of our academic year I wish you all the best of luck. Since our meeting in San Diego, the International Qur’anic Studies Association (IQSA) has successfully completed a number of important activities, and we continue to develop the organization to better serve our members and fulfill our mission and vision. The purpose of this message is to inform about our recent activity.
New Homepage & Welcome Video
To serve you better our landing page on IQSAWEB.ORG is now simpler than ever. Visitors are given a warm welcome and introduction to IQSA by watching leading members of the community speak on VIDEO. Furthermore, the number on the page has been reduced to include only what is essential—enjoy!
IQSA Membership & AM Registration
To become an official MEMBER of IQSA for 2015, and to receive exclusive mmber benefits, please GO HERE (http://members.iqsaweb.org). There is a flat $25 membership fee for 2015. (Note that if you became an IQSA member in 2014 you need to sign up once again for 2015)
2015 International Meeting (Yogyakarta, Indonesia)
Our much anticipated international meeting in Yogyakarta, Indonesia will take place August 4-7, 2015. We are very excited about this conference and the international scholarly exchange it will foster. We are also very pleased with the interest of our members and the public in attending this conference. For more information please GO HERE (https://iqsaweb.org/meetings/im2015)
2015 Annual Meeting (Atlanta, GA, USA)
The program for Atlanta is almost set and promises to be both informative as well as exciting. For more information please GO HERE (https://iqsaweb.org/meetings/) and do not forget to become a MEMBER and REGISTER (See above).
Be an IQSA citizen – nominate future officers
All IQSA members are encouraged to submit names of potential candidates for the following positions:
If you or a colleague are currently undertaking research as a faculty member or post-doc, working on a new project as a graduate assistant or would like to share information about an upcoming Qur’an related conference, workshop or service, please consider writing a blog post for us. Your blog post will receive one to two thousand views in the first week! Blog posts in languages other than English are acceptable. Blog contributions should be sent to Dr. Vanessa Degifis (vdegifis@wayne.edu)
Scholarly reviews should be submitted to RQR and academic articles to JIQSA (See above).
Needed: Two Grad Student Assistants
We are seeking two graduate students assistants to help out with editorial and online assistance. This is a great opportunity for networking, professional development and hand-on experience. Learn more about these positions HERE (https://iqsaweb.org/2015/03/16/iqsa_jobs_grad_assts). Applications are welcome anytime but an initial review of applications will take place by June 1, 2015.
Social Media
Don’t forget to follow us on Twitter @IQSAWEB and Like us on Facebook, search “International Qur’anic Studies Association.”
Special Thanks
IQSA’s continued success is not possible without the dedication and skill of its officers and employees. I would especially like to thank Irfana Hussain, Vanessa DeGifis, Mun’im Sirry, Sean Anthony, Catherine Bronson, Mehdi Azaiez, Gabriel Reynolds, Nicolai Sinai as well as all unit chairs, Michael Pregill, Holger Zellentin and Missy Colee and her team at SBL.
Finally, please do not forget to join IQSA by becoming a MEMBER and REGISTERING for our 2015 Atlanta annual meeting by May 22, 2015. That’s one month away!
On behalf of the Board of Directors, Standing Committees and our partners I would like to express our deepest gratitude to all IQSA members and friends.
The IQSA Nominations Committee welcomes nominations for several positions. The IQSA Board of Directors needs to appoint the following positions:
President Elect for 2016
a new member of the IQSA Board of Directors
a new member of the Nominations Committee
Please see the IQSA bylawsfor the description of the roles. The Nominations Committee would like to ask all IQSA members to nominate possible candidates for these three roles. Please note that the Nominations Committee strives for diversity in professional and academic participation. The consultation and discussion of nominations and submissions is done with great care and will ensure confidentiality.
You must be a paid member to nominate. If you are not a member,join today. Please send your nominations to contact@iqsaweb.orgby May 1st.
The IQSA Annual Meeting in Atlanta, 20-23 November, will be held in conjunction with the SBL/AAR Annual Meetings. You could save up to $70 by joining IQSA and registering for the Annual Meetings as an Affiliate Member! Registration is now open on the SBL website here. Take advantage of an additional “super saver” discount by registering now through 21 May. We hope you’ll join us and meet us in Atlanta!
** PLEASE DO THE FOLLOWING **
(1) العضوية مجانية – To join our academic community today (for free!) simply submit a Membership Form here: http://members.iqsaweb.org/Join-Us
(2) التسجيل بسعر مخفض إلى ٢٢/٥/٢٠١٥ – Annual Meeting Registration (Discounted until May 22, 2015) :
He claimed to be an Arab prophet and he was. We shall see him consciously borrowing – he is quite frank about it. But to begin with, the materials which he uses, though they may remind us ever and again of Jewish and Christian phrases and ideas, are in reality Arab materials. (Richard Bell, The Origin of Islam in its Christian Environment [London, 1925], 69)
Around all these Koranic narratives there is, and was from the first, the atmosphere of an Arabian revelation, and they form a very characteristic and important part of the prophet’s great achievement. (Charles Cutler Torrey, The Jewish Foundation of Islam [New York, 1933], 126)
Above are the testimonies of two distinguished scholars writing at a time when the debate for anchoring the origins of the Qur’an to one of the two major religious traditions was still hot. The titles of their works do little to hide their standpoints, but they both talk curiously—if scantily—about an Arabian background to the Qur’an. Are they talking about the rich pre-Islamic treasure of mythopoeia that was exemplified in the so-called pre-Islamic poetry? Is it the ever-increasing number of inscriptions that were being located in and around the Arabian Peninsula? Whatever this Arabian background meant for Bell and Torrey, they were both unconvinced about the completely explanatory power of a Judeo-Christian or Biblical context for the Qur’an.
Much has happened since then. Heinrich Speyer almost exhausted the Biblical and extra-Biblical parallels to the Qur’an in his brilliant Die biblischen Erzählungen im Qoran; Margoliouth and Taha Husayn call the authenticity (or rather, pre-Islamicity) of pre-Islamic poetry into question; work on a critical edition of the Qur’an was abandoned due to disastrous events partly related to World War II, only to be revived half a century later; most importantly, Wansbrough’s Qur’ānic Studies bulldozed the whole field.
Now that the dust of the commotion that Wansbrough caused in the field are settling and that manuscript studies of the Qur’an have matured, what is left of this Arabian background? Wansbrough’s argument for a Qur’anic context that was later in time and more distant in location than traditionally assumed is hardly tenable now, and a more accurate contextualization of the Qur’an is needed more than ever. If the Arabian background of the Qur’an cannot be accounted for in Biblical and extra-Biblical material, and can no longer be lumped in with the too-good-to-be-true pre-Islamic poetry and early Muslim historiography, then where is this background to be found?
My dissertation project attempts to shed light on the Arabian context of the Qur’an by using sources that securely predate the Qur’an from in and immediately around the Arabian Peninsula, aiming to contribute to the traditionsgeschichte of the Qur’an through a focused examination of lexical and thematic continuities from pre-Qur’anic Arabian texts to the Qur’an. The sources that inform my study are necessarily extensive, and I consider a large variety of inscriptional sources in Old South Arabian, Ancient North Arabian, Nabataean, Palmyran, “Sinaitic,” and, in a rather limited fashion, Greek, Latin, and Syriac.
The field of ancient Arabian languages has been particularly lively for some time, but little has been done to align these sources with the Qur’an, with the important exceptions of Hubert Grimme and the more recent attempts of Christian J. Robin, Hani Hayajneh, and Ahmed al-Jallad. The ancient Arabian sources provide crucial information where Biblical tradition falls short or where Muslim sources need correction or corroboration. I use these sources to argue for an Arabian context of the Qur’an.
The first chapter of my dissertation compares Qur’anic divine nomenclature with the divine landscape of the Arabian Peninsula as attested in epigraphy. The aim here is to show not only that the immediate context of the Qur’an purveys a unique pantheon of gods that find their equivalents in the inscriptions from the Peninsula, but also that the names and attributes of the Qur’anic God reflect the regional preferences for divine appellations, with the tension between Allāh and al-Raḥmān particularly residual in the Qur’an.
My second chapter builds on the first by exploring some central concepts in the Qur’an that have to do with the relationship between humans and the divine, showing how the Qur’anic vocabulary that dominates the human-divine axis is informed by its Arabian context.
The third chapter addresses the portrayals in the Qur’an of Biblical history along with what appears to be nearly contemporaneous events in and around the Peninsula. I argue that there is a visible break of temporal perception in the Qur’an concerning the transition from what I call “biblical pseudo-history” to episodes of “Arabian” events that informed the local history surrounding the provenance of the Qur’an. I examine these local events in light of available epigraphic and literary sources.
The fourth and the fifth chapters bring the discussion back to the Judeo-Christian plane that has been familiar to Qur’anic studies for two centuries, but this time with an eye toward identifying a trend in the Qur’an’s employment of Biblical figures. These two chapters problematize the indebtedness of the Qur’an to the central Biblical discourse of the time and try to explain the oddities in the Qur’an’s portrayal of Judeo-Christian material through sources that remained peripheral at best to the main centers of Judaism and Christianity. Here I use South Arabian texts of Jewish and Christian provenance as well as those sources that primarily circulated in the Ethiopic language like the Book of Jubilees and the Book of Enoch.
My dissertation is an attempt to historicize the Qur’an in a post-Wansbrough and post-Ṣanʿāʾ-manuscripts world by treating it as a primary source rather than as a text with unwanted exegetical baggage. I believe that narrowing down the context of the Qur’an to a workable and meaningful scale of time and space, with philological commonsense and sensitivity to intra-Qur’anic diachrony, can do wonders for our understanding of the Qur’an.
* Süleyman Dost is a Ph.D. candidate in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago.
Registration for the IQSA Annual Meeting in Atlanta, 20-23 November, is now open! You can access the registration system through the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) webpage HERE. Take advantage of the “super saver” discount by registering now through 21 May. Please visit the SBL site for more information on registration rates, housing, meeting locations, etc. We look forward to seeing you in Atlanta!
