2019 IQSA Lifetime/Institutional Members

It is with great honor that IQSA acknowledges two new lifetime members and one new institutional IQSA member as of January 2019.

cmje

IQSA welcomes the Center for Muslim-Jewish Engagement (CMJE) as its inaugural institutional member. CMJE is a tripartite partnership of the Hebrew Union College, the Umar Ibn Al-Khattab Foundation, and the University of Southern California.

 

IQSA’s two new lifetime members include Farid Esack (former IQSA president) and Ghazala Anwar (Starr King School for the Ministry).

Farid EsackFarid Esack is a South African scholar of Islam and public intellectual who completed the Darsi Nizami in traditional madrasahs in Karachi, Pakistan, and his PhD at the University of Birmingham, UK. Since 2000, Esack has been teaching at the University of Johannesburg (UJ), where he is Professor in the Study of Islam and head of its Department of Religion Studies. In addition to serving as a Commissioner for Gender Equality in the first South African democratic government (appointed by President Mandela) and heading a number of leading national and international not-for-profit entities, he has taught religion, Islamic Studies, and Qurʾanic Studies in South Africa (University of Western Cape, Cape Town and UJ), Europe (Universities of Amsterdam and Hamburg), the United States (College of William and Mary, Union Theological Seminary,Xavier University, and Harvard Divinity School) and in Asia (International Islamic University of Islamabad and Gaja Mada University in Yogjakarta).

AnwarGhazala Anwar (PhD Comparative Religion,Philadelphia) is a Pakistani American scholar of Islamic Studies. She is currently Associate Professor of Quranic Studies at Starr King School for the Ministry. Her focus has been on feminist/queer inclusive and animal inclusive contemporary readings of the Qurʾaninformed both by modernist and traditional as well as contemporary Western approaches of reading theQurʾan and Sufi intentionality. She is now turning her attention from interpretation of the text to the history of its formation as this new field emerges.

As a reward for their investment, lifetime members enjoy benefits in perpetuity. To accommodate the different levels of our members, IQSA offers five membership tiers starting 2018. We encourage all scholars and students in the field to consider renewing their membership or to become IQSA MEMBERS NOW.

On behalf of the Board of Directors and Standing Committees, IQSA offers a warm welcome to CMJE, Farid Esack, Ghazala Anwar, and all incoming 2019 IQSA members.

© International Qur’anic Studies Association, 2019. All rights reserved.

Call for Papers – EABS Annual Conference Warsaw 2019

The Call for Papers for this year’s European Association of Biblical Studies Annual Conference is now open! The Conference will be taking place at the University of Warsaw, ul. Krakowskie Przedmieście 26/28, Warsaw, Poland, from Sunday, August 11th to Wednesday, August 14th 2019 followed by two days of post-conference tours.

Paper proposals will be accepted until February 28th, 2019 and individual EABS units’ Calls can be found on their webpages. To browse the list of EABS research units, including several Qu’ran related panels, click here. Please direct any enquiries about the specific Calls directly to the relevant unit chairs; for questions concerning the technical aspects of submitting an abstract, please email abstracts@eabs.net.

To submit your paper proposal, click this link. Contributions both from established scholars and PhD students in the field of biblical and cognate studies are welcome, but in order to submit an abstract, you must be a member of the EABS. To join or renew your membership, go to the join section of the website.

We very much look forward to seeing you in Warsaw in August!

Review of Qur’anic Research, Vol. 5 no. 2 (2019)

In the latest installment of the Review of Qur’anic Research (Vol. 5, no.2), Ayman S. Ibrahim (Southern Baptist Theological Seminary) reviews Juan Cole’s Muhammad: Prophet of Peace Amid the Clash of Empires (New York: Nation Books, 2018).

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In his review, Ibrahim writes “In recent years, the field of Islamic Studies has witnessed a growing trend centered on reinterpreting early Islam. The reinterpretation concerns historical episodes, events, or figures, and stands in a clear dissonance with traditional narratives depicted by classical Muslim historians…Juan Cole’s ‘Muhammad: Prophet of Peace Amid the Clash of Empires’ is a recent representation of this trend. The author attempts to reinterpret early Islam, particularly in relation to the image of the Muslim prophet. Following Fred M. Donner’s footsteps in ‘Muhammad and the Believers,’ Cole’s Muhammad “puts forward a reinterpretation of early Islam as a movement strongly inflected with values of peacemaking” (1). If Donner’s reinterpretation portrayed early Islam as an ecumenical movement (a community of believers, not Muslims), Cole’s book emphasizes Muḥammad as a “prophet of peace” who led a peacemaking community…”

Want to read more? For full access to the Review of Qur’anic Research (RQR), members can log in HERE. Not an IQSA member? Join today to enjoy RQR and additional member benefits!

© International Qur’anic Studies Association, 2019. All rights reserved.

Eléonore Cellard wins Andrew Rippin Best Paper Prize 2019

The International Qurʾanic Studies Association is delighted to announce that the second annual Andrew Rippin Best Paper Prize (open to papers delivered by junior scholars at the 2018 annual meeting) has been awarded to Dr. Eléonore Cellard for her paper “From Coptic to Arabic: A new palimpsest for the history of the Qur’ān in Egypt during the first centuries of Islam.” The winner of the Andrew Rippin Best Paper Prize receives a cash award. In addition, an expanded and edited version of the winning paper qualifies for publication in the Journal of the International Qur’anic Studies Association.

This award is given in honor of Prof. Andrew Rippin (1950-2016), a leading scholar of the Qurʾān and inaugural president of the International Qur’anic Studies Association (2014). Prof. Rippin is remembered as “an esteemed colleague, revered mentor, and scholarly inspiration to many members of the IQSA community.” An announcement regarding submissions for the second annual Andrew Rippin Best Paper Prize will follow the 2019 IQSA annual meeting in San Diego.

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An abstract of Eléonore Cellard award winning paper follows:

According to the Islamic tradition, the Qur’ānic text was fixed some years after the conquest of Egypt by ‘Amr ibn al-‘Āṣ. Egypt, however, didn’t received any of the archetypal codices sent by ‘Uṯmān ibn ‘Affān. Without this archetype, how did the Qur’ānic text spread to this region during the first centuries of Islam? Did Egypt play a role in the beginning of the written transmission of the Qur’ān? Unfortunately, the hundreds of early Qur’ānic fragments found in Egypt in the last centuries can’t attest to their Egyptian origin, as they contain no information about their dating or their origins.

A new palimpsest, recently emerged on the antiquities market, could shed some light on these issues. On its scriptio inferior – the original text which has been erased – we could so far decipher fragments of Deuteronomy and Isaiah, probably written in the 6th or 7th century, within a Coptic monastery, located between Cairo and Assiut. The scriptio superior – the upper text which supersedes the Coptic text – is a Qur’ān, sharing similarities with the large copies kept in Fustat (Old-Cairo) and elsewhere, and dating from the middle of the 8th century. The originality of this palimpsest is its lower cost manufacture, reflecting a more modest, and regional context of production in this period, perhaps in Middle-Egypt like the former Coptic manuscript.

Revealing the existence of another way of production of Qur’ān copies as early as the 8th century, this document shows also that the written transmission of the Qur’ān was already well established and under control. Last, but not least, this artifact reminds us of the material proximity of Qur’ānic and Coptic scribal cultures in Egypt. The copyists never ignored each other, but what were exactly their relationships? Studying this palimpsest and the others, we approach the Qur’ān as a tridimensional book, never isolated from the other scriptural cultures, but rather interacting with them, in the multicultural story of Egypt at the end of Late Antiquity.          

portrait pro Eleonore-3Dr. Eléonore Cellard is specialist in Qur’ānic manuscripts. She started her research activities in 2008, under the supervision of François Déroche. In 2015, she submitted her dissertation intitled “The written transmission of the Qur’ān. Study of a corpus of manuscripts from the 2nd H./8th CE” (INALCO/EPHE). Until 2018, she carried on her research at the Collège de France, as research assistant and post-doctoral researcher.  Involved first in the French-German Coranica project, then in the Paleocoran project, she published Codex Amrensis 1, the first volume of the collection of facsimile and diplomatic editions of the earliest Qur’ans (Brill, 2018).

 

 

© International Qur’anic Studies Association, 2019. All rights reserved.

 

 

© International Qur’anic Studies Association, 2018. All rights reserved.

 

NEW Journal of the International Qur’anic Studies Association,Vol.2 (2017)

IQSA is proud to announce the release of the second issue of its flagship journal, the Journal of the International Qur’anic Studies Association by Lockwood Press. JIQSA, vol. 2 (2017) is co-edited by Michael Pregill and Vanessa De Gifis (Wayne State University) and features new research on the Qur’an. The editors offer an insightful introductory essay in remembrance of Andrew Rippin, IQSA’s inaugural president and “esteemed colleague, revered mentor, and scholarly inspiration to many members of the IQSA community” (Pregill, 3).

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Articles include the 2016 presidential address by Farid Esack and a response by Shari Lowin, as well as a number of original contributions by renowned scholars in the field.

Readers will find JIQSA reflects the depth, diversity and debate latent within Qur’an Studies today. Subjects explored in this issue include the Qur’an’s place in late antiquity, literary and inter-confessional dialogue, its reception in the west, the hermeneutics of traditional and modern exegesis, transmission of the text, manuscripts, philology, rhetoric and more. A table of contents follows below.

Preparation for JIQSA, vol. 3 has already begun. Submissions should be uploaded electronically, in both Microsoft Word and PDF formats, to http://lockwoodonlinejournals.com/index.php/jiqsa/about/submissions. Please ensure that the documents you upload are anonymized for peer review. As a rule of thumb, articles should be between 10,000 and 15,000 words including footnotes, using 12-pt Times New Roman font double-spaced for the body and 11-pt single-spaced font for footnotes. Shorter or longer articles may be accepted for review at the discretion of the editors. Authors are encouraged to conform their submissions to our current JIQSA Guidelines and Style Sheet.

Volume 2 (2017): Table of Contents

  1. Pregill, Michael E. “Remembrance: Andrew Rippin (1950-2016).” JIQSA 2 (2017): 3-6.
  2. Esack, Farid. “Lot and His Offer: 2016 IQSA Presidential Address.” JIQSA 2 (2017): 7-34.
  3. Lowin, Shari L. “Response to Farid Esack’s 2016 Presidential Address.” JIQSA 2 (2017): 35-46.
  4. Stewart, Devin. “Cognate and Paronomastic Curse Retorts in the Qurʾān: Speech Genres and the Investigation of Qurʾānic Language.” JIQSA 2 (2017): 47-88.
  5. Ali, Kecia. “Destabilizing Gender, Reproducing Maternity: Mary in the Qurʾān.” JIQSA 2 (2017): 89-110.
  6. Lowry, Joseph E. “Law, Structure, and Meaning in Sūrat al-Baqarah.” JIQSA 2 (2017): 111-148.
  7. Qureshi, Jawad Anwar. “Ring Composition in Sūrat Yūsuf (Q 12).” JIQSA 2 (2017): 149-168.
  8. Pregill, Michael E. “Review Essay: Positivism, Revisionism, and Agnosticism in the Study of Late Antiquity and the Qurʾān.” JIQSA 2 (2017): 169-199.

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© International Qur’anic Studies Association, 2019. All rights reserved.