Call for Papers: International Conference on Qur’anic Studies

The department of Qur’anic Studies at the Institute for Humanities and Cultural Studies announces the call for papers for the 2020 International Conference on Qur’anic Studies to be held in Tehran, Iran from February 24-25, 2020.

cfpThe organizers welcome original work from scholars at any stage of their careers, including early career researchers and PhD students, relating to the following themes:

  • The Qur’an and its religious milieu;
  • The reception history of the Qur’an, from the beginnings to modern times;
  • Literary, historical-critical, and comparative approaches to the Qur’an;
  • The history of scholarship and methodological issues in Qur’anic studies;
  • Qur’anic manuscripts;

 Applicants are kindly asked to submit their abstracts to Dr. Ala Vahidnia at a.vahidnia@ihcs.ac.ir by November 15, 2019. The organizing committee will send notification of acceptance for abstracts on December 15, 2019.

The Institute for Humanities and Cultural Studies will issue an official invitation for all participants who need to apply for their own visas individually. Papers may be presented in English or Arabic. 

Should you have any questions about the conference, please contact the conference director, Dr. Ala Vahidnia at  a.vahidnia@ihcs.ac.ir.

 

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

Review of Qur’anic Research, Vol. 5 no. 9 (2019)

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In the latest installment of the Review of Qur’anic Research (Vol. 5, no.9), Eléonore Cellard (Collège de France) reviews Asma Hilali’s The Sanaa Palimpsest: The Transmission of the Qurʾan in the First Centuries AH (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).  

palimpsestIn her review, Cellard writes “‘The Sanaa Palimpsest: The Transmission of the Qurʾan in the First Centuries AH’ by Asma Hilali aims to contribute to the ongoing discussion of the transmission of the Qurʾān in the early Islamic centuries, presenting a new interpretation of one of the most discussed documentary witnesses in recent years: the palimpsest of Ṣanʿāʾ. This monograph is the culmination of a long investigation, that started with the digitization project De l’Antiquité tardive à l’Islam (2005–2008) funded by the French ANR (Agence Nationale de la Recherche). One of the aims of this project, directed by Christian J. Robin, was the digitization of three Qurʾān manuscripts found in the Ṣanʿāʾ mosque in 1972 or 1973 and kept in one of the mosque’s libraries, Dār al-Makhṭūṭāt. Of the three digitized manuscripts, one—inventoried as DAM 01-27.1—is of particular interest because it is a palimpsest, parchment leaves from which a previous text has been erased in order to write a new text above. The most intriguing feature is that its lower and upper texts are both qurʾānic. Then, what are the motivations behind this recycling operation?…”

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.

    

Call for Papers: Beyond “Jewish-Muslim Relations”

From May 19-20, 2020, the Jewish-Muslim Research Network (JMRN) will host a conference at the University of Manchester entitled “Beyond ‘Jewish-Muslim Relations.”

Picture1The keynote speakers will be: Najwa al-Qattan (Loyola Marymount University), Seth Anziska (University College London), Yulia Egorova (Durham University), and Brian Klug (Oxford University)

Call for Papers: Beyond ‘Jewish-Muslim Relations’ invites scholars of Jewish and Muslim histories, cultures, politics, theologies and peoples to share comparative, transnational, and interdisciplinary approaches to the study of these topics as they relate to and come into contact with one another. Despite many theological and cultural similarities and frequent social proximity between Jews and Muslims, Jewish-Muslim relations in both contemporary societies and in diverse historical and geographic settings are often depicted in polarized binary terms. This conference aims to understand interactions and relations between Jews and Muslims in a wide variety of contexts beyond this binary. We encourage papers which offer innovative theoretical, methodological and empirical contributions to the study of these topics, and in particular seek papers which adopt a critical approach to the terminology of ‘Jewish-Muslim relations,’ which might itself inadvertently invoke binary, possibly predetermined relations between Jews and Muslims qua Jews and Muslims, often within historical and socio-political frameworks that have reified categories of Jews, Muslims, and inter-ethnic/-religious relations.

We welcome papers on topics including, but not limited to:

  • Historical cases of interaction between Jews and Muslims
  • Representations and self-representations of Jews and Muslims
  • Jewish and Muslim interfaith activism/dialogue
  • Religion, tradition, secularism and innovation
  • Antisemitism and Islamophobia
  • Islamic and Jewish polemic and intellectual cross-fertilisation
  • Critical theory and Jewish-Muslim relations
  • Gender and sexuality
  • Jews and Muslims in the arts, literature and media
  • Multilingualism, translation and transnationalism

 

Paper proposals should include abstracts of 250 words and a speaker biography of no more than 100 words. Speakers are allocated 20 minutes to present and 10 minutes for questions and discussion. Please address all proposals and queries to the organizers (Adi Bharat and Katharine Halls) at jewish.muslim@manchester.ac.uk

Deadline for submissions: December 1, 2019

 

The Jewish-Muslim Research Network (JMRN) is an interdisciplinary and international initiative bringing together researchers studying Jews, Muslims, Judaism, and Islam in various time periods and regions. JMRN aims to be a collaborative forum which stimulates productive discussion on a wide range of topics regarding Jews, Muslims, and their relations/interactions.

 

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

 

New Publication: The Making of the Mosque by Essam S. Ayyad (Gorgias Press, 2019)

Gorgias Press has recently published a new book, The Making of the Mosque: A Survey of Religious Imperative, by Essam Ayyad. The Making of the Mosque is available to IQSA blog readers at the special price of $87.50 (30% off, RRP $125) until September 30th with the coupon code MM30%. Please note, this discount  is only valid for orders placed through the Gorgias Press website and cannot be used in conjunction with any other offers. If you have any queries, please email gemma@gorgiaspress.com.

About the book: In the absence of reliable archaeological evidence, the question of how the mosque was made represents a real challenge. Its origin remains moot despite many attempts to settle the question. While the structure built by the Prophet Muḥammad at Madina soon after the Hijra in 622 AD is believed by many to have later provided the prototype of the mosque, the dominant theory that it was only a private residence casts doubt on that belief. The current study provides fresh evidence based on the Qurʾān, ḥadīth and early poetry that this structure was indeed built to be a mosque.

ayadFor example, a key rationale for those who doubt the existence of a mosque in the Prophet’s time is the so-called “Qurʾān’s non-specific use of the term masjid.” The study presents a close survey of the usage of masjid (mosque) in the Qurʾān and concludes that the Qurʾānic use of the term to denote earlier God-worship sanctuaries does not mean that it, namely the term, had not been Islamized by early Islam; rather, it is the case that such sanctuaries were deemed Islamic. As such, the general use of ‘masjid’ to denote a variety of types of structure, or even specific devotional acts, does not necessarily exclude its denoting also an Islamic place of worship. ‘Masjid’ is used in the Qurʾān to mean place of worship generally and sometimes explicitly as an Islamic place of worship.

The study further investigates what conceiving the Prophet’s structure as a “private residence” or a “mosque” may have to say apropos a number of undecided issues such as the immediate origins of the mosque type and the kind of impulses and modalities that determined its design and character. In a broader sense, this study seeks to explore whether early Islam, within the framework of the Prophet’s teachings and practices, as well as the Qurʾān, might have provided the necessary prompts for the making of the mosque and the shaping of its essential functional and architectural features. It also investigates how such religious imperatives may have interacted with the political, cultural and socio-economic contexts in which the mosque type materialized.

In so doing, this book scrutinizes two dominant tendencies regarding the mosque type: the modern Western views on its non-Islamic origins and the Islamic legalistic views on what it should look like. This survey is positioned at the intersection between art, historiography, religious sciences and politics; it is not a typical monograph on architecture. As readers will see, it cuts across topics such as early Islam’s outlook on visual arts and aesthetics in general.

 

Dr Essam Ayyad received his PhD in the history of Islamic civilization from the University of Leeds, UK, in 2011. He is currently working as an assistant professor of Islamic history at Qatar University. Before joining Qatar, he was elected to Imam Tirmizi Visiting Research Fellowship at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, a recognized independent centre of the University of Oxford. He joined Oxford as a visiting research fellow during Trinity Term 2016. Earlier in 2015, Dr Ayyad joined the Centre of Islamic Studies, University of Cambridge as a visiting scholar. His main interest is to explore the array of prompts and modalities that shaped the various aspects of Islamic civilization, with most of his studies centring on the early period.

 

Content reproduced with the kind permission of the Essam Ayyad and Gorgias Press

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