The International Qur’anic Studies Association (IQSA) will award a prize to the best paper delivered at IQSA’s 2024 meetings (London or San Diego) by a graduate student or early career scholar (Ph.D. awarded 2019 or later), in honor of Andrew Rippin, inaugural president of the learned society. The prize winner will receive $500.
In addition, the award committee will provide him/her with detailed feedback and guidance enabling him/her to expand the paper into a scholarly article that qualifies for publication in the Journal of the International Qur’anic Studies Association (JIQSA), subject to peer review.
Interested scholars should submit a draft of the paper which they read at the most current Annual Meeting (for 2024, this can be either the London or the San Diego meeting); this draft should be no longer than fifteen double-spaced pages (or 3750 words including bibliography). The award committee does not expect at this stage a “journal-ready” version (and so limited footnotes, or no footnotes, are acceptable). Please do not submit slides.
Submissions should be emailed to contactus@iqsaweb.org by February 14, 2025. The prize winner will be announced at the end of February. The winner should then be prepared to submit a fully revised version of the winning article to JIQSA by May 31, 2025 (the prize winner of the “Andrew Rippin Best Paper Prize” commits to submitting the paper to JIQSA). Publication of the final version is contingent upon review by the award committee and editorial staff of JIQSA.
Questions? Email contactus@iqsaweb.org. We look forward to receiving your submissions!
The International Qur’anic Studies Association has opened its call for papers for its Annual Meeting to be held in San Diego, California from November 22-25, 2024 in conjunction with the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature. Paper proposals should be submitted through the SBL’s online submission system under the corresponding “Affiliates” link by March 20, 2024.
For the 2024 meeting in San Diego, IQSA will be accepting papers that address any aspect of the Qur’anic text. These may explore particular themes in a given surah or aspects of the Qur’an’s conversation with the religious traditions of Late Antiquity, or even discuss methodological concerns when studying the text or highlight features of physical manuscripts. All topics are welcome.
Please note that all proposals must include:
Author name and affiliation
Paper title
400 word paper abstract (written in English)
Eligibility for proposal submissions is contingent upon the following:
Active IQSA membership is required at the time of proposal submission for the IQSA Program, and the membership status of all applicants will be checked prior to acceptance
Participants must maintain current IQSA Membership through their participation in the Annual Meeting
Please also note that:
To ensure equity and diversity amongst participants, participants should submit only one paper presentation per IQSA Annual Meeting
Participants will be required to register for the conference by submitting payment through SBL’s online system(users are strongly encouraged to take advantage of the “Super Saver” rates which end mid-May)
Questions? Email contactus@iqsaweb.org. We look forward to seeing you in San Diego!
The deadline for this year’s Andrew Rippin Best Paper Prize has been extended until February 7, 2024.
In honor of Andrew Rippin, the International Qur’anic Studies Association (IQSA) will award a prize to the best paper delivered at IQSA’s 2023 meeting in San Antonio by a graduate student or early career scholar (Ph.D. awarded 2018 or later). The prize winner will receive $250. In addition, the award committee will provide him/her with detailed feedback and guidance enabling him/her to expand the paper into a scholarly article that qualifies for publication in the Journal of the International Qur’anic Studies Association (JIQSA), subject to peer review.
Interested scholars should submit a draft of the paper which they read at the most current Annual Meeting; this draft should be no longer than fifteen double-spaced pages (or 3750 words including bibliography). Please do not submit slides. Submissions should be emailed to contactus@iqsaweb.org by February 7. The prize winner will be announced at the end of February. The winner should then be prepared to submit a fully revised version of the winning article by April 1, 2024. Publication of the final version is contingent upon review by the award committee and editorial staff of JIQSA.
Questions? Email contactus@iqsaweb.org. We look forward to receiving your submissions!
The deadline for papers and abstracts to be submitted for IQSA’s 2024 Annual Meeting in London has been extended by one week! Paper and panel proposals are now due on Wednesday February 7, 2024.
In addition, formatting guidelines have been added to the submission guidelines. If you have already submitted your proposal, you can edit your submission using the link provided in your confirmation email until the deadline.
Please read the submission guidelines closely and register ASAP to take advantage of the best travel rates. If you have any questions, please email contactus@iqsaweb.org.
There is only one week left to submit your proposals for the International Qur’anic Studies Association’s Annual Meeting to be held in person from July 15-18, 2024, hosted by the Institute of Ismaili Studies in London!
We are accepting proposals for individual papers, panels, and roundtable discussions. Proposals will be considered on any aspect of the academic study of the Qur’an or its reception history. Proposals are due on January 31, 2024.
Individual papers: Individual paper proposals should be no more than 400 words long and should include the title of the paper, the name and affiliation of the presenter, and a 100-150-word biography.
Panel papers: Papers belonging to pre-arranged panels should indicate the name of the panel in the appropriate field in addition to providing a 400-word abstract and title for the individual paper. Only panel organizers should include a panel abstract in the submission. There is a dedicated field for submitting the panel abstract.
Roundtables: We will accept a limited number of proposals for lightning roundtable discussions. These are roundtables of up to seven participants, where two to three questions are given and each participant has no more than three minutes to address each question. Ample opportunity should be given for audience participation. Only roundtable organizers should submit an abstract which would include the rationale and the questions to be asked.
Please only submit one paper proposal (either individual or as a part of a panel); roundtable discussants may also give a paper.
Proposals for single and panel papers must include:
Author name and affiliation.
100-150-word short bio (written in English).
Paper title.
400-word paper abstract (written in English).
Proposals can be submitted here by January 31, 2024. For your proposal to be accepted and to attend the conference you must be an active IQSA member. You can join IQSA here. If you are a graduate student, contingent faculty, or are from the global south and are unable to pay, please contact us (contactus@iqsaweb.org).
The deadline for the 2023-24 Andrew Rippin Best Paper Prize is fast approaching!
In honor of Andrew Rippin, the International Qur’anic Studies Association (IQSA) will award a prize to the best paper delivered at IQSA’s 2023 meeting in San Antonio by a graduate student or early career scholar (Ph.D. awarded 2018 or later). The prize winner will receive $250. In addition, the award committee will provide him/her with detailed feedback and guidance enabling him/her to expand the paper into a scholarly article that qualifies for publication in the Journal of the International Qur’anic Studies Association (JIQSA), subject to peer review.
Interested scholars should submit a draft of the paper which they read at the most current Annual Meeting; this draft should be no longer than fifteen double-spaced pages (or 3750 words including bibliography). Please do not submit slides. Submissions should be emailed to contactus@iqsaweb.org by January 30, 2024. The prize winner will be announced at the end of February. The winner should then be prepared to submit a fully revised version of the winning article by April 1, 2024. Publication of the final version is contingent upon review by the award committee and editorial staff of JIQSA.
Questions? Email contactus@iqsaweb.org. We look forward to receiving your submissions!
A friendly reminder that in honor of Andrew Rippin, the International Qur’anic Studies Association (IQSA) will award a prize to the best paper delivered at IQSA’s 2023 meeting in San Antonio by a graduate student or early career scholar (Ph.D. awarded 2018 or later). The prize winner will receive $250. In addition, the award committee will provide him/her with detailed feedback and guidance enabling him/her to expand the paper into a scholarly article that qualifies for publication in the Journal of the International Qur’anic Studies Association (JIQSA), subject to peer review.
Interested scholars should submit a draft of the paper which they read at the most current Annual Meeting; this draft should be no longer than fifteen double-spaced pages (or 3750 words including bibliography). Please do not submit slides. Submissions should be emailed to contactus@iqsaweb.org by January 30, 2024. The prize winner will be announced at the end of February. The winner should then be prepared to submit a fully revised version of the winning article by April 1, 2024. Publication of the final version is contingent upon review by the award committee and editorial staff of JIQSA.
Questions? Email contactus@iqsaweb.org. We look forward to receiving your submissions!
Andrew Rippin was the inaugural president of the International Qur’anic Studies Association (2014). He is remembered as “an esteemed colleague, revered mentor, and scholarly inspiration to many members of the IQSA community.”
In honor of Andrew Rippin, the International Qur’anic Studies Association (IQSA) will award a prize to the best paper delivered at IQSA’s 2023 meeting in San Antonio by a graduate student or early career scholar (Ph.D. awarded 2018 or later). The prize winner will receive $250. In addition, the award committee will provide him/her with detailed feedback and guidance enabling him/her to expand the paper into a scholarly article that qualifies for publication in the Journal of the International Qur’anic Studies Association (JIQSA), subject to peer review.
Interested scholars should submit a draft of the paper which they read at the most current Annual Meeting; this draft should be no longer than fifteen double-spaced pages (or 3750 words including bibliography). Please do not submit slides. Submissions should be emailed to contactus@iqsaweb.org by January 30, 2024. The prize winner will be announced at the end of February. The winner should then be prepared to submit a fully revised version of the winning article by April 1, 2024. Publication of the final version is contingent upon review by the award committee and editorial staff of JIQSA.
Questions? Email contactus@iqsaweb.org. We look forward to receiving your submissions!
A Christian Arabic inscription featuring a cross and Aramaic dots over the dāls, see Younis al‐Shdaifat et al. “An Early Christian Arabic Graffito Mentioning ‘Yazīd the King’,” https://doi.org/10.1111/aae.12105
The ERC project “The Qurʾan as a Source for Late Antiquity” (QaSLA) has opened its call for papers for the conference Islamic Tradition at the End of Late Antiquity: New Perspectives on Hadith, History, and Historiography, to be held in Tübingen, Germany, from July 8–10, 2024.
The three-day conference aims at attracting contributions to the scholarly discourse on Islamic tradition and the late antique milieu, particularly studies that pursue connections between the hadithliterature, Islamicate historiography, and Jewish and Christian traditions from the period of Islam’s emergence.
The conference is oriented towards exploring new connections between Islam and the late antique milieu, while shifting the emphasis to the hadith, broadly defined. Can the hadithprove to be a reliable source for historical inquiry into the 7th century, despite its codification in the 9th century? And, if so, can other genres of hadith convey insights that contradict or confirm the tafsīr tradition? How might different methodological approaches to the hadithand improved analytical techniques shed new light on the Qurʾan and its environment? And how is the hadith, if at all,a witness to the existence of and the specific cultural and religious impact of Jewish, Christian, or other communities in Arabia?
While we are particularly interested in scholarly contributions that engage with the preceding questions, we welcome other avenues of inquiry into the hadith, Islamic late antiquity, and the interaction of Jews, Christians, and (other) Arabian peoples in and around the 7th century CE. By way of example, themes to be addressed include:
1. Methodological approaches to the study of Muslim traditions: hadith, tafsīr, and akhbār
2. Judeo-Christian elements in hadith, such as the isrāʾīliyyāt, and other Islamic literature
3. Interactions between Islamic and other late antique legal and juridical ideas
4. Portrayals of Jews and Christians in Islamic tradition
Travel and accommodation expenses in Tübingen for the duration of the research symposium will be covered by QaSLA.
This call for papers invites Early Career Researchers (PhD candidates and within five years of the award of the PhD). It seeks to promote outstanding research of early career scholars and bring them in conversation with established scholars of Hadith Studies and Late Antiquity as well as historians of early Islam.
Today is the deadline to submit paper proposals for IQSA’s Annual Meeting to be held in San Antonio, Texas from November 17-20, 2023. Paper proposals should be submitted through the SBL’s automated online submission system under the corresponding “Affiliates” link by March 14, 2023 (note: IQSA membership is required for proposal submission; see below). Paper proposals will be accepted through 11:59 PM (23:59) US Eastern Time (UTC-4). Submission links can be found below under the respective program units. If you require further information or experience difficulties with the submission process, please contact the chairs of the program unit to which you would like to apply.
Please note that all proposals must include:
Author name and affiliation
Paper title
400 word paper abstract (written in English)
Eligibility for proposal submissions is contingent upon the following:
Active IQSA membership is required at the time of proposal submission for the IQSA Program, and the membership status of all applicants will be checked prior to acceptance
Participants must maintain current IQSA Membership through their participation in the Annual Meeting
Please also note that:
To ensure equity and diversity amongst participants, participants should submit only one paper presentation per IQSA Annual Meeting
Participants will be required to register for the conference by submitting payment through SBL’s online submission system(users are strongly encouraged to take advantage of the “Super Saver” rates which end mid-May)
The Annual Meeting includes panels for each of IQSA’s seven program units:
The Linguistic, Literary, and Thematic Perspectives on the Qur’anic Corpus unit invites proposals for papers that engage with the study of the Qur’an from a literary standpoint and examine aspects such as rhetorical devices, literary motifs, characterization, themes, voices, sound, structure of passages or surahs, etc. While the unit welcomes proposals that explore any of these aspects, this year we particularly encourage papers that utilize linguistic, literary, and thematic perspectives to study the legal and prescriptive material found in Medinan surahs and verses.
The aim of the Qur’an: Manuscripts and Textual Criticism unit is to provide a cross-disciplinary setting for the exploration of the various interconnected issues that arise when questions concerning the Qur’an’s text are investigated through the prism of its manuscript tradition. This latter term encompasses the field of Qur’an manuscripts per se, but also alludes to such information regarding the history of the text that can be gleaned from the citations, marginal notes, and detailed analysis provided in other branches of the Islamic sciences, for example Qur’an commentaries and the qira’at literature. It is hoped that bringing together scholars from a variety of disciplines will serve to enrich and strengthen each of these fields. The Manuscripts and Textual Criticism unit seeks to create a forum for the application of textual criticism to the Qur’anic text attested both in physical manuscripts and within the wider Islamic tradition. It also aims to investigate palaeographic, codicological, and art historical features in the Qur’an’s manuscript tradition. For the 2023 meeting in San Antonio, the unit welcomes papers on any topic within the range of the interests of the Manuscripts and Textual Criticism program unit. For the 2023 meeting in San Antonio, the unit welcomes papers on any topic within the range of the interests of the Manuscripts and Textual Criticism program unit.
The focus of this unit is the Qur’an’s relationship to the Biblical tradition in the broadest sense: the books of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament in the various languages of their original composition and later translations (regardless of a particular book’s status of canonization within specific Jewish or Christian groups), as well as the exegetical, homiletic, and narrative traditions of the Bible in written or oral form. For the 2023 meeting in San Antonio, the Qur’an and the Biblical Tradition unit welcomes proposals that engage any aspect of the relationship between the Bible and the Qur’an.
The Methodology and Hermeneutics Unit invites proposals for papers that focus on the theological and hermeneutical relationship between the Qur’an and extra-Qur’anic sources of truth or authority, including the prophetic Sunna, communal Sunna, consensus (ijma’), the Shi’i Imams and their Sunna, hadith literature, biographical literature (sira), formative exegetical literature (tafsir), the rulings of Muslim scholars (‘ulama’), the Sufi shuyukh or Sufi poetry, mystical unveiling (kashf), studies of the material universe, intellect, and so forth.
For example, proposed papers could consider:
The hermeneutical relationship between the Qur’an and the prophetic Sunna; for instance, in how hadith, sīra, or “occasions of revelation” (asbāb al-nuzūl) impact exegesis;
How principles from Islamicate philosophy (falsafa) or theology (kalām) are used to exegete the Qur’an, or how specific verses become significant within Muslim ontological and cosmological discourse;
How the idea of the Imams as the authoritative interpreters of the Qur’an influences exegesis in Shiʾī Islam;
How Sufi works of literature like the Mathnawī of Rūmi or Divān of Hāfiz distill the Qur’an for popular audiences;
How Sufi exegetes read the Quran through the lenses of mystical principles and spiritual experience;
Ways in which modern and contemporary Qur’anic interpretation adheres to or departs from influential premodern methods of tafsīr, and so forth.
The Surah Studies Unit invites proposals for individual papers on any of the 37 surahs in the 30th juz’ (Juz’ ‘Amma), viz. from Surat al-Naba’ (78, “The Announcement”) to Surat al-Nas (114, “Humanity”). Proposals about any aspect of any surah—or cluster of surahs—are welcome. Proposals which can take our collective thinking in new directions are especially encouraged. These might broach (1) such general themes as: addressee(s), chronology and dating, the eschaton, oaths and oracular language, rhyme and rhythm, or textual cruxes; (2) topics specific to particular surahs, such as: astral imagery and phenomena in Surat al-Buruj (85, “The Constellations”) or Surat al-Takwir (81, “Rolling Up”), non-human beings in Surat al-Nazi‘at (79, “The Dispatchers”), Surat al-‘Alaq (96, “The Clot”), and Surat al-Fil (105, “The War Elephant”), or the language of commerce and trade and wealth in Surat al-Takathur (102, “Vying”) and Surat al-Ma‘un (107, “Liberality?”); or (3) devotional, liturgical and recitational aspects of the surahs and the juz’. The Surah Studies Unit welcomes diverse methods and new approaches. The raison d’être of the Unit is specifically to bring different perspectives into dialogue with one another.
For the 2023 IQSA Annual Meeting in San Antonio, the Qur’an and Late Antiquity program unit invites proposals that utilize various types of material or evidence—be that literary, documentary, or epigraphic—to illuminate the historical context in which the Qur’an was revealed and the early Islamic polity emerged. We are especially interested in papers that present and discuss new and comparative methodologies to approach the interplay between Late Antique phenomenon and the Qur’an.
The Societal Qur’an unit invites proposals for papers that investigate the Qur’an in its lived and societal contexts throughout history, from Late Antiquity to contemporary Late Modernity. Papers might, for instance, discuss topics such as:(1) ritual uses of the Qur’an; (2) practices of teaching the Qur’an; (3) talismanic and medical uses of the Qur’an; (4) the production of manuscript, print, and new media versions of the Qur’an and their commodification; (5) the role of the Qur’an in public debates, political organisation, and identity building; (6) the Qur’an in arts and media; (7) multilingual representations of the Qur’an. Proposals are encouraged that engage with sociological, anthropological, and political science theories and methods in their pursuit of the societal and lived Qur’an.
Questions? Email contactus@iqsaweb.org! We look forward to seeing you in San Antonio!
The deadline for the 2023-24 Andrew Rippin Best Paper Prize is fast approaching! 
In honor of Andrew Rippin, the International Qur’anic Studies Association (IQSA) will award a prize to the best paper delivered at IQSA’s 2023 meeting in San Antonio by a graduate student or early career scholar (Ph.D. awarded 2018 or later). The prize winner will receive $250. In addition, the award committee will provide him/her with detailed feedback and guidance enabling him/her to expand the paper into a scholarly article that qualifies for publication in the Journal of the International Qur’anic Studies Association (JIQSA), subject to peer review.
