Dear Friends of IQSA,
For over seven years the International Qur’anic Studies Association has made fostering Qur’anic scholarship its mission. The Qur’an is an integral part of world literature, and it has shaped and continues to shape the world in which we live. IQSA is mindful of its members, partners, and friends during this difficult time, and we want to reach out to those among you who can afford to support IQSA when the organization needs it most at a time when our operational costs remain high despite cutting back on operations themselves. By giving to IQSA as you are able, you are promoting high quality scholarship and building bridges across the globe, which in turn has positive ripple effects on high quality education, journalism, publishing and public engagement.
IQSA is the only non-profit learned society exclusively dedicated to convening regular Qur’an conferences in North America and in Muslim majority countries around the world, as well as to publishing rigorous cutting edge scholarship on the Qur’an. Within seven short years IQSA has convened eleven major conferences. These have included large scale conferences in throughout major US cities, Carthage, Palermo, Tunisia and Jogjakarta, Indonesia, as well as co-sponsored panels in Berlin, Germany and St. Andrews, Scotland. IQSA conferences showcase cutting edge research on manuscripts, historical documents, and high tech digital resources, as well as debate critical issues including methodology, hermeneutics and gender. This is possible because IQSA members include the very best scholars in the field.
The fourth issue of the bilingual Journal of the International Qur’anic Studies Association (JIQSA) was released this year, and IQSA’s publications in the Studies in the Qur’ān series are now available from ISD. In addition, IQSA now sponsors free weekly online seminars through Zoom to bring scholars and students of the Qur’an together at a time when many are in social isolation in conjunction with the University of Notre Dame. IQSA members receive free access to JIQSA, the Review of Qur’an Research (RQR), the exclusive member directory (including world renowned Qur’an specialists), and PhD students and recent graduates gain valuable professional development experience. Lifetime and Institutional members carry additional member benefits. IQSA also rewards junior scholars and international academics with the opportunity to learn from colleagues around the world and publish their research. By giving, you help IQSA keep membership dues low and you reward those members of our community who need it most.
It goes without saying that the current political climate has made our task — especially critical scholarship and building bridges — more important than ever. As academics, professionals and philanthropists we have a duty to support the Humanities and Social Sciences at a time when they are under threat. This also means we have the opportunity to bring about a much more intellectual discussion of the Qur’an when the public needs it most.
IQSA was founded by a generous grant from the Henry Luce Foundation, and is now funded through the generous support of its members, partners and friends. Please take time this #GivingTuesday to DONATE NOW to further IQSA’s mission across the globe.
Most gratefully,
Emran El-Badawi, Executive Director
International Qur’anic Studies Association
http://www.iqsaweb.org | contact@iqsaweb.org
In his review, Rikab writes “Recent scholarship, especially following the contributions of Angelica Neuwirth and Nicolai Sinai, has increasingly stressed that the Qurʾān is better understood through an examination of the Late Antique period and the multiple religious traditions that were active in the Hijaz and the shām region, which included Christian, Jewish, and Manichean traditions. In ‘Evolution of the Early Qurʾān’, Daniel Beck offers a new contextualization of several early Meccan sūrahs in the Qurʾān against this Late Antique background, and situates his contribution in correcting tendencies among scholars to see these early sūrahs either as obscure, or as secondary to the later corpus, or as representing fossilized relics of earlier traditions….” 
Description: Over the course of his career, Bruce B. Lawrence has explored the central elements of Islamicate civilization and Muslim networks. The Bruce B. Lawrence Reader: Islam beyond Borders assembles over two dozen selections of Lawrence’s key writings, which range from analyses of premodern and modern Islamic discourses, practices, and institutions to methodological reflections on the contextual study of religion. Modeling what it means to study Islam beyond political and disciplinary borders, as well as a commitment to linking empathetic imagination with critical reflection, this Reader presents Lawrence’s prescient contributions to the study of Islam in its broadest arc.
About the Author: Laura Hassan is Faculty Associate of the Oriental Institute, University of Oxford, where she teaches Islamic philosophy and theology. Her research to date has focused on post-classical developments in Ash’arī kalām in the aftermath of Ibn Sīnā’s groundbreaking philosophy. More broadly, she is interested in theological issues that arise where competing world-views meet, whether at the intersection of theology and philosophy, at the boundaries of religions, or where the supposedly distinct realms of science and religion come face-to-face, both in our times and historically. She has studied Arabic in Oxford, Fes and Alexandria, and received her PhD from SOAS, University of London.
In his review, Pregill writes “Stephen Shoemaker’s The Apocalypse of Empire builds upon the methodology, and some of the most provocative conclusions, of the author’s earlier monograph The Death of a Prophet.
Impostures 
Publisher’s Overview: Qurʾān Quotations Preserved on Papyrus Documents, 7th-10th Centuries is the first book on the Qurʾān’s Sitz im Leben, i.e. on how the Qurʾān was quoted in Arabic original letters, legal deeds, and amulets. Qurʾān Quotations also serves as an in-depth exploration of the radiocarbon dating of documents and Qurʾānic manuscripts.
Publisher’s Overview:
About the author: