International Conference: Epigraphy, the Qur’an, and the Religious Landscape of Arabia
International Conference: Epigraphy, the Qur’an, and the Religious Landscape of Arabia
Conference
The University of Tübingen Qur’an as a Source for Late Antiquity Research Project team announces “Epigraphy, the Qur’an, and the Religious Landscape of Arabia” to be held September 8–10, 2022. This three-day international conference will bring together specialists in epigraphy as well as scholars of the Qurʾān with the aim of exploring how recent epigraphic and archaeological findings and research have been changing our understanding of the Qurʾān and the Arabian religious, cultural, and political landscape.
A wide range of archaeological finds is rapidly expanding our knowledge of the pre-Islamic cultural milieu and the political structures of the Arabian Peninsula during Late Antiquity, and thereby of the Qur’ān’s cultural context. This material can offer a complementary reading to the literary accounts on pre-Islamic Arabia, which were mostly composed outside Arabia, or long after the late antique period. Accordingly, the conference seeks to integrate new archaeological finds with ongoing studies on the genesis of the Qur’ān, its Arabian background, and the broader cultural milieu of pre-Islamic Arabia with a special focus on “late” Late Antiquity at the dawn of Islam. Themes to be addressed include, but are not limited to:
Religious Identities and Religious Landscape
Naming God in pre-Islamic Arabia
Ethnicity and literacy
Cultic continuity
Bearing in mind the fluidity of identities and traditions during Late Antiquity, we also accommodate papers that do not fall into these exact categories. We believe there is a growing need to make the recent exciting discoveries of scholars working on the Qur’ān and Arabia more widely accessible to historians who may not have a solid background in archaeology and epigraphy. Aiming to foster discussion between scholars, each panel will be paired with a specialist on the Qur’ān or on the wider history of Arabia.
The research presentations will be open to the public upon timely pre-registration and streamed online.
CALL FOR PAPERS: “Persia and Arabia in Late Antiquity: Bridging the Ancient and Islamic” November 17-20, 2021
Event Information: ASOR Annual Meeting (Chicago, IL): “Persia and Arabia in Late Antiquity: Bridging the Ancient and Islamic,” November 17-20, 2021
Session Chairs: Arvin Maghsoudlou (Southern Methodist University), and Kyle Longworth (University of Chicago)
SESSION DESCRIPTION: Scholarship has long recognized late antiquity as a transitional period separating the worlds of antiquity from those of the middle ages. For Persia and Arabia, late antiquity is historiographically divided, if not bookmarked, by the emergence of the Islamic faith and conquest of the Sassanian Empire. On the one hand, this historiographical division gives the impression that Islam as a political and religious phenomenon was a definitive rupture between Sassanian and Islamic Persia. On the other hand, pre-Islamic Arabia has received rather scant scholarly attention in comparison with its Byzantine and Sassanian neighbors. This session aims to bridge the historiographical divide by exploring elements of late antique Arabia and Persia that do not map conveniently onto political and religious history.
The session is open to topics on the history, art history, and archaeology of late antiquity in Arabia and Persia (200-800 C.E.), especially those with a focus on cultural continuities between the pre-Islamic and ‘early’ Islamic period.
General Instructions for Individual Submissions: https://www.asor.org/am/2021/call-for-papers-2021
The deadline to submit abstracts is March 15, 2021. Please note that this session will be held in-person.
Abstracts (max 250 words) must be submitted electronically through ASOR’s Abstracts Online Management System.
Call for Papers: Syriac and Arabia Symposium (Hugoye Symposium VI)
Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute is holding its sixth Hugoye symposium on April 24-25, 2020, at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. This year’s topic is Syriac and Arabia. While there has been much on the contribution of Syriac to the Abbasid translation movement, research on the connections between Syriac and Arabic before Islam and during the early years of Islam is in its infancy. This workshop aims to bring together scholars who cross the Syriac studies and Arabic/Islamic studies divide in the hope of forming a framework for the study of the Syriac-Arabic interface. Scholars interested in participating may send via email a proposal between 750 and 1,000 words. Submission deadline is February 29, 2020. Submissions are to be sent via email directly to George A. Kiraz at gkiraz@ias.edu. Scholars are expected to fund their travel to/from and accommodation in Princeton. The Institute will provide meals and a conference celebratory dinner. Speakers will be invited to contribute to a collected volume on an agreed-upon theme.
The Arabian Context of the Qur’an: Dissertation Highlight
by Süleyman Dost*
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?
The “inscription of Abraha;” image courtesy of the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institute, http://www.mnh.si.edu/epigraphy/e_pre-islamic/fig04_sabaean.htm.
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.
The University of Tübingen Qur’an as a Source for Late Antiquity Research Project team announces “Epigraphy, the Qur’an, and the Religious Landscape of Arabia” to be held September 8–10, 2022. This three-day international conference will bring together specialists in epigraphy as well as scholars of the Qurʾān with the aim of exploring how recent epigraphic and archaeological findings and research have been changing our understanding of the Qurʾān and the Arabian religious, cultural, and political landscape.
Beth Mardutho: 