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 the 2021 hybrid Annual Meeting in San Antonio, TX by a graduate student or early career scholar (Ph.D. awarded 2016 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). Submissions should be sent to contactus@iqsaweb.org by January 5, 2022. The prize winner will be announced by February 1, 2022. The winner should then be prepared to submit a fully revised version of the winning article by April 1, 2022. Publication of the final version is contingent upon review by the award committee and editorial staff of JIQSA.
The International Qurʾanic Studies Association is delighted to announce that the fourth annual Andrew Rippin Best Paper Prize (open to papers delivered by early career scholars at the 2020 virtual Annual Meeting) has been awarded to Avigail Noy for her paper: “Qur’anic Imagery Between the Literary and the Literal.” 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 Professor 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 fifth annual Andrew Rippin Best Paper Prize will follow the 2021 IQSA Annual Meeting.
An abstract of the award winning paper follows:
Qur’anic Imagery between the Literary and the Literal
Medieval Arabic literary criticism has long been recognized as a venue for Qur’anic interpretation alongside formal works of exegesis (tafsir). The volume Literary Structures of Religious Meaning in the Qur’an, edited by Issa Boullata in 2000, alone contains two articles on literary interpretations of the Qur’an by alSharif al-Raḍi (d. 406/1016), a poet and critic of Shi‘i background. In this paper I continue the work done by M. Ayoub and especially K. Abu Deeb by exploring how some of the Qur’an’s vivid images were analyzed by language scholars on one hand and literary critics and exegetes on the other. Centering on images that have a lexical basis in the vocabulary of Old Arabic (the language spoken at and before the time of the Prophet), at least as evinced by the dictionaries, I examine how the literal and the literary interact. Things become interesting when philologists such as al-Zamakhshari (d. 538/1144) are taken into account: being a collector of a dictionary himself (Asas al-balagha), he offers diverging interpretations on given verses depending on whether the work is his dictionary or his exegesis (al-Kashshaf). This leads to the thorny question of the reliability of dictionaries for “literal” meanings of Qur’anic expressions, as the early lexicographers may have depended on Qur’anic idiom alone for the makeup of certain entries. Looking at a wide range of Arabic lexical and major works of exegesis and literary criticism, I take a few verses as test-cases, including Q al-Takwir 81:18, “By dawn, when it sighs,” Q al-Hashr 59:9, “those who made their dwelling in the residence and in belief,” Q 2:16, “their trade reaps no profit,” Q al-Nahl 16:112, “God made it taste the garment of famine,” Q 2:20, “Lightning almost snatches away their sight,” Q 2:7, “God has sealed their hearts,” Q 2:25, “Gardens graced with flowing streams,” and the famous Q al-Isra 17:24, “wing of humility.”
Avigail Noy is Assistant Professor of Arabic Studies in the University of Texas at Austin. Noy holds a PhD in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from Harvard (2016) and an M.A. and B.A. in Arabic and Islamic studies from Tel Aviv University. Her research focuses on the pre-modern Arabic literary and linguistic traditions, including poetics, rhetoric, literary criticism, grammar, Islamic hermeneutics, and adab. Her recent articles include “The Legacy of Abd al-Qāhir alJurjānī in the Arabic East before al-Qazwīnī’s Talkhīṣ alMiftāḥ” (Journal of Abbasid Studies, 2018) and “Reading Poetry with Sībawayhi: Ittisāʿ/Saʿat al-Kalām and Metaphorical Thinking in the Kitāb” (in From Sībawayhi to Aḥmad Haṣan al-Zayyāt, Brill 2020). Her current book project explores the development of Arabic poetics in the thirteenth century.
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.
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.
Dr. 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).