Website Launch—Khamseen: Islamic Art History Online

Website Launch—Khamseen: Islamic Art History Online

On October 20, 2020, Khamseen: Islamic Art History Online launched. Khamseen is a free and open-access online platform of digital resources to aid the teaching of Islamic art, architecture, and visual culture. It is sponsored by the Digital Islamic Studies Curriculum (DISC) at the University of Michigan through the support of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

khamseen

Khamseen currently offers a collection of short-form video presentations on a range of topics in the scholarly discipline of Islamic art history. These presentations are intended to support educators, particularly those who face limited access to institutional and archival resources, and to bring new voices, perspectives, methodologies, artworks, and objects into classrooms. Besides catering to undergraduate and graduate students, the materials provided here are also intended to help educate and inspire interested audiences outside of academia. Through this platform, we seek to take the study of Islamic art out to the world, reaching a truly international level of engagement and learning thanks to the possibilities of integrated digital technologies. 

Visit the Khamseen website and follow us on our socials: @khamseenislamicart (Instagram), @TeamKhamseen (Twitter), and @KhamseenIslamicArt (Facebook). 

Those interested in contributing to Khamseen may submit their ideas here.

© International Qur’anic Studies Association, 2020. All rights reserved.

HBK Symposium on Islamic Art

The 8th Biennial Hamad bin Khalifa Symposium on Islamic Art will take place on November 10-11 at VCUarts in Doha, Qatar.

HBKThe theme of the 2019 conference is The Seas and the Mobility of Islamic Art. The symposium will explore the relationship between Islamic art and trade routes, migration, and travel. Among other topics, the speakers will discuss the following:

How did exposure to imported materials and ideas transform formerly local artistic traditions? What role did travel, diplomacy, and gift-giving play in crafting seemingly discrete forms and practices? How are the movements of people, shifting markets for labor, and the uneven distribution skills and techniques, bound up with the formation and metamorphosis of styles? How did the shipment of commodities and curiosities from distant places shape and change social, cultural, and religious institutions? What role do the objects created from such interactions have in enhancing cultural understanding or generating enmity and mistrust? And how has the ever-increasing pace of globalization affected such developments?

The program also includes discussions on the Qur’an and Islamic artwork. A complete program can be found here.

 

Conference Co-chairs

Radha Dalal, Assistant Director of Art History and Assistant Professor of Islamic Art, VCUarts Qatar

Sean Roberts, Interim Director of Art History and Associate Professor of Pre-Modern Mediterranean Art, VCUarts Qatar

Jochen Sokoly, Associate Professor of Islamic Art, VCUarts Qatar

 

Registration is now open.

For more information, write to Marisa Brown at mabrown@vcu.edu.

 

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

 

 

Qur’ans of the Umayyads: Interview with Dr. François Déroche

By Dr. Keith Small

Prof. François Déroche, one of the leading scholars in Arabic manuscript studies, has a new book due out this October: Qur’ans of the Umayyads, A Preliminary Overview, (Leiden, Brill, 2013, 226+46 ill. ISBN 9789004255654). Early Qur’anic manuscript studies is a lively and growing discipline in the academy, and Déroche’s contributions have been essential reading—substantial in providing a framework for understanding the development of the Qur’anic manuscript tradition during the Umayyad and Abbasid eras. This new book promises to bring into focus the current state of knowledge of this very early stage in the Qur’an’s manuscript tradition. I had the privilege of asking him some questions about his new book on behalf of IQSA.

Just for some background information for our readers, what is current your position in Paris?

The direct translation is: “Director of studies at the EPHE, Department of historical and philological sciences”; it involves teaching and research. My chair is titled “History and codicology of the Arabic handwritten book.” I am also co-director of the French-German Coranica project, which aims—among other things—at publishing systematically the earliest MSS of the Qur’an.

Your book, Qur’ans of the Umayyads, A Preliminary Overview, is due to come out in October 2013. How did writing this book challenge or develop your views on early Qur’ans? For example, did it overturn any of your previous views of the early transmission of the text of the Qur’an?

Qur’ans of the Umayyads is the result of a series of conferences given at LUCIS in Leiden. It is to some extent an offshoot of my previous study of the Codex Parisino-petropolitanus which I suggested to date to the third quarter of the first century. As the subtitle (A preliminary overviewputs it , it is a first attempt at understanding the evolution of the mushaf during the Umayyad period. The focus is different from my previous monograph, as I wanted to explore the broader Umayyad context and to offer a chronology of the period. The material used is undated and I had first to determine the basis on which I could date the largely unpublished fragments I had collected over three decades. Reviewing them led me to revise and enlarge my previous typology of the scripts. I had, for instance, to take a more cautious stance on the early hijâzî copies than in the 1983 catalogue of the Bibliothèque nationale collection.

What are some major areas of debate in our field that you think the book informs? For example, does it speak into the issues of dating current manuscripts? Or to the degree of variability of the text in its earliest stages, or the development of Qira’at? (Here you can increase our interest by hinting at what controversial things you might have to say!)

As the book offers a chronology of the MSS, it challenges some views about the canonisation process, as it shows that the development of the handwritten transmission of the text was evolving at a rapid pace, especially the orthography of the Qur’an. It shows that the text was still fluid during the first decades of Umayyad rule and tries to understand also the diversity of the material which I suggest to attribute to this period. Although it is impossible to pinpoint every single copy to a place or a milieu, some clusters emerge. As a whole, one begins to see some rough stages in the history of the mushaf during this period. One can now follow more precisely the introduction of the notation of the short vowels, which of course will lead to new researches into the qirâ’ât—providing them more strength than was the case with the previous conclusions, which relied mainly on the division of the verses. It also draws attention to a field which is yet not researched, that of the intellectual conditions under which the written transmission took place.

How do you see it informing the broader fields of Umayyad studies and Islamic art history?

The book will provide new elements for the history of the Arabic script and shows that the palaeographic approach is a decisive tool for the study of the period. Previous papers, for instance by H.C. von Bothmer, enabled the incorporation of new elements into the history of Islamic art during this period. The book will provide a broader view of this question: it will be possible to speak of an Umayyad art of the book.

This first overview of Qur’anic MSS production under Umayyad rule will also provide new insight towards the position of the ruling elite about the Qur’an. As a whole, it will bring a diversity of new direct witnesses to the awareness of those who are researching the early history of the Qur’an.

Is there anything else you would like to say about the importance of this book?

I hope that I have been able to argue convincingly in favour of the attribution of some MSS to the Umayyad period, but the last chapter can only open the question of the transition from the Umayyad to the Abbasids. I hope that this will help to start new research on this moment, which remains largely shrouded in uncertainty as far as the MSS are concerned.

© International Qur’anic Studies Association, 2013. All rights reserved.

Update – Public Lecture on Tuesday, July 9

By Emran El-Badawi and Gabriel Reynolds

On April 9th we announced our first international meeting to be held in St. Andrews, Scotland this July. We would like to share with you an update concerning the public lecture on Tuesday, July 9th. Dr. Alain George–senior lecturer of Islamic Art at the University of Edinburgh–will do us the honor of delivering a talk “On an Early Qur’anic Palimpsest and its Stratigraphy: Cambridge Or. 1287.” Details can be found below.

Quran and Islamic Tradition in Comparative Perspective
Joint Session With: International Qur’anic Studies Association, Quran and Islamic Tradition in Comparative Perspective
7/09/2013
3:00 PM to 4:15 PM
Room: Auditorium – MBS (17)

Gabriel Said Reynolds, University of Notre Dame, Presiding

Alain George, University of Edinburgh
On an Early Qur’anic Palimpsest and its Stratigraphy: Cambridge Or. 1287 (45 min)

Break (5 min)

Discussion (25 min)

Alain George, Univ. Edinburgh

Alain George, Univ. Edinburgh

Alain George received his first degree from the London School of Economics before moving on to study Islamic Art at the University of Oxford, where he completed his Ph.D. in 2006. He was recently awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize. His publications include The Rise of Islamic Calligraphy. London: Saqi Books (2010).

© International Qur’anic Studies Association, 2013. All rights reserved.