2016 Year in Review & Happy 2017

2016 Year in Review & Happy 2017

It’s been a fruitful year for IQSA. In 2016 we furthered our work in the Review of Qur’anic Research (RQR), helped launch the the Qur’an Seminar Commentary,  and completed work on the first issue of the Journal of the International Qur’an Studies Association, now in design and production. We also welcomed hundreds of friends and colleagues from around the world to our  Annual Meeting in San Antonio. As the year winds to a close we reflect on our association’s achievements with gratitude to our members, contributors, and readers around the world. We also take this time to renew our dedication to providing valuable resources and opportunities for collaboration in Qur’anic studies in 2017.

2016 has also come with its challenges as well. We acknowledge the passing of renowned Qur’an scholars–and dear friends– during 2016. These include Ali Mabrouk as well as Andrew Rippin. The outpouring of support for the Andrew Rippin Best Paper Prize, and professor Rippin’s legacy has been unprecedented–thank you.

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The work of IQSA wouldn’t be possible without the active support of our members. So start your new year off right by joining or renewing your membership in IQSA! Three tiered membership remains in place for 2017 ($25, $50, $75), with students and select junior or international colleagues paying as little as US$25 (USD). We do our best to keep membership dues low while offering high quality, academic and professional member benefits. Your membership and support are what make this exchange possible–thank you.

To become a member, please click HERE, where you will be asked to fill out a membership form and pay the appropriate membership fees. After completing this process, you will receive login information to save for your records and use to access member benefits at any time. You can then create your own profile for our member directory.

Membership benefits for 2017 include:

We appreciate your membership!

U.S. taxpayers! Are you still looking to make an end-of-year tax deductible charitable donation? Consider supporting Qur’anic scholarship with a donation to IQSA. We are a registered 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization eligible to receive tax-deductible charitable contributions. You can donate to IQSA online by clicking HERE.

Finally, please do not forget to follow our Blog, Twitter and Facebook accounts, and to join the private IQSA Discussion Group. Thanks for your support!

We wish you a very Happy Holidays! كل عام وأنتم بخير

© International Qur’anic Studies Association, 2016. All rights reserved.

Arabs and Empires Before Islam

IQSA members – the final Review of Qur’anic Research for 2016 is up! In the latest installment of RQR, Dr. Ilkka Lindstedt reviews Arabs and Empires Before Islam (Greg Fisher, ed. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 2015). With contributions by over 20 leading experts of pre-Islamic Arabia, it is a formidable achievement in the field of pre-Islamic Arabian studies. It presents the history of Arabia from antiquity to the 630s CE, taking into account the subject’s diversity and presenting a variety of source materials.

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Much importance is given to the surviving material evidence in the present volume. It provides, for example, interpretations of significant new inscriptions and reinterpretations of previously published ones, many of which have previously been dispersed in hard-to-access publications, and explains their worth for the study of history. It has been (and unfortunately still is) a common habit of Arabists to look first and foremost at the Arabic historiography of the Islamic era and other literary evidence when discussing pre-Islamic Arabia. This is probably a question of habit and training: Arabists and Islamicists usually know well, for example, the Arabic works of the ninth–tenth centuries by Ibn al-Kalbī (d. 206/821-22), Ibn Hishām (d. 218/833), and al-Ṭabarī (d. 310/923), but they are not aware of the magnitude of the surviving pre-Islamic Arabian epigraphic record (numbering almost 100,000 known items at the moment).

Not an IQSA member? Registration for the 2017 calendar year is open! Click HERE to sign up for benefits like access to the Review of Qur’anic Research and much more!

 

© International Qur’anic Studies Association, 2016. All rights reserved.

Les trois piliers de l’Islam: Une lecture anthropologique du Coran

chabbi-coverIn the latest installment of the Review of Qur’anic Research, Gabriel Said Reynolds reviews Jacqueline Chabbi’s Les trois piliers de l’Islam: Une lecture anthropologique du Coran. In this volume, Chabbi makes the case that Islam as we know it from medieval sources is not the same as Islam as it was in its original Arabian context. According to Chabbi, academic scholars and pious Muslims alike too often fail to recognize elements of Islam which were introduced in later centuries, and too often assume that medieval ideas about the Qurʾan reflect what the Qurʾan meant to its original, Arabian audience. Les trois piliers de l’Islam is her effort to set things straight, to recover Islam’s original message.

Full access to the Review of Qur’anic Research (RQR) is available in the members-only area of our IQSA website. Not an IQSA member? Join today to enjoy RQR and additional member benefits!

Qur’anic Studies, a Political Philology?

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Cover of Koranforschung – eine politische philologie? (Walter de Gruyter, 2014)

In the latest installment of the Review of Qur’anic Research 2 no. 5, Mareike Koertner reviews Angelika Neuwirth’s Koranforschung – eine politische Philologie? (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2014). In this book Neuwirth presents a concise work of her larger theories of contextualizing the qur’anic text within the intellectual framework of Late Antiquity. She suggests that the study of the reception of biblical materials in the Qurʾan must be analyzed by considering the cultural and religious context in which the Qurʾan emerged and evolved. The qur’anic text heavily interacted with its audiences and is a result of a process of cultural re-negotiation that included elements from the environment in Mecca, the living heirs of the biblical traditions who resided in Medina, and, Muhammad and his community. In answering her question of if the qur’anic studies is a political philology, Neuwirth explains the various meanings of “political.”

Full access to the Review of Qur’anic Research (RQR) is available in the members-only area of our IQSA website. Not an IQSA member? Join today to enjoy RQR and additional member benefits!

The Aesthetic Experience of the Qur’an

kermani coverIn the latest installment of the Review of Qur’anic Research 2, no. 3, Lauren E. Osborne reviews Navid Kermani’s God is Beautiful: The Aesthetic Experience of the Quran (Malden, Mass.: Polity, 2015). In this book, Kermani argues that the aesthetic experience of the Qurʾan has always been linked to understanding the text as a whole since its initial reception. This aesthetic experience is mainly focused on the hearing. Through his analysis, Kermani brings an innovative hermeneutic strategy to Qur’anic studies. His work also provides an innovative way of analyzing early accounts of the reception of the Qur’an. His work covers close readings of an impressive number of sources, bringing into focus an essential aspect of experiencing the Qur’an.

Full access to the Review of Qur’anic Research (RQR) is available in the members-only area of our IQSA website. Not an IQSA member? Join today to enjoy RQR and additional member benefits!

The Jews of Medina and the Challenge of Early Islamic Historiography

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Cover of Mazuz, Religious and Spiritual Lives of the Jews of Medina (Brill, 2014). Image from brill.com.

In the latest installment of the Review of Qur’anic Research 2, no. 2, Michael Pregill reviews Haggai Mazuz’s The Religious and Spiritual Lives of the Jews of Medina (Leiden: Brill, 2014). This work not only seeks to establish the historicity of much of the data the traditional sources offer us on the culture, customs, and traditions of the Jewish communities of the Ḥijāz in Muhammad’s time, but proposes to offer a conclusive demonstration of the squarely halakhic nature of these Jews. According to Mazuz, much of what the classical Islamic sources relate about Muhammad’s Jewish contemporaries can be correlated with data about Jewish ideas and practices found in the Babylonian Talmud and other mainstream rabbinic sources, which he interprets as proof that these Arabian communities were essentially rabbinic in orientation.

Full access to the Review of Qur’anic Research (RQR) is available in the members-only area of our IQSA website. Not an IQSA member? Join today to enjoy RQR and additional member benefits!

© International Qur’anic Studies Association, 2016. All rights reserved.

Twenty Years of Reading the Qur’an as a Literary Text

neuwirthIn the latest installment of the Review of Qur’anic Research 2, no. 1, Süleyman Dost reviews Angelika Neuwirth, Scripture, Poetry, and the Making of a Community: Reading the Qur’an as a Literary Text (Oxford University Press/Institute of Ismaili Studies, 2014), the first thorough collection of Angelika Neuwirth’s scholarship in English. Neuwirth, a leading scholar of Qur’anic studies at the Freie Universität Berlin, treats the Qur’an as a coherent literary corpus and grounds the text in its late antique and biblical setting with a special interest in its emergence through an ever-evolving communication process. The book under review brings together in a single volume fourteen of Neuwirth’s articles that were published in varying contexts over twenty years. Thus the book embodies the leading edges of first-tier Qur’an scholarship and in the process sheds light on pressing issues of the field today.

Full access to the Review of Qur’anic Research (RQR) is available in the members-only area of our IQSA website. Not an IQSA member? Join today to enjoy RQR and additional member benefits!

© International Qur’anic Studies Association, 2016. All rights reserved.

Variant Readings of the Qur’an

In the latest installment of the Review of Qur’anic Research 1, no. 9, Hamza M. Zafer reviews Shady Hekmat Nasser, The Transmission of the Variant Readings of the Qurʾān: The Problem of Tawātur and the Emergence of Shawādhdh (Brill, 2013). This book lays out the processes whereby certain readings of the Qurʾan were deemed canonical while others were deemed deviant (shādhdh; pl. shawādhdh) by the early tradition. Nasser brings together an eclectic selection of traditional sources and uses a Motzkian hadith critical methodology to shed light on the development of Muslim scripturalism and its connections to wider ideological transformations in early Islamic thought.

Full access to the Review of Qur’anic Research (RQR) is available in the members-only area of our IQSA website. Not an IQSA member? Join today to enjoy RQR and additional member benefits!

© International Qur’anic Studies Association, 2015.

Translating the Qur’an

In the latest installment of Review of Qur’anic Research 1, no. 8, Johanna Pink reviews M. Brett Wilson’s new book, Translating the Qurʾan in an Age of Nationalism: Print Culture and Modern Islam in Turkey (Oxford University Press, 2014). At the dawn of the twentieth century, many Muslims considered Qur’an translations to be impermissible and unviable. Nevertheless, printed and translated versions of the Qur’an have gained widespread acceptance by Muslim communities, and now play a central, and in some quarters, a leading role in how the Qur’an is read and understood in the modern world. Focusing on the Ottoman Empire and Turkey, and following the debates to Russia, Egypt, Indonesia, and India, Wilson’s book tries to answer the question of how this revolution in Qur’anic book culture occurred, considering both intellectual history as well the processes by which the Qur’an became a modern book that could be mechanically reproduced and widely owned.

For a long time, Qur’an translations have attracted little scholarly attention. Wilson’s book reflects growing interest among scholars to study such texts and the reasons and circumstances of their production, which can help to shed light on the place of the Qur’an in the lives of those who engage with it in different non-Arabic languages.

Full access to the Review of Qur’anic Research (RQR) is available in the members-only area of our IQSA website. Not an IQSA member? Join today to enjoy RQR and additional member benefits!

© International Qur’anic Studies Association, 2015.

Reason and Scripture: Questions of Exegetical Authority

In the latest installment of Review of Qur’anic Research 1, no. 7, Rodrigo Adem reviews Tariq Jaffer’s new book, Rāzī: Master of Qurʾānic Interpretation and Theological Reasoning (Oxford University Press, 2015). Fakhr al-Din al-Razi (d. 1209 C.E.) had a pervasive influence on Sunnī and Shīʿī theological discourses from the thirteenth century to the present day. Jaffer’s book explores how al-Razi’s approach to the Qur’an embodied pivotal intellectual developments in the Islamic scholarly milieu of his time, focusing in particular on one specific aspect of al-Razi’s exegetical priorities, the so-called “rule of interpretation (qānūn al-taʾwīl),” wherein “reason” (ʿaql) is privileged over “scripture” (naql) for authoritative qur’anic exegesis in matters of theological import.

Full access to the Review of Qur’anic Research (RQR) is available in the members-only area of our IQSA website. Not an IQSA member? Join today to enjoy RQR and additional member benefits!

© International Qur’anic Studies Association, 2015.

Interpreting the Qur’an in Context

In the latest installment of IQSA’s Review of Qur’anic Research 1, no. 6, Andrew C. Smith reviews Abdullah Saeed’s Reading the Qur’an in the Twenty-First Century: A Contextualist Approach (Routledge, 2014). Smith’s review addresses important and persistent questions raised in the book about the location and stability of textual meaning, and about the challenge of interpreting a traditional text in ever-changing social scenarios.

Full access to the Review of Qur’anic Research (RQR) is available in the members-only area of our IQSA website. Not an IQSA member? Join today to enjoy RQR and additional member benefits!

© International Qur’anic Studies Association, 2015. All rights reserved.

The Qur’an’s Legal Culture

In the latest installment of IQSA’s Review of Qur’anic Research 1, no. 5, Lev Weitz reviews Holger Zellentin, The Qurʾān’s Legal Culture (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013). In this book, Zellentin considers the apparent affinities between the Qur’an and the Didascalia Apostolorum, a late antique Syriac church order that took shape between the third and seventh centuries CE. The Didascalia records a significant number of the laws promulgated in the Qur’an, and the Didascalia’s legal narratives about the Israelites and Jesus, as well as the legal and theological vocabularies of its Syriac version, show kinship with the Arabic Qur’an. Zellentin argues that the legal tradition evident in the Didascalia was a key element of the “legal culture” of the Qur’an’s seventh-century milieu, and that the Qur’an’s own conception of a prophetically delivered, divine law for Gentiles emerged both in conversation with and against that precedent.

Full access to the Review of Qur’anic Research (RQR) is available in the members-only area of our IQSA website. Not an IQSA member? Join today to enjoy RQR and additional member benefits!

© International Qur’anic Studies Association, 2015. All rights reserved.