Call for Papers: Pre-Modern Comparative Literary Practice in the Multilingual Islamic World(s)

Call for Papers: Pre-Modern Comparative Literary Practice in the Multilingual Islamic World(s)

A virtual conference entitled Pre-Modern Comparative Literary Practice in the Multilingual Islamic World(s) will take place July 12-24, 2021. This conference is co-organized by Huda Fakhreddine (University of Pennsylvania), David Larsen (New York University), and Hany Rashwan (University of Birmingham), and hosted by the Oxford Comparative Criticism and Translation Research Centre (OCCT), University of Oxford.

medsemDescription: The premodern Islamic world was multilingual and multicultural, and by necessity was continually engaged in comparative critical practices. Mapping the interconnected trajectories of these practices, everywhere they arose between Urdu, Persian, Turkish, Arabic, and other language traditions of Asia and Africa, is the aim of this conference. We invite scholars to employ methodologies based on direct engagement with primary sources that negotiate the multilingual Islamic world(s) in ways that are overlooked or misunderstood by Comparative Literature.

For most of Islamic intellectual history, the literary analysis of discourse has been carried out in the domain of balāghah, and its Arabic terms—e.g., sariqah (theft, but also intertextuality), muʿāraḍah (rivalry, but also parody), muṭābaqah (correspondence, but also antithesis), muwāzanah (collation, but also comparison) etc.—signify concepts and categories that are different from those of Western criticism. Likewise, the traditions of grammar, lexicography, poetic meter, Quranic exegesis, hadith criticism, jurisprudence, theology, philosophy, and mysticism developed their own Arabophone conceptual resources, which were applied throughout the Islamic world. We invite participants to investigate the ramifications of such terms, and the consequences of their application across the multilingual Arabic world, fruitful and otherwise. Participants are invited to extend Islamicate poetics beyond Islamic traditions, and contemplate how contemporary critical theory might be enriched by comparative methods of the Islamic world. To bridge the frontier dividing modern literary theory from Islamic Studies is another aim of this conference. We mean to challenge the Eurocentrism of modern Comparative Literature as we invite dialogue across the disciplines of comparative rhetoric, poetics, philosophy, and Islamic Studies.

Topics

  • Translation and non-translation in the Islamic world
  • Translinguistic adaptations of genre and form
  • Multilingual scholars and scholarly practice
  • Nationalism and polyglossia
  • Minorities, shibboleths, and Arabolects
  • Multilingual lexicology and exegesis
  • Catachresis and Creative Misreadings
  • Textual practices, media, and reception

**Abstract Guidelines**

Abstracts (max. 400 words) should be sent in a word document, along with a short biography that contains academic affiliations and publications. Please use the IJMES transliteration system. The deadline for all submissions is November 17th, 2020. Please send the abstract to the conference’s email: premulticomparison@gmail.com

Notification of abstract acceptance is issued by December 25th, 2020.

Talks will be allotted 20 minutes for the presentation with 10 minutes for questions and answers on Zoom.

The proceeding will be co-edited by the organizers and published in early 2022 with Oxford University Press.

For more information see: https://www.occt.ox.ac.uk/pre-modern-comparative-literary-practice-multilingual-islamic-worlds

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

Podcast Series: Introducing the Qur’ān

Professor Nicolai Sinai, of the University of Oxford, has recorded four short talks funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council which aim to introduce the general public to aspects of current research on the Qur’ān’s historical context and literary character. These are now available as podcasts online here:

podcast

Link: https://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/series/introducing-quran

Although most IQSA members will be familiar with more specialised scholarship on many of the issues covered in these talks, they may be useful for teaching purposes.

The four 10 – 20 minute talks are entitled:

  1. Hovering about the Qur’an without entering into it? On the academic study of the Qur’an, asks what it means to study the Qur’ān historically and considers how historically orientated research on the Qur’ān relates to religious belief and traditional Islamic scriptural interpretation.
  2. Rekindling Prophecy: The Qur’an in its historical milieu, examines the historical context in which the material now collected in the Qur’ān was first promulgated with special attention being paid to the various groups addressed by the Qur’ān.
  3. Confirming and Clarifying: The Qur’an in conversation with earlier Judaeo-Christian traditions, discusses the fact that the Qur’an’s original audience must have been familiar with earlier Jewish and Christian traditions, which the Qur’an claims both to “confirm” and “clarify”. Narratives about Abraham and the death of Pharaoh serve to exemplify what this means.
  4. The Qur’an as literature, takes as its starting point that the Qur’ān’s compelling literary aspect was the main reason it was able to establish itself as a text believed to constitute divine revelation. It further asks how Islamic and modern Western scholars approach the Qur’ān’s literary dimension.

Sinai

Many thanks to Professor Sinai for sharing this free resource.

© International Qur’anic Studies Association, 2018. All rights reserved.

From Medina to Oxford, from Codex to the Cloud: Scenes from the Life of the Qur’an

Venue:            Lecture Theatre, Weston Library, Oxford 
Speaker(s):    Nicolai Sinai, University of Oxford; Alasdair Watson & Keith Small, Bodleian Libraries
Date/Time:     30 May 2017, 4:00- 6:00 PM
codex
In a collaborative presentation, three Oxford scholars will present crucial waystations in the life of the Qur’an. Nicolai Sinai will guide the audience through current research seeking to reconstruct the literary genesis of the Qur’anic texts in late antique Arabia; Alasdair Watson will examine how early modern collectors and adventurers first introduced Qur’anic manuscripts to European libraries, including the Bodleian; and Keith Small will show how Qur’anic codices that have been dispersed by the vagaries of early modern manuscript hunting can now be virtually reunited by cutting-edge digital technology.
 
All are welcome but tickets must be reserved in advance.
 
For more details, see:

 

© International Qur’anic Studies Association, 2017. All rights reserved.

‘The Digital Muṣḥaf Project’: A New and Unique Resource for Qur’an Manuscript Studies

The Oriental Manuscripts Division of the Special Collections at the Bodleian Library of the University of Oxford would like to announce the launch of a new portal for viewing the dispersed fragments of early Qur’ān manuscripts called ‘The Digital Muṣḥaf Project’, which can be accessed at http://digitalmushaf.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/ . Here you can view 85 folios of high definition colour images of a parchment Qur’ān manuscript in page order as if they were physically reunited in one location.

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We are launching this portal with the modest beginning of reuniting 85 of 334 known folios of one Qur’ān codex, a 3rd/9th or early 4th/10th century Abbasid Kufic manuscript which is dispersed over at least 10 museum and library collections. The 85 folios we have chosen for the initial project are from the collections of the Bodleian Library, the Bibliotheque Nationale de France, the Chester Beatty Library, and the Herzog August Bibliotek at Wolfenbüttal, Germany. We desire to complete the reunification of this manuscript in a continuing project as well as add other early dispersed parchment Qur’āns.
 
Alasdair Watson, the Bahari Curator of Persian Manuscripts and the Curator of Islamic  Manuscripts at the Bodleian Library, and Dr. Keith E. Small, a Qur’ānic Manuscript Consultant and formerly Honorary Fellow to the Bodleian Library’s Centre for the Study of the Book, are co-leading this project and maintaining the site.
 
This portal represents the first attempt to reunite a dispersed Qur’an manuscript online. It holds out great promise for setting a new standard of both access to manuscripts, and completeness in the presentation of basic bibliographic and codicological information for scholarly research. In making images of manuscripts from varying collections available through a common portal, it presents a cost effective way of gaining access to images, and also provides a very direct advertisement of the treasures held in the various collections involved. It also will assist in the conservation of these important and fragile resources.
 
We gratefully acknowledge funding from The Islamic Manuscript Association, the assistance of Computer Services at Oxford University, and the cooperation of the four libraries mentioned which have all made this portal possible.
 
Please feel free to use this site for your research of early Qur’ān manuscripts. Also, if you come across a leaf or folio that might be from this parchment but is unknown to us, please let us know so that we can investigate it and if possible, include it on the site. Please also let us know your suggestions for improving the site. The Digital Muṣḥaf Project email address is: digital.mushaf@bodleian.ox.ac.uk. 

 

© International Qur’anic Studies Association, 2017. All rights reserved.