The Qur’an and Scriptural Studies

[Music] been deputized by our leaders this morning professor weather.gov and Harry Bester masion to call everybody here to order my name is thought of Massoud and I'm the director of the L will even follow Islamic Studies program here at Harvard we are one of the organizations that has a great honor of co-sponsoring this event in honor of Professor Graham the other institutions are the Harvard Divinity School the center for Middle Eastern Studies the Center for the Study of world religions the science religion and culture program at the Divinity School the Department of Near Eastern languages and civilizations and I think the breadth of organizations that have come together to make today possible is a testament to the kind of person and scholar that Professor Graham is I've known him for about ten years ever since I got here to Harvard I've always been in awe of him both as the embodiment of what a Harvard professor should be and as the embodiment of an adult sort of who I want to be when I grow up and to have been asked to be his successor as the chair of the other lead program which I think of as the kind of institutional embodiment of what he has tried to do over the course of his 50-year career here which is to deepen and broaden the study of Islam in the West and at Harvard it's deeply humbling and I could not resist the opportunity to honor him so I will now turn things over to the organizer of today's event our leader another tremendous scholar and adult who I aspire to grow up to be like and that is Professor Ahmed Rekha thank you [Applause] thank you so much sorry I don't think of myself as okay we'll try so thank you all for coming and first I would like to thank Harry and Miriam for all the work that they have done here and for and also the dean's office at the Divinity School for all their work and helping organize this there are so many people who are not in the room today who really wanted to be in the room we've been contacting a lot of the people who worked with Bill for years before and there are so many people around Harvard and around the world really that really wanted to be here but at a moment we had to choose a date and by choosing a day there are so many other people that were not able to come but the idea of the fact that all these people wanted to come the fact that all of you are here today is a story mentioned testament to the work that bill has done over the years and and in when we started Harry and I started talking about organizing this particular event Bill's idea was that if if you are going to do an event that this needs to be or that he would prefer an event that would allow people to talk and have a conversation which both Harry and I believed was another instance of Bill's intellectual generosity the idea that an event of that sort should still be dedicated to people spending time with each other and talking and discussing and having a fruitful conversation so on his request we're going to delay all the toasts to dinner he didn't request the donor this is something that I'm adding and we're gonna have to have it I'm sorry but for now we're going to continue we're going to start to have such a you know the talks and discussions from such wonderful group of people that we have today before before we start I would like to just take a few minutes to say a few things from about bills career over the years Bill Graham received his PhD from Harvard University in 1973 and he has been a member of the Harvard faculty since 73 and was a member of the Faculty of Divinity here from 2002 to 2018 he served as the director of the center for Middle Eastern Studies the master of career house the chair of the Department of Near Eastern languages and civilizations that share of the Committee on the study of religion the core curriculum committee on foreign cultures at Harvard and the program at Waleed program of Islamic studies and of course he served as the Dean of Harvard Divinity School from 2002 to 2012 bill scholarly work as we as you all know is focused in early Islamic religious history and textual traditions particularly the Quran and hadith and on topics in the global history of religion some of his many publications include Divine Word and prophetic word in early Islam 1977 beyond the written word oral aspects of Scripture in the history of religion in 1987 three phase one God co-authored with drew with Jacob Posner and Bruce Chilton in 2002 and in 2010 Islamic and comparative religious studies selected writings bill in 2012 received the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Journal of law and religion and he also has held a number of distinguished fellowships from the Guggenheim the Alexander been humbled and many others I think the when one looks at this and this is obviously you know it's a much longer CD I just selected things because you're not here to listen to me but I think what one sees immediately is the profound impact that bill has had on the study of Islam around the field and also more prompt even most prominently here at Harvard bill has been leading the various institutes and bodies on campus that have sort of that that made or that allowed for the study of slamming Harvard and as such he has contributed to the making of definitely the field at Harvard as we know it and to the field at large and a lot of the work that many people many of us and many people outside the room are doing owes a lot to what Bill has accomplished so before I introduce the chair of the first panel please join me in congratulating so for our first okay so our the chair of the first panel I will introduce her professor come to be patent it's traffic has been terrible in the i-90 today so she's a little late but she will be here momentarily she's parking professor Kimberly Patton is professor of the comparative and historical study of religion she received her master's and PhD from Harvard she's pill she specializes in ancient Greek religion and archeology with research interest in archaic sanctuary and iconography of sacrifice she also teaches in the history of world religions offering courses in cross cultural religious phenomenology these courses include ritual studies the mythology of natural elements religious art and iconoclasm the interpretation of Dreams animals in religion and math ritual weeping material holiness angels and in Jalali and funerary calls her latest book religion of the gods ritual paradox and reflexivity was published by Oxford University Press in 2009 and won the 2010 American Academy of religion book award for excellence in religious studies and in the analytical and descriptive category so Kimberly is going to be here momentarily I think we can you know maybe you can have some more coffee and couple of minutes we will be ready to start thank you all good morning everyone it's my great honor and privilege to chair the first panel in this celebration in symposium thinking Islam within religious studies methods histories and futures in honor of Professor bill gray and William Graham my name is Kimberly Patton I am professor in the comparative and historical study of religion here at the Divinity School and in the Committee on the study of religion and I don't certainly want to get in any kind of competitive arm-wrestling but I think I might have known to fester Graham I won't say the longest but one of the longest lengths of time which has been such a privilege for me we first met when I was 17 years old and thinking of transferring colleges and he persuaded me to come to Harvard and persuaded me to leave the second order study of English literature and take up the real order study of religion which is where things were actually happening that concerned the writers of English literature so I'm always grateful to him since then he's been a teacher a colleague a friend and I'm just so happy to see this day in your honor bill and so happy to see you in Barbara here and thank you so much to Harry and for organizing this the first panel today is called the Quran and scriptural studies and we'll have four panelists dr. Monson good good good Darcy excuse me uh dr. Jay McAuliffe dr. shadi Nasir and dr. walid Sela so I will introduce each of them in order they'll each have 15 to 20 minutes and I'll ask them to to try to respect that they've assured me they will then I will ask the panel to offer any comments to one another any kind of discussion or exchange you might like to have to each other's presentation and then I will open up the floor to questions and comments from the audience so our first presenter is dr. Mohan GU darzee who is assistant professor in classical and Near Eastern Studies at the University of Minnesota focusing on the intellectual and social aspects of the emergence of Islam and in particular the qur'an's relationship to late antique literature ok professor good darzee thank you so much it is an honor we need to be here in such distinguished company and for this wonderful occasion I have some phase but I'll leave it for the end of the talk so I wanted to begin speaking about some of the ways in which professor Graham's research on the Quran in particular I think sort of stands out from what precedes and what follows it in some ways and I've take a long book and if we think about the origins of the modern study of the Quran in the Western Kadim II in the nineteenth century we can speak of the dominance of source critical approaches to the Quran and they are the approaches that are interested in finding out the precise sources of specific quranic accounts stories ideas in various biblical or post biblical writings and the sort of classic early example of that he's Abraham Tigers what didn't have Matt borrow from Judaism and there follows essentially a tug of war between people who argued that Christian sources are the major inspiration for the Quran and or Jewish sources are the Jewish foundations of Islam is something that transitory authors we have Richard Bell author in the early 20th century the origins of Islam in his Christian environment so we have that kind of competition between two hams that are to find sources of the Quran and of course the origins of that are that kind of approach is applied to the Bible it's also at the same time but in in the case of the Quran there is sometimes a polemical aspect or polemical tone to it there's a nice coat that so exemplifies that from William Muir the Scottish orientalist and colonial administrator who worked in India in the middle of the 19th century and he authored a major biography of the Prophet in English and Muir sort of in the context of discussing the story of Ishmael and the Quran refers to it as a travesty to plagiarism from Scripture and sort of that sentiment is there but I think after the Second World War it seems sort of subside to some extent and I think professor Graham's work is a really major example of departure from the source critical approach in some ways and it's a really serious sustained an honest attempt to understand the Quran on its own terms in a way so regardless of what inspirations or echoes we might be able to find for the Quran what if we take this text seriously and try to understand you know its own logic and one of the good examples of that I think is in professor Graham's article at the Quran as a discourse of signs which addresses a really old non Muslim complaint about the Quran that is sort of just disjointed or it's episodic that it moves from one subject to another without any apparent relation between the two and professor Graham proposes you know by really reading the Quran on its own terms as I mentioned he proposes a convincing explanation for why the text has this kind of structure and I want to read something from the essay itself but basically the argument that you poses is that the Quran is primarily meant to impart lessons by drawing attention to the signs of God in nature in history which the quran sees are saturated with these signs so it's really an attempt to give as many of these examples and lessons as possible packed in the text if you will that's what we have these sort of transitions and if I just read something from the essay it speaks that the many of the unusual and unique aspects of the Qurans text style and content can be seen as logically consistent with the text reiterated call to heat the manifold signs of God's sovereignty that are evident in creation in history and in Revelation so it's an attempt to really come to terms with the text and instead of being dismissive really taking it seriously and I think it really is one of the most developed examples of that and B there are the examples of that in the Western Study of the Quran but it is not just the case that Professor Grimes work has tended to move away from source critical scholarship to a literary investigation of the text because it is not just limited to the text itself it is not the kind of sort of structuralist readings of the Quran as we might find for example in pushy who's caught a man in the Quran a really good and classic text but still structuralist readings have tended to treat the text as a static reality as a timeless reality and in trying to sort of understand it as separate from the way in which it is read and engaged with but Professor Graham approaches the Quran as a scholar of religion first and foremost not as a submit assist but as or a philologist more broadly but as a scholar of religion so he's interested in how the kind of significance that has for its community and this approach follows from the premise that a Texas scripture not because there is anything inherent to it but because there is a community that agrees to invest the text with authority so there's a community that is interested in treating the text as special and that's why we're studying it so maybe we should also take that community's experience of the text seriously and a prime example of that is of course beyond the written word which really tries to push the boundaries of the concept of Scripture as such and make us recognize that it's often in the lived experience of not only Muslims with many Jewish and Christian communities or the Hindu communities both historically and in a contemporary world it is something that is recited is chanted is memorized is coded in arguments in a very lively dynamic oral and aural way so these aspects of what we tend to maybe treat as just texts that are written and printed for us to city it tries to because of that approach for the study of religions professor cram tries to make us cognizant of the really significant oral oral dimensions of the Quran but also other scriptures and here I want to use that to segue into the other point is that because Professor Graham is a scholar religion philology is just a tool that he uses and that's again not often the case if you read a lot of scholarship indeed 19th century in the 20th century there always are drowned in theological discussions and it's you know an example of if you can't follow this then you're not good enough for example it's really about you needing to have the linguistic training and philology takes center stage but in professor Graham's work both in its content but also any structure philology is really just a tool as stepping stone for understanding religious phenomena and it's evident in the structure of these works because both in beyond the written word and also in divine word and prophetic word the fill illogical discussion tends to be in the end notes which are great but you can actually read the text many people can read the text without having that theological training and it's a very subconscious choice I remember a few years ago I was reading I was searching for beyond the written word in the Hollis library but I came across a review of it which was written maybe in the 80s I don't remember the exact words of the review and I couldn't find it for our purposes but I think the reviewer had also recognized this feature and was speaking as basically the the text being something that everyone can read and maybe also suitable for undergraduate courses and the endnotes basically representing a graduate seminar in a way and it's really something that you can use for that kind of teaching and it's something that from the graham has pushed me to do unfortunately not to watch a veil by itself apart but to me that was a change and the last point I wanted to mention is that again because of his training and his approach as a scholar of religion I think professor Graham has tended to consider Islam or the Quran not as a sweet generous as something of his own kind but within the broader context of religious history and that's been made possible because he has expertise also in other languages like Sanskrit and Greek and so on which isn't often right now as one of my friends put it they don't make scholars like that anymore so it's that kind of broad comparative framework that you find the same you think the beginnings of this study of religion from Friedrich max Muller for example there is this emphasis that the religion as a phenomena has something to it as a category as something to each and you have to take seriously the different forms and try to put things in a comparative framework in context which professor Graham does for example all so in beyond the written word but it is not something that's done very much today so hopefully that may change I'd like to end by saying so echoing something that both Tom and Ahmed as mentioned and I say this in in the acknowledgments section of my dissertation which I doubt the Vasa Graham has seen so I'll just hate here and it's that I really do consider him both in his scholarship but also in the style of teaching that he's had in his mentoring as a great example or in the Quranic term as a no swaha sana really and I'm very sort of happy that I had the chance to study with him and I've often pondered why he's works don't get outdated I don't have a good answer for it yet but it is honestly something that I've thought about you know why are we still reading the earliest meaning of the Quran or beyond the original not as classics that have been sort of abrogated in a way but as something that's still you know maybe the final word on the subject or at least the best source to go for the subject and I thought about it a lot I don't have a ready-made answer but I think it's partly by staying away from perhaps was fashionable and trying to focus on a problem that seems to be significant within the tradition itself within the text itself and also just trying to be honest and not thinking about you know making an argument that might be intriguing or twisting or provocative but really trying to get at the truth in a way while recognizing all the subjective aspects of it so that's what I had to say and again thank you so much for a wonderful experience as a mentor it's freely an honor it's been an honor thank you so much for you thank you so much Jessica Darcy our next panelist is dr. Jamie McAuliffe who is the director of the Kluge Center at the Library of Congress and the head of the office of scholarly programs at the Library of Congress and also a distinguished fellow at the Berkeley Center at Georgetown she is also the general editor of the six-volume encyclopedia of the court on and with a number of forthcoming publications and it's a pleasure to have you here [Applause] good morning I can't tell you how much I look I've been looking forward to this morning and the chance to get back together with friends and colleagues from decades in many cases it's not something I often have an opportunity to do so this is very very special I know we're not supposed to eulogize bill but perhaps I'll be forgiven for uttering a few words of praise because like Muslim bills work has been so important in my own scholarly development again like muslin let's take us back not maybe to the 19th century but say about 30 years in the history of Quranic scholarship there was of course an overwhelming stress on the textual and my own research fell right into this groove it was all about the Quran and its many multi-volume commentaries both medieval and modern then in 87 bill published beyond the written word the book provided to use the kind of old-fashioned phrase a paradigm shift along with Christina Nelson's 1985 music illogical study of Quran recitation in Egypt and later work on the recitation of the Quran in Indonesia it opened another Quranic world the study of the Quran at least for me expanded from the eyes to the ears to the ethnographic and then in the mid-90s my connection with Bill moved from intellectual influence to collaborator and co-worker because as I was starting the work on the encyclopedia of the Quran bill generously joined the group of associate editors along with clergy Leo would add Connie and the late Andy Ripon and Bill's expansive vision of Quranic studies ensured that the EQ included textual studies but also reached out to anthropological work to the visual arts and our attention to the study of material culture and to this day bill and I continued our work to with the EQ online as it as it continues to increase in that format I'm gonna explain why there's a picture of the Bible Museum up here in just a minute but no but I wanted to say a few things now about a shift that I'm making in my own work because the primary focus of my work has been as I said primarily the Quran and its interpretation if there was one theme to it throughout several decades I think it would be the persistent effort to make the Quran more accessible to those in other fields and to the wider public that's so that but after retiring from Bryn Mawr College I was invited to spend a year in the Kluge center of the Library of Congress and I'll pause here to put in a plug for the Kluge Center which is the residential research center at the Library of Congress I am actually no longer director of the Kluge Center I now oversee the operation that includes that but I did spend a year there at the Kluge Center finishing a book and then you know one thing led to another and I was asked to be the director for a while and then I was asked to set up a whole new division for the Library of Congress that subsumes all of the ways in which the library reaches out to the American public everything from our exhibits to our our visitors services we get about 2 million visitors to the Library of Congress a year to the National libraries for the blind our lecture series are our scholar Center the whole way in which the library does serve and can will continue to enhance its services to the American people it's as you can imagine a pretty fun and fascinating position and it's been fun to learn the world of cultural institutions after having been in the world of academic institutions all my life it's also interesting to learn the world of federal bureaucracies but being at the Library of Congress has really really condone the libraries as you can imagine a treasure trove of American history among the things I oversee is our National Book Festival which is a huge annual event in Washington that regularly showcases prominent popular host historians another thing I do is host breakfasts and dinners for members of Congress and again these the focus of these are often book talks and these book talks are themselves often by prominent historians and you know the library has an ever-changing display of it's Americana treasures there are all kinds of lectures and symposiums so it's pretty hard to spend time there surrounded by all of these opportunities and not discover or at least rediscover a fascination for our nation's history then a couple of more specific prompts that have moved me in a somewhat different direction I live in the Georgetown section of Washington DC and in my local public library I happened upon the portrait of a former slave when I saw it I recognized the connection with a portrait I'd seen in Philadelphia at the Philadelphia Museum of Art when I was living in Ramar the one in Philly was painted by Charles Wilson Peale who also painted washed George Washington Ben Franklin and Alexander Hamilton both portraits are of the same subject yarrow mahmud about whom I'll say more in a few minutes the Georgetown public library owns and displays Mahmood's portrait because he used to live just a few blocks from the library so that was one thing that kind of started to stimulate an interest in another direction of my work qur'anic studies ii was being asked to collaborate on a major exhibit at the Smithsonian in the fall of nineteen of 2016 the Smithsonian mounted an exhibit called the art of the Quran treasures from the Museum of turkish & islamic art it was the largest exhibit of quranic manuscripts ever mounted in the US and it drew tens of thousands of visitors and won awards for its cure curators all of that has prompted me to begin and I'm only just beginning to learn more about the history of the Quran in America that exploration started with a plenary lecture that I gave at the Turkish embassy in conjunction with the academic conference that was hosted as this exhibit the Smithsonian exhibit opened in crafting that lecture I was trying to put myself in the shoes of the average visitor to that Smithsonian exhibit so I structured the lecture in the form of a series of questions and the last question I am I addressed was does the Quran have anything to do with America and in subsequent lectures I've continued to explore that and this morning gives me another small opportunity to do so again going back to Bill's influential book as well as his subsequent publications I'm starting this work with the assumption that one cannot study the history of the Quran in America without taking full account of the place of the Bible in American history and culture no I think we can all agree that this country has long been a Bible saturated Society so you know I won't spend a lot of time on the defense of that proposition but I'll point to a couple of things in 2014 the Pew Research Center did one of its religious landscape studies and one of the questions they asked was about the reading of scripture and they did they came up with a statistic but one-third of Americans say they read scripture at least once a week another thing that I will point to is can we blow that up that first slide how would I do that just from here okay maybe just just good thank you as many of you probably know just recently a new museum opened in Washington it's just blocks from the US Capitol it's called Museum of the Bible I had some reluctance about visiting this museum both because of the political and religious motivations of the donor to the museum and I'm not keen you know I'm not too keen on the kind of Disneyland like recreations of village life in the time of Jesus but because I oversee the exhibits program at the Library of Congress I felt that I had to make an effort to visit this new museum so I did it in the company of a friend of mine who's a biblical scholar and it was a mixed experience but one of the things I did find was a very well curated exhibit on the Bible in American history particularly in the african-american experience some things in the permanent collection of the museum other things on loan from other museums and universities what was especially interesting about that part of the museum was that that whole exhibit concludes with a great big screen which mounts an interactive question-and-answer end of the exhibit it's a it's an interactive Bible in America survey so the visit of the museum stands in front of a console and answers questions that flash up on the screen and the answers the cumulative answers to these questions are recorded on the screen usually in the form of word clouds wide range of questions such things as earlier these are true and false ones earlier settlers to America had the freedom to interpret the Bible however they chose true or false the Bible supports the defense of religious freedom for all true or false Thomas Jefferson cut up pages of his Bible and omitted certain parts removing or ignoring passages in is an acceptable way to interpret the Bible true or false for me the most interesting questions though came towards the end of the survey and one was how would you describe the Bible's impact on America today and this they divided the answers between the under 45 crowd and the over 45 crowd but for both of them the word clouds clustered around words like week fading diminishing declining etc but with some pretty big spaces taken up by important and powerful the next question however was in a word how would you describe what the Bible's impact should be on America's future and here it was all about important significant increasing strong influential so I think the Bible still has a very strong place in American life and society so what does that mean for looking at the Koran within the American context that's a kind of background question and since time is short I'm just going to briefly touch on two areas I've begun to explore in as I am in the beginning stages of the development of this project one is to acknowledge and to recognize that the Koran was read by some of our founding fathers John Adams for example John Adams on the left in the rare book room of the Boston Public Library there is a book known as Adams 281 point it's a copy of the Koran from John Adams personal library and his Koran was a copy of the first translation of the Koran published in the United States printed in Springfield Massachusetts in 1806 I think is pretty well known is that Thomas Jefferson also had a copy of the Koran I'm always interested in Thomas Jefferson because his personal library became the core collection of the Library of Congress and among his acquisitions and consequently one of the act among the acquisitions at his on permanent display at the Library of Congress is the translation of the Quran that Jefferson owned that was done by the English scholar George sale just as an aside I think you might remember back to January 2007 when this copy this two-volume copy of sales translation owned by Jefferson became the center of controversy who and representative Keith Ellison the first Muslim to be elected to the House of Representatives took his oath of office with his hand on this Corbin and it's interesting to think about the fact that that may help happen again next January because the person who's running for his seat which Ellison is vacating this year is a woman named Neil Hannon Omar who's currently in the Minnesota House of Representatives but he's running for the fifth congressional district she took her oath of office when elected to the Minnesota House on a Koran and I have no doubt she will do the same and when oh if she comes to Washington but let's go back even further than the founding days of the Republic the current scholarly consensus is that the Quran probably arrived in colonial America on slave ships most likely as an oral scripture held in the minds and memories of West African captains of whom as we know although there are no obviously definitive statistics were numbered in the tens of thousands I'll speak about Earl mentioned briefly just two of them first being our friend yarrow ma who about whom I spoke earlier and he's pictured here in the two portraits Mahmud was born in rust West Africa in 1736 we don't know how he was captured but we do know that in 1752 he made a slave crossing to America on the Elijah he was owned for 44 years by the Beale family of Maryland worked as a body servant and traveled with his owner a tobacco farmer he was manumitted manumitted in 1796 and moved to Georgetown where he became a kind of banker for local merchants both black and white he bought a house in Georgetown we know where it was we know the address and the plot on which that house stood and in fact that site it was the site of an archeological dig three years ago by the DC office of archaeology his real renown comes from these two portraits he was painted in 1819 by Charles Wilson Peale that's the portrait on the left which hangs in the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Peale also wrote Mahmood's obituary and noted that he was interred in his garden the spot where he usually resorted to pray he was recognized as a Muslim as an observant Muslim and and honored in that as as that the painting on the right was done in 1823 by a man named James Alexander Simpson who was later in our professor at Georgetown University and this is the one that hangs in the Georgetown public library although at the moment it is on loan to the National Portrait Gallery which is downtown in Washington the second person that I want to mention is Lamar Evan Sayid he too was born in West Africa in northern Senegal enslaved during a military conflict and transported to the Carolinas around 1807 20 years later his final master James Owens of Fayetteville North Carolina asked him to write about his capture his deportation and his treatment at the hands of earlier owners his manuscript begins with Cyril Luke the 67th surah of the Quran it's written in Arabic obvious evidence of his education and former status as a scholar and translations of the manuscript soon followed and it had pretty wide dissemination today the mosque in Fayetteville North Carolina which of course was badly hit a couple of weeks ago by Hurricane Florence is named after Omar Gibbon Saeed the manuscript itself is an interesting story of loss and discovery it's the only American slave memoir written in Arabic so far as we know well it was well known in the pre Civil War period interest in it waned after the war and for a long time it was thought to be in the possession of the American Numismatic Society and then it went missing and nobody knew where it was for decades and decades in 1995 it was discovered in an old trunk in Alexandria Virginia in a house that belonged to descendants of a former president of the American Numismatic Society it was sold at auction and purchased by a private collector who displayed it occasionally at museums and libraries and gave access to some of scholars the connection here with the kind of biblical interface is that it's early dissemination was promoted heavily by the American colonnade colonization society who were eager to showcase a literate Muslim because they were building this colony or promoting this colony for freed slaves in library liberia and recognized that literacy came to West Africa at large parts of West Africa through Islam which which had brought Arabic and the Koran to West Africa and so early Bible translations in that period were also in Arabic and it was a way of beginning to set the stage for a faceoff of the Koran and the Bible in this new West African country so as I said the it was discovered it was bought by a private collector and then last year the or even Syed's manuscript was acquired by the Library of Congress it's currently in our conservation department being prepared for a digitization and then eventual public display so I've touched very briefly on just a few strands of the work that I'm now starting it still focused on the Koran but it shifts the context closer to home a few a few years ago in 2013 bill published an article entitled winged words scriptures and classics as iconic texts he used the wonderful Homeric phrase winged words to speak about those very special texts that embed themselves in the collective psyche of a people and a tradition I really love that phrase and I hope that it will inspire me to keep exploring how the Koran has been and will be winged words in America thank you thank you so much dr. McAuliffe and one nice thing about being a scholar is you can publish hourly errata so Kluge Center and I apologize and if you don't publish the Arado someone else will publish them for you that's another great thing about our vocation our next thank you for a wonderful presentation and fascinating our next presenter is dr. shut the NASA who is assistant professor of Near Eastern languages and civilizations here at Harvard he teaches Arabic literature and Islamic civilizations courses working with Professor Graham of course and also with wohlfahrt Heinrich Slate wohlfahrt Heinrichs and his research interest is in Quranic studies in general but also in pre-islamic and early Islamic poetry and Akbar literature so dr. Nasir thank you so much it's an honor to be here and I will start with the anecdote that probably bill doesn't remember probably this is you know one of the rare occasions that I mentioned this so 2011 I defended my dissertation was on the committee back then I was working at Yale during that time and for certain reasons complicated I submitted my dissertation to Bill and two other members of the committee probably six weeks before the defense and then bill sent me an email back then and he said dear Shetty this is like you know too soon of a notice this is not how we do things here at Harvard and then I apologized well you know there were certain circumstances that I couldn't really submit you know before that and then I was so scared you know those during the time that you know bill will just you know tell this is unacceptable this is a horrible dissertation review before my graduation during the defense bill was actually very supportive of the dissertation he he gave me excellent feedback and he was along with the other members of the committee he was really very supportive to publish the dissertation which back then of course I was very you know realist like oh this is just you know a dissertation it's not ready and Bill was known this is like work on it you know incorporate the feedback and publish it and I did and I published the dissertation the following here transmission of the variant readings of the Quran which I have been working on and I'm still working on and I'm very you know grateful for and that's how I usually treats and treated all his students even though we give them things on short notice he will still yes so because of that I'm still really because of Bill and other colleagues also encouragement I'm still working on the same topic this is something that also bill is very interested in transmission of the Quranic text what does the Quran mean we usually of course take it for granted you know the Quran of course is the holy book of the Muslims but then what does really the text me and what it meant for early Muslims what it means right now as a scripture and as a text and one of the things that I'm interested in is the transmission of the text so how did we get to this point and what is the variant readings of the Quran what are the different transmissions of this text how did Muslims 1,400 years ago until today how did they react to those variant transmissions of the text different three sections different renditions and that's something that back to the philology of theological work I think we are in Islamic studies / Arabic studies we are still a little bit behind when it comes to very thorough theological work when it comes to textual study especially with these early texts so may I have the I will just do it from here so I will be working I'm currently I currently finished my second manuscript which is still now under review and it's very the topic of the book is an extension of my dissertation and also the the first book I published which is on a period that I called the second canonization of the Quran and I believe you know but the Quran underwent several stages of standardization over the past 1400 years and it was not and it is not a static text whether in its interpretation or whether in the final form that you know we have it today so the main line of research that I work on is how the text very subtly and over a very long period of time it underwent changes and these changes even though many people will look at them as non significant when it comes to bickering and fighting over a towel or over a case ending or over whether there is a long vowel or a short vowel I still think if we if you take it from a theological perspective that the Quran is the word of God and how Muslims reacted to that it just gives us an important perspective of how Muslims were dealing with these variations and how Muslims were dealing with the holy book without going into too many details this is a chart that shows you that the Quran that we have today both [Music] this is the only way to is now this is now we get to the stage well to the others so again why do we have for each versus now we're the common notion is the Quran was transmitted as is verbatim from the to the Prophet through Gabriel so I will go into detail into the transmission this is one of the things that we have a manual that go back to house and transmitted this reading from his master awesome but then you look at the biographical dictionaries and you find what Huff's have many students as you can see so how conditions through all these people and the question is but why did this person survive in terms of transmission and why do we have his rendition of the Quran and we don't have the rendition so what was so special about this person one of his articles on his net and what he said here a particular element of this Islamic traditionalism is pervasive even indispensable a sense of connectedness or to coin an Arabic a neologism for this it is alia which is connectedness with the transmitters the need or desire for personal connection it dissolve across the generations with the time and the personalities of Islamic origins something that has been a persistent value and Muslim thought and institutions over the centuries in coining this term I do not contend that Islam is unique in valuing personal connectedness for such valuation might well be taken as fundamental even defining sociological trade of traditional as opposed to modern societies and then he goes on to talk about a snide paradigm this is a an example of a nice net which is a chain of transmission paradigm that Muslim traditionalism has most clearly and consistently expressed its need for connectedness and specifically personal connectedness and variations on a single model there is not paradigm this paradigm derives from the central Islamic institution of the hadith the collective corpus of the traditional reports a hadith and ascribed to Muhammad or others of the first generation of Muslims so back to this model we try to understand how a snap or change of transmission function or worked and Quran versus hadith and I will not go here into into detail but we do find that there are the Muslim scholars they treated is not or they treated the Epistle diya as well called it different from how they treated it in the sense in the and they asked and the situation of the Quran so let me read for you [Music] I have connected you know what what what we have about all of them but we don't have time to discuss all of them so I just chose small excerpts so he Shannon amar he is this the canonical railway of the of the damask reading of the serial reading it says that when he got older he became sin oil and he started to read and recite anything that was given to him he would repeat and transmit anything people told him without inquiring about its truth but he was more trustworthy when he was younger okay now Hisham transmitted four hundred febrile ated hadees in arabic lie salah house with all apparently goodness nuts a man by the name of foot lock his name footlocker rosy probably used to give these fabricated hadith division who did transmit them and due to which he almost created a rupture in Islam Hashem was dictating hadith one day when he was asked who gave you the Sabbath he answered one of my teachers when he was asked again he yawned closed his eyes and from from sleepiness and Muhammad been Muslim arose he said I decided to stop narrating hadith of Hisham because he used to sell hadith I had been humble the famous jurist said Hashem was fickle and rivers frivolous one day he was sitting in public while his private parts were visible a man told him cover yourself Hisham responded have you seen it God willing he will never go blind in your life so he had a sense of humour even humble said one must repeat the prayer if it was led by Hisham so the same comments we have these kind of derogatory comments in the biographies of the what we call the canonical readers and again the question is why Muslims still thought it was okay to transmit the Quran which is the most important document of course in Islam why they still trusted Hisham and why they trusted Huff's and why they trusted often and transmitting the text and which is the holy text of Muslims and they never had problems when it came to basically impugning or cross-examining Hisham as a prime transmitter very quickly since I talked about Hassan awesome let me read also for you and this is again have some awesome V V standard and canonical again version of most Muslims today it says that I had been humble said that the his hadith the hadith of house was not to be transmitted even magnin stated that he was not trustworthy while Medina or her difficult text said that his hadith was weak and should be abandoned and Buhari said the hadeeth transmitters abandoned house hadith Tara cuckoo and an SAE confirmed that his hadith must neither be learned nor written down other critics said that all his hadees were manicure and poetry in arabic they were all fabricated and they were all forged not only was he untrustworthy in hadith but it was reported that his colleague Shobha was more reliable than him and Quran and then we have some reported the perhaps was a better recited than Shaba but he was a liar get that and this is house so this is how house is you know was depicted in biographical information saying will the awesome I will not also read that but the eye very beautiful quotation here for something from someone who said anyone whose name was awesome had bad memory so if your name is awesome it means you just like you can't memorize things and again this is the most important canonical rally ie transmitter of so again the question is here the reason why I go into detail into trying to document the students the transmitters who transmitted what is try to understand what was happening you know during that early period and why Muslim scholars exegetes theologians how did they look at the Quran and I do believe that the way they treated the scripture or the way they looked at the Quran was somehow different from how in the past 200 years Muslims look at the Quran yes of course they thought that this is the Word of God this is a verbatim transmission from God to get real to Muhammad but at least they were let's say a little bit relaxed about the fact that you know the Quran could go in two different variations or different modes of recitation but that's okay no problem we have we have no problem with that unlike the discourse in Islamic theology and quranic interpretation I would say post I can I'm generalizing here but I would say post on Ottoman period I would say post 1400 1500 where things were very standardized through probably manuals and manuals of basically studying and at schools at mattresses where you memorize that the Quran is this way but then you don't go into detail into trying to explore what was going on and the traditional sources and I think you know this kind of trying to understand the Quran from that perspective even though it is a very detailed through our theological work in that sense but I think it sheds light on how Muslim over the past 1,400 years really approached the Quran how they recited it how they transmitted it and even though they it was susceptible to this kind of variations and transmissions they really still venerated the text they memorized it they wrote about it and they cherished it so I will stop here this is just like a very short excerpt from you know the work I have been doing since 2011 and thank you all for listening and again thank you Bill so much for always being thank you so much shutd well I think you've opened the floodgate to Bill's stories and it was which I want to encourage throughout the day and it was really interesting to hear that you were on the receiving end of bills famously apparently opposite attributes but which are really complimentary the epic scolding and the deep generosity yes and generally when discovers them in that order and yeah like in the Talmud and the Quran that the mercy overcomes the justice always so bill and I had the chance to teach religion 2001 a number of times our required Bataan Death March true theories and methods in the study of religion for our doctoral students I'm dealing with them by myself right now and I'm daring up to share some of bills really famous sayings sayings tradition the one that comes to mind at the moment about final papers is if it's too if it's too short it better be good if it's too long and it better be interesting so that's one that they all learned our next and final speaker is while in Salah who grew up in Lebanon he was educated at the American University of Beirut in Arabic literature and language also did his doctorate at Yale in Islamic studies his research shows is exha jeesus and medieval Islamic civilization he's also researched and published an apocalyptic literature and an Arabic literature and it's an honor to have you here did I give your title professor yeah I forgot to mention that you are the professor of religion and near and Middle Eastern civilizations at the University of Toronto oh yeah well now we've given both titles yeah I'm glad already several people have mentioned in the generosity of Professor Graham and actually greatest callers are sometimes easy to have you know if you work hard you could become a good scholar but really if you don't have generosity of the soul that's really lacking that diminishes one's air one's work I have a chance I have a personal story I'll keep for the dinner but I have a chance to see him a last year at the AAR there was a panel in which professor Asma halal he was presenting her work she just published an important work on palimpsest of the Quran and he was there so I already teased her I said look a Harvard is here she she works in France where she didn't know what was going on and then sure enough after the the panel professor Graham came and introduced himself and I could hear him I'm like the the humility and eagerness to learn from others is amazing the fact that he took from his time to be at that panel is indicative of his intellectual curiosity but also and you went up and introduced herself it was to see you in action and willing to put yourself out and introduce yourself was quite amazing today I really want to talk about recent developments and Islamic world in my field in tafseer has to do with I spent a year in the Middle East I've been collecting material and so it's a really a report about the field now these radical developments are transforming the availability of primary sources in a field that in the last three thirty years to have witnessed and remarkable the expansion and they're forcing us to rethink how we studied of Syria as a matter of fact was happening right now in the Islamic world is akin to what happened in the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the funniest century when printing has took off and there was a massive production in in publications in the Islamic world now there are three areas from in the Middle East Egypt which is not surprising but the Gulf and Turkey are showing up which is quite interesting now in the case of Egypt it's unlike what used to be before it's all the money that is generating these new new publications so an ex-minister from Saudi Arabia Al Turkey has teamed up with the publication house in Egypt Doha sure to reproduce and produce then the classics of Islamic exegetical tradition now this is using the resources of graduates from our but also the money that allows them to collect the manuscripts in ways that was not feasible before now the teamwork that is at the heart of this work is really what is transforming the way of using this book these books now these are massive books 24 volumes 30 volumes 27 volumes oh and each volume is a nine hundred twelve thousand pages so we're talking about really some of the most expensive works in Islamic civilization the fact that they're being done by teamwork is were explaining the speed and the efficiency and good quality now these new additions are what one hopes for all the manuscripts are collected all previous publications are assessed and the news first period edition is produced so they and they've been like there seems to be a quite a systematic way of doing this which is quite surprising in the sense this is what we want and they're doing it so they three edited October II in twenty four four and this edition should become the standard edition really and have chance to compare in detail it with the previous editions and it corrects massive amount of mistakes and sentences etcetera so this is really a serious work now the second one they published is a seventeen volume of a double month or which is a classic award from us to UT 15 century Kyle now to give you an example what's going on this dolmen food came out the end of the 19th century in Cairo and then reissued at the beginning of the 19th century in what we call the moola which is really a moving of the manuscript page to an edited page with no editorial change and it's the same look basically when you you have almost like a printed manuscript now it's these works are notoriously hard to read and almost in a sense very foreboding and this development is the classic of what we call tradition based Quran commentary now to have a 17 volume edition with massive footnotes telling us what's like where are the sources from really radically opens the the work and the fee the access to such material of course there's the obligatory are we doing of an configure which you know you don't need it but they've done it and but recently last year they just published 27 volume edition of album ahead of Mahayana warranty now this is absolutely the the the aplex of quran commenter he based on literature and phonology it came out in nineteen eleven in Cairo and six volumes that are really impossible to read the reprints were done based on their addition it's showed with mistakes and then you I always asked when when will somebody even dare to look at this work and they did in this twenty-seven volume edition a massive beautiful and really like I cannot emphasize how important these editions are to both make them accessible but also put them on the map meaning Avenue or not is definitely like one of the masterpieces of the tradition but it's not on the map in the narrative of the history grand history of tafseer now now this attention to top steelworks is new and makes social these massive works feasible in ways that was not possible before why because also these these new additions have indices which anyone who worked on Arabic massive works they we don't now they're not the indices that we really want but there are there I mean so for example in the case of October II there's two two indices etcetera so you at least we have we have access to the material now the other center of productions and this is Egypt and this is Egypt with Saudi money the other center is the Gulf and mainly Saudi Arabia now so there's all the universities and Saudi Arabia have departments of Islamic studies and these the PhDs there are still the old-fashioned way in which a student is given a chunk of a manuscript to edit so for example there is a massive work of 20 volumes each students take a volume and they do dissertation so by the end of you know a cycle of PhDs we have the work edited now the problem is these are inaccessible so all the PhDs in sodium and trust me I've tried for the last 15 years to get a visit to get material it's just you know there's so much bureaucracy you can't really do that now what's happening is that people collecting these editions systematizing them and publishing them to major additions interfere have come out from Saudi Arabia that are really radical especially in their smack in my field the first one was a 24 volume edition of Iowa Hadees Albacete now this is the opposite by the way in Arabic means the expansive and literally it's like the like the most cyclope deep work of the early medieval times that came out on moonship or now this world cup argued that was the missing link connecting Nishapur to arousing so in a sense we know arrazi but then how do we know that arousing how did he manage did you produce all of that because if you look at the rows it's 32 volumes so what was he using alba see it is at the heart of his work and in a sense without an edition of albacete we really have we cannot make these arguments so we have that and then i am i poured my first monograph or sauna therapy and fatima call of mention drippin as a tree or the United the three of you as I was finishing my because the ribbon was on my committee and I was I was finishing my my my dissertation - a monograph he sends me an email the work has been published or what the manuscripts really so I scrambled to get a copy of the Edition it's in Beirut 10 volumes it's fascinating it's it's it's done it's a film work done by a sharing ma'am using the worst copies from Iran because they don't have them etcetera so it was really a letdown even for the standards of Arabic editions this was a like a horrendous one so but there it is and in a way the wind out of anybody who would have thought to do an addition luckily the Saudis didn't and they produced a 33 volume edition of the star B now this is unbelievably good I mean like you know I know because I know all the manuscripts they have they use the manuscripts you want them to use they have done they there's no like basically this is really what you want and the three volumes at the end are indices now so just two works 24 and 33 how much is that 75 volumes and these are two works only so you can imagine by the end of this lecture there's at least 170 volumes just from the five six editions that are produced now so you can see what a massive transformation this is impacting the field now with these two words there's no doubt now that Nishapur was a center of the fear studies in the Islamic world for two centuries really by the way a point that story already made by another professor Giulio had already made that but now we have the books at hand now I did mention the transformation in Ms impartial delay of the page and I really think that's fundamental to emphasize the fear Studies is hampered by the fact that most of our works are in this old bull of things so the transformation to a modern page with footnotes with ease on the eye is really important to to access it now in UAE the UAE is a newcomer to the game of Islamic worlds and charger University is doing is publishing that so they issued a 13 volume edition of Al Maki I forgot the title so forgive me and this is from the Andalusian tradition and that's really important because the Maliki the seal tradition does not have does not have representative in the center of the Islamic world but for those who don't know UAE is a malachy state so they are heavily invested in producing Maliki works so so the addition from Andalusian work to tafseer is really fundamental I mentioned in passing Qatar is also doing that so they issued reissued a massively new edition of arimathea which is really the standard edition that just came out we have an addition before but this is much more corrected and for battle now there is an international prize for Quran in Dubai which really has been putting out wonderful additions of Islamic works so for example they have put the malapa of Mallard in a new edition which is really now I think the standard among scholars working in in law but recently the the price went to a tough seal work now to me this is really held a major transformation in the field now this stuff steelwork is a gloss the hash eeeh now the Islamic world have stopped publishing hashes for over 130 years only in the 19th century did Muslims publish how a she of tafseer by the early 20th century the notion of decadence have really seeped into the elites of the Muslim or Cairo so then there was a really a distaste for publishing Hawaii and they stopped publishing how a she so I mean by the way how she is really is so you have the Koran you know the commentary on the Koran and then you have a commentary on the commentary so this is what we call how much or glosses now you could see why because of certain enlightenment notion or romantic ideas of the authorial voice a commentary on a commentary is seen as out of intellectual decadence so Muslims stop publishing these the problem is from the 12th century 13th century onward this most of the intellectual output of the Islamic world was in hwacha form so to write an intellectual history without paying attention to this is really basically just you know a major major problem now in terms here all the houses we have by the way are owned by Darwin of Martin steel which is of course because all the mattresses up to 1924 taught by darby and Istanbul and Cairo we're publishing how was she on by Darwin by the way the first quran commentary published in the islamic world was a hasha on all by Darwin so in a sense if you if you are in the 19th century the gloss was the center of the sphere now all this disappeared now there is a forgotten history that there were her ashes on the ma cherie so you have to mention authors by Dorian's emissary at a certain moment in the fifteen sixteen century all the sudden the world moves from the mastery to bide our way and this is affected in all the mattresses so far in Cairo in Istanbul in Mughal India in Central Asia there's suddenly there's shifted to bide our way and then 19th century when Muslims start needing textbooks that's what they publish but there's five centuries before the 15th century so from the 13th to the 16th century that was the mastery period and that's when Muslims were teaching them actually in the mattresses so all the glasses on tafseer were on them actually but then they disappear in media from the whole horizon so this price 2016 price in Dubai was for a new edition of TV's gloss on the mastery now a TV is the most important gloss in the scholastic tradition on as the mastery it's in beautiful seventeen volume edition really basically the the first volume is an introduction that really opens the book for you and tells you what's going on but far more important for me is that you know there comes a moment in an academic career where you realize the horizon of urine what was that you keep promoting you to what's that till you reach the level of your incapacity or something like that so you keep writing till you reach the limit of what you cannot do and I know very well that the gloss under the mastery story is something I'm keenly know about but I'm neither have now the will or the energy or the time to really do it but you can have graduate students so so the publication of the sub TV has really made it possible for one of my students to want to do on this period which is really that's what I mean by by affecting the lay of the land now how much time now there is a there's a group of scholars in Riyadh that they have an institution that studies the tafseer tradition now this is them this is a group of scholars that is fully committed to what we call tradition based understanding of the Quran or touchable motto it's really it's a culmination of almost two centuries of development in modern Islamic tradition in which really an attempt to really refocus who gets to talk about the Quran from the by dahui scholastic tradition to even kaffir so ut tradition and this house is really very committed scholars I have the honor of meeting them this this past year and they have just put out an encyclopedia of sealable month or in 24 massive volumes each volume is almost a thousand page so we're talking about 24,000 day but this this work took ten years to produce there was a team of at least 30 scholars working on it and really it's really now for the first time we have full access to the to the whole Islamic not only Sunni but because they're all they also use the material material on the Quran is narrated by the Muslims and I mean I cannot emphasize what a radical impact this this encyclopedia is gonna have on our field so now this just came out this year so let me let me tell it to you if you if you sum up the number of volumes I've just recounted there's at least 160 to 170 volumes new volumes just have come out in the last five years interfere I want to finish with I did mention Turkey as a place that now the Islamic awakening in Turkey had meant a maturity awakening so in a sense they have really rediscovered that their mettle Eadie's and they're publishing maternity wards now one of the classics in mint and maternity tradition is that a seer commentary of Almaty himself now as it happens there was a fault of the attempt in the seventies in Cairo which really tells you like in a sense then the faltering modernity in Cairo so there were two volumes come out in Cairo but they couldn't do it then we have simultaneously a Moroccan scholar female Moroccan scholar and an Arab scholar both published editions in Beirut they're good but really the the the the critical edition of Matuidi came out from Turkey in seventeen volumes now this is each volume is in this indexed but there is an cumulative index I just want to say one thing about like what does a new edition do I already written an article on the impact its gonna have on us on our understanding so matter really is as early as tabari right so in a sense this is for four hundred years now we have been working on top tier based on tabary yeah we have metal ET that we haven't used so how what does that mean for our world that's one question now the question is the indices sometime in the fourth century the charge moves as if from from from out of nowhere and becomes embedded in the Senate addition the question to me was when the disturbed like how did the judge was a minor figure move into the semi tradition with such force I stipulated back then with the material I have that it was a father be the one guy I worked on but actually if you look at maturity and you look at the indices in the very middle of the work he starts using as the church so the first seven eight volumes there's not one mention of death the church and all of a sudden with the ninth volume so you could see that the work has just come to his attention and now he's incorporating it is fascinating to allow this detailed knowledge of the tradition enter Syria is unprecedented and it's it's thanks to these works that are coming out from the Middle East so I want to invite the panelists if you have any questions or comments for one another just to allow you to have that opportunity at the beginning we have four very rich papers growing out of this rich and beautiful scripture yeah Jr your pen could I start grilling changing microphone new toughest ear two quick questions McLaughlin live in Sulaiman has anything happened with that which there was a kind of an abortive attempt years ago in Cairo is lon etc at least that's where my current knowledge stops second question is about the indices you know what sort of things are they indexing what can you now use them for a third question how soon will they start digitizing these things so I think the MacArthur now has become a non-issue so you can get the fancy five-volume edition from Cairo okay yeah but not a critical edition it is the critical the point for the hata Edition is is now released so you can get it that's not a problem now with the second question was about the indices this is only for example the Turkish Edition is what I would call it proper academic modern like what we would like an offense Edition the other ones are becoming with their own peculiarities its but they are usable so they have indices of all the hadith excuse me indices of all the poetry of all the names that they have comes the first time so like the one so their peculiar they're not strictly indices in the way we know them so the there are massive massive help they're not exhaustive in these things but they match and the third thing is that because there's no copyright laws in the arab world these are uploaded into the internet immediately mmm so actually you don't I'm old-fashioned I insist on buying the books but you don't need that either all pirated and they're all actually there was this funny story the the final the encyclopedia from tradition based work from Saudi Arabia just came out last year and then somebody put it in the internet immediately so they were very upset because that's not even pirating there seems to be rules so you have to wait till till they sell enough of it then you could put it so they pulled it out of the internet yeah and then it made the rounds in the Arab Book Fairs and now I think it's back on the Internet in Rio and the past 20 years most of the manuals of terawatt they are also being published as dissertations and actually I'm also relying on them so it's really also changing the way that we look at the valiant readings and the transmissions taxable all these dissertations being also published and so I mean I mean if I have a plea is that the center of and relevant law established contacts with with the National Library and rearmed so that it allows scholars to access lists like if we can have that that would be a great help for scholars of Islamic studies because the amount of material done in Saudi Arabia is massive and really really could change how we do our work if we have access to the National Library so I actually have questions first I'm a qualified first of all I'm absolutely delighted about the turn in your scholarship because then it like we we have like almost like a wave of new studies on not only Islam in America but the place of the Quran in America and recently that American Quran so in a sense what do you think is happening like what's going on in North America because it's almost like a whole wave of new attention well to what do you attribute that for well you know I I think a good bit of it is the fact that now the American Muslim community is generation sold in its country and so an effort to retrieve the history of Islam in this country and then more specifically of the Quran is a natural consequence of that there are lots of things that are starting to percolate particularly the history of Islam in America and of contemporary Muslim communities in terms of the Quran the studies there have been some studies done on a very early period of the pre-colonial and yeah you know they're scattered in terms of what we can know from the fact that there is not a big literature about Muslim slaves and their relationship to the Quran and what evidence we have of their incorporation of that into their their continuing incorporation of that into their lives but there's more stuff now and I mean I was only touching on a few things about the 19th century interest in Orientalism in in general and literary figures that are familiar to all of us became intrigued with the East the exotic East and the the literature's of the East and began to turn to that for literary inspiration and then you have of course the entire modern period in which the Quran is is becoming a part of the indigenous culture and and some of the the ways in which the Bible is studied or publicized or disseminated in this country are also being used for the Quran so in the book that I'm kind of sketching out in very early stages how far I'll be able to go and and still have a management manuscript I don't yet thank you so before I open it up to general questions I wonder if our guest of honor has any comments or questions your PMS and they now have a 10 million euro project over the next six years but all the way down to Sicily of course all of the history of Turin dysfunction Oh bill that's terrific that's one of the reasons I came today just get I would anyone like to offer any comments could you please state your name if you if you do so yes yes my name is Justine Sassari my question is to won it the opening of the field is quite amazing I mean it's kind of unprecedented I understand the benefit for scholarship are you aware of any way that the new knowledge is channeled into Islamic universities and trained people who have to make decision or will a Muslims because this is the key for the traditional lives it's I think the weak link in all this research how is it channeled in the way that it's a very good question and it's also an impossible to answer is that there seems to be keen awareness that they need to do something about it how's that gonna come about is really not clear but there is awareness that they've disconnected from academic world and so there are attempts I cannot speak to them but I've seen them I'm not sure how successful they're gonna be or not but at least there's a keen awareness that there's problems there they are not connected to you to what's going on but actually this is the question like in a sense we're benefitting here we're benefiting from these developments but we're not talking about what's happening actually I have a question first to shadi shadi and there has been a lot of like encyclopedias of Cairo art like at least 2/3 now and then there's the least one that the last one is the Tunisian was selected can you can you offer us like your insights and comments on this because I thought so far nobody has really done any reviews or academic like input on this but these are like you not being produced okay so the first one was published in quit and I think this is probably the first attempt to collect you know the different variant readings into one place I think six volumes or seven volumes the second one was in the mashed right in Syria 2001 by a tip or no and the third one which just came recently now I can now I think the the last one I I have it I have all of them of course and I I think it is a good addition to the last two months but unfortunately what's happening in these encyclopedias is it's almost like a copy-paste what's happening so you basically go to the sources you copy what you know you have and then you just put it under the entry there are still the same mistakes the same type was that we have in the first one and the second one they are still in the third one okay you know so and many of these I have a list of the periodic typos the variant readings I have them and it's like my criteria just I go to a newly published you know work and then I checked do they have the same typo so at the same time was just a close the book and I still and I just like don't consult it in a sense so like one of the things for example about one of the transmitters his name is uh yesh and then it's a new bar hit by a bhai and I want to now check the new edition and in all the group in this first two encyclopedias he is a best it's like they missed the dogs right so the first insect would be here he is a pest the second one is the lab pass and an optimization of he he still a bus but he is actually I guess with so so unfortunately they're still the same type was there holding the same editions that we have in the first and the second one and the addition that we have in the Tunisian one is that they added the Jeffrey is kitab-o-moosa have his addition they work on it and they have also a new classification of the Mackay and you know the but I still think and that's something that I have actually like been advocating or working for is that to have a digital encyclopedia rather than really a paper encyclopedia searchable searchable and can be updated I think just like having the traditional model of an encyclopedia because new manuals of very uncommon and unfortunately they are still relying on the same editions that are full of mistakes could you just say your name please hi my name is Khalil I know at least three of you nice nice to see you guys here my question is to the whole panel and the question is about the prominence and use of tafseer in Quranic studies some of you and and mint there are many studies especially on Quranic terms or Quranic themes where tough seer seems to tafseer literature and related literature like uh luma : seems to be like a major reference point for scholars to elucidate what the Quran may mean or however should be interpreted and whatnot and my question to you is do you think that there is perhaps an overemphasis on drawing from the tafseer genre in terms of how Muslims have interpreted the Quran and in terms of what the Quran you know could have meant whereas we have many non tough series on reside kalam falsify Ismaili literature where there is Quranic interpretation embedded but it's not in a tough seer format so my question is do you think like when we're relying a lot on tough seer to do Quranic studies we're sort of privilege in this genre it's approach and where we perhaps are missing out on non tafseer interpretations and is there a way to sort of incorporate that non-test ear genre I'm wondering if muslin you'd like to think I just answered that first yeah no I know we have other experts but do you have any you know I agree with you completely there is there's lots of commentary in places that are not official commentaries in there and people do refer to it but in in a kind of an episodic way there isn't usually a systematic fashion of doing this I did note that when we first starting the encyclopedia the Koran one of the big questions we addressed was should it be in encyclopedia of the Quran and of tafseer and as you doubtless know we didn't include articles about the major Rufus Adeem in the online edition we're starting to do that it was for reasons of scope and size that we restricted it earlier on but for most of the articles they the author's kind of defaulted to the standard def ser because that that was the expected scholarly methodology for trying to develop a topic within it but I couldn't agree with you more Mohsen actually do have a question for you not about tough Cyrano that's disappointing but yeah it's about us mail and your work on the quranic traditions Muslim traditions Islamic traditions within their own terms just pedagogically and in terms of your own research how do you encourage mixed or even non-muslim readers and and your own students to approach things sacrificed that I smile on it's on terms instead of as you said as a derivative of the Aki dawood what moves do you make and how do you open up that space what what would you say I'd like to maybe first Oh watch the tips here yes of course yes and instead I am guilty of doing that exactly as well relying on the commentaries I think there are some some good excuses for example it's just unmanageable if you want to cover everything and it seems that at least methodologically speaking because the premise of the commentaries is sort of similar to the premise of Quranic studies as we have which is that we look at the text we try to look at the relationship between various verses of the text so on so that's really the in the driver's seat so it seems that we're engaging in a conversation with people who are doing sort of what we are doing in a way and coming at the text looking at the text from from a similar perspective so that's one reason I think at least personally has driven me to focus on the toughest here another one is that you know we have of course commentaries in many different genres we have for example Sufi commentaries and so on but again even those are not generally speaking consulted in works of Quranic studies as frequently again because their premise seems to be different their approach seems to be different so I think part of the reason why their use is that they just seem to be our pre-modern brethren or sisters in Hawaii and engaged in a similar exercise but I definitely understand and agree that it unfortunately also cuts off things it makes us not see many of the developments that are happening in other parts and other final thought is that oftentimes people who are doing theology also sort of produce commentaries or people who are doing law have produced commentaries so it seems that we should sort of expect some at least synergy between what they did in their theological work and their historical work and their commentaries this is actually sometimes not the case for example if you consult even Cathy's audible dial and hey and compared to its Tampa Bay Rays for assalaamu Luke and his staffs here there are really significant differences sometimes in what they mentioned even about the same verse how they connected to so there are these differences but there is hopefully also some something seeping back and forth between these jean these genres now with regard to I can't could you maybe elaborate another question I mean you had mentioned professor Graham's methodological intervention of taking the poor on its own terms and I know that you work on it smile and I was just wondering how do you teach and how do you research and write about a smile in a way that approaches it not as just a historical or if you'll have to go derivative of Donkey dot but on its own terms right it is it is a very right sort of subject in a way because even right now in qur'anic cities there's really there are people who are working on the Quran really very thoroughly systematically from a source critical perspective right in fact it's been exploding in the past two decades in some ways I have participated in that kind of work as well and there are others who would prefer a sort of different tack and either sort of focusing on the later exegetical tradition or just the Quran on its own terms as a textual corpus that that's examined I mean my own sense is that the two are sort of have to be combined in a way I think it's unfortunate that many source critical studies just completely ignore the post Quranic writings and it emanates from a very what we sometimes called the revisionist understanding that considers those exegetes and any sort of all the early islamic literary sources as being some devoid of any insight about the quran in a way and the context of its revelation is social and intellectual context of its revelation so I think I would I would tend to sort of combine both both take the later traditional serious they would also try to understand what the Quranic starting point is in the broader context of the seventh century sixth century as in sort of staking out a new position and one one of it for the story of Ishmael for example is that if we look at Ishmael's portrayals in Jewish and Christian literature it's overwhelmingly negative very negative and the Quranic portrayals are beasts it seems in the Meccan periods of hesitancy be positive and later on much more extremely certain embrace of Ishmael so that really isn't we can't understand what the Quran exactly is doing without understanding the pre-islamic context but at the same time to just cut everything off and chop everything after the Quran just seems to be doing violence to religious history in a way I think professor Graham's work has been you know hopefully to some extent remedying that that defect in the previous scholarship Thank You Mohsen any other comments or questions yes could you say your name please my name is Maria could you speak up I was wondering what was said in a traditional scholarship about the liability of some of these narrators considering that those descriptions were passed on I'm sorry could you repeat the question I'm not sure everyone heard it yeah why don't you say it again just slower and louder for all the dinosaurs listening okay yeah I was wondering what was said in traditional Islamic scholarship about the reliability of some of these transmitters of the recitations of the Quran given that those descriptions were transmitted yes exactly yeah so that's one of the challenges that they had to face and then what they did is that they separated the property or hadera of the quran transmitters as being quran transmitters and then they were bad and hadith but good and Quran so you could have good memory as a foreign reciter but you could have bad memory as a hadith transmitter so this is how they solved it so and then you would have you know these later biographical dictionaries say he's trustworthy and Quran but he's weak and happy so and then they basically reach the conclusion that there is a separation and the disciplines and you don't have to be idle you don't have to be trustworthy in all disciplines so you could be you know the Quran is a promise the Mojave - Norma - the jurist of jurist and there's no overlap and that's a problem because you know there's as we know academic Adela and more later and the moral one should not really be a bubble you know in this discipline or that discipline so that's the solution they offered many scholars disagreed with that muslim scholar said well wait a second you're saying he's got that he's a liar so it doesn't matter if you lie in hadees or a few line thank you so much my name is PD I am shooting a pilgrim I'd like to take up I'd like to pull up your your question of method actually with regard to Graham works because to mediate is one of the important subject matters motion erased the question that Graham is working on the Quran on its untrim which is in some part I agree with him with reference to his earliest meaning of the Quran which is not a classic article written by diagram in in the water Islam but the only scholarly good by Graham is actually property at a fine word and property which is to place the emphasis on the slowly Islamic the significant of the early Islamic community and spending of the Quran so here here here is my concern actually the method of studying the Quran I said I said I said properly study I said proper two-sided cotton on its own term precisely because it's really hard to understand the Quran itself on its own term just mention let's say when that's me the hower the surah Hannah to me what is not me what is how are here if we just read the translation most translator will say by the servant at fall when a be read Jafar so take the Cheney interpreter he will say that best the meaning by Mohammed when he formed but a bolito body is going to be has different meaning by the Quran when it form so so here whether we really study actually up to me Bill Graham is trying to read the Quran in some part on its own term but also in other parts in relation to the development and the promotion of the Islamic community so using the apocalyptic vocabulary of Khalid Saleh it is Quranic status but also it is interpretive studies or tertiary studies and try to to to leave the Quran in some pot on a chandram but also in some but in the light of the early Islamic community so that is why in the in his early scholarly work fashion but rather try to appreciate the importance of the early Islamic community and the understanding of the Quran itself the revelation of how the Quran as he put it is ongoing his station in the early song is not Quran has attack itself but rather as something that is still happening in still going on exactly exactly thank you exactly and to understand the Quran is something still happening and still reciting it's not the product of reading the gonna wear its on drum but further reading of the early Muslim community understanding of the Quran itself and thank you so this is the method actually that I try to face yes thank you Bill do you want to respond to him okay would you like to summarize a bit louder and slower two or three sentences for professor Graham just so he could hear we couldn't he's couldn't quite hear everything you said yeah that's okay he'll ask you about what you didn't do yeah no that's fine that's fair enough that's I heard parts of that I don't know whether it really be fair to say that I my early work was even really focused very much on the Quran alone I worked a lot with the hadith what I was interested in I think was the degree to which in the early period it strikes me still even now after many more years of reading reading Islamic texts and reading the work people such as the four here in front from which I've learned just tremendous amounts it strikes me that in the early period what I seem to discern in the hadith literature and in the I would say in the akbar as well because I think in things like the Muslim add of even hanbal one really has almost more f5 and a hadith and a lot of ways we've got a lot of very primitive traditions there that I think what interested me early on was the degree to which the early Muslim community I think had a much looser attitude towards things that later became theologically impossible to deal with except in a very rigid way you had to have or from hadith you had a revelation isolated from the inspiration you have lots I think of lines drawn later on and so all I was trying to do I think it certain my first book all I was really trying to do was to look at all the traditions that that seemed to say that I would ask why would people have kept this tradition about the Prophet having given revelations in two different ways the Prophet here hearing a reciter you know safe I say something you know add something to to what is just that is just recited from the Quran and the Prophet says yes that's what comes next there was a much looser notion about revelation and about even the prophets role and I think that's I think that's primarily the thing that interested in the early on was the degree to which in the early community you have a lot a lot I would say looser relationship to what later would be texts that are in Orthodox thinking if you want to call it that had become rigidly understood as either externally revealed Koran or just inspired words of the Prophet or even in words of the the Companions of the Prophet that's what interested me early on so I think that maybe what to what you were talking to but I wasn't early already focused on Quran in particular I mean it's a was worth other people like Jane in particular that began to move thank you so much for the question yes here thank you for all the wonderful talks I definitely learned a lot from all the scholars on the panel I have a question specifically for dr. Nasir but for the rest of the panelists as well if y'all could add insight the question was on the seven transmitters that you mentioned that were facilitators of canonizing the Quran can you kind of speak more to kind of what the variations between them and then subsequently their students were so from what I extracted what was like the mode of transmission another was like like treadeth was there like transmission not only in like recitation but also like substantive content different differences and if there were like can you like give us can you give us examples on like what those variations we are talking about the canonical corpus only okay yeah so so let's see the seven readers they the differences amongst the seven readers themselves forget now all the transmitters they we justify the differences into two categories one is the colossal and one we call fresh so the acyl is basically a technique that the reciter uses throughout the Quran so if you have a technique and pronouncing the aleph already do assimilation that's something that you apply throughout the Quran the first is a specific individual word that is only applicable on in its position right vowels dots etc so the seven readers they disagree amongst one another in both in the ozone and in the first so the principles of recitation and the individuals the students the students of the transmitter they mostly agree on the first the individual words but they disagree on the principles of recitation so you would find for example Huff's let's say and Shaba if you listen to both the recording you would find that job principles of recitation are different from Huff's and there are still some individual variants also between them so I would say the difference is in the canonical corpus is the way that you pronounce things until the way you recite and also some of the vowels and dotting an example let's say a man would say maja for example you know you would say how she would say Madurai huh and then sharp I would say Maha right something like that but both of them they say well awesome taught us as such now when it comes to the irregular of the regular we would go beyond that so there are even readings which disagree with the Russell what we call the Continental texts and they are still some of them are attributed to the seven readers but in Islamic basically history they called that shelf estaba the irregular readings of the canonical readings so yeah so differences would be okay that'll have to be our last question thank you so much for your comments and questions [Applause] and I really warm thanks to our panelists for a really exciting and interesting panel and to Professor Graham for being such a gracious respondent you [Music]

Channel: Harvard Divinity School

Views: 8,690

Rating: 4.625 out of 5

Keywords: Islam, Qur'an, Religion, Harvard

Id: HAJpcqKFpUU

Length: 127min 38sec (7658 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 03 2018