IQSA, meeting 20-23 November

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- Zimriel
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OP - September 29, 2015, 08:19 PM
My plan is currently to attend this shindig here:
https://iqsaweb.wordpress.com/meetings/am2015/

Also in attendance (in a more official capacity):
- Holger Zellentin
- Fred Donner
- Khalid Yahya Blankinship
- Reuven Firestone
- Mehdi Azaiez
- Nicolai Sinai
... and that's just a top-six; any more and I'd get banned for spamming and namedropping, not to mention obsessive stalking. Okay, okay, one more name; Gabriel Said Reynolds.
- Quod Sum Eris
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Reply #1 - September 29, 2015, 10:44 PM

This bit made me laugh.

Quote
amidu2 on February 12, 2015 at 10:25 pm said:
Want to find out if there would be travel grants to assist participants from indigent countries in case their topic proposals are accepted.

Reply ↓

iqsaweb
on February 16, 2015 at 8:12 pm said:
IQSA does not provide travel grants to presenters.

Reply ↓

Ta.Z.
on March 4, 2015 at 1:34 pm said:
Dear Sir: Would accommodation arrangements be made for the selected participants?

iqsaweb
on March 4, 2015 at 9:12 pm said:
There is no accommodation for selected participants, each participant will need to arrange their travel and accommodation.

Nazir Ahmad Zeerak on March 5, 2015 at 8:09 am said:
Dear Sir,
Your statement that participants shall have to arrange for their accomodation also is discouraging. Usually,in all international seminars/conferences assistance to the participants is provided in getting transported locally and accomodated in the host institution/local hotels,on standard terms.In the interest of the event you may have to be generous.
N A Zeerak

Reply ↓

Michael Pregill
on March 27, 2015 at 6:10 pm said:
Dear Dr Zeerak – It should be pointed out that IQSA is a professional scholarly organization and the Atlanta meeting is our annual conference; it is usually the practice that members of such organizations collectively fund the conference through their dues, and are responsible for meeting their costs themselves. This is different from the process for special INVITED conferences that are financed by universities or other institutions. This is not the kind of conference we have announced here.

`But I don't want to go among mad people,' Alice remarked.
`Oh, you can't help that,' said the Cat: `we're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad.'
`How do you know I'm mad?' said Alice.
`You must be,' said the Cat, `or you wouldn't have come here.'
- zeca
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Reply #2 - September 30, 2015, 09:33 AM

We'll expect a report back...

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- bogart
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Reply #3 - September 30, 2015, 05:18 PM

Been reading Donner's work. If possible could you tell me what he covered in his lecture. I do not need a detailed report or anything, just if he addresses specific subjects/topics.

Thanks
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Reply #4 - November 18, 2015, 10:17 AM

Program for the Atlanta IQSA meeting (pdf): https://iqsaweb.files.wordpress.com/2015/11/iqsa-programbook-2015.pdf

This includes abstracts for the papers being presented.

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- Zaotar
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Reply #5 - November 18, 2015, 06:06 PM

I was a little disappointed in those abstracts ... not quite as exciting a group of papers as I'd hoped.
- Zimriel
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Reply #6 - November 20, 2015, 07:55 PM

First session is, if I'm using the proper term, a lightning-round of 20 minute talks on the long late-antiquity.

I heard later that some of the presenters were told they'd get 30 minutes each. So some talks were rushed with a skip-over or two. That meant it was really hard to take notes. I do hope I'm doing these discussions... if not justice, exactly, then at least a minimal amount of injustice.

The first talk was Emran al-Badawi, exploring the Qur'an and Church Canon: law and politics in the long seventh century (ca. 570-705). He is playing off Hobsbawn's long nineteenth century.

What kicked off the long seventh century was 572-91, and then the disastrous holy war between Heraclius and Khusro II. During this period came a rise in sectarian politics.

This sectarianism is witnessed in the "first Arabian scripture", as Badawi terms the Qur'an - and Badawi consistently pings the Yemen as a Qur'anically relevant flashpoint. This was the site of the Martyrs of Najran. Badawi also believes that the Ashab Ukhdul refers to the Yemen at this time.

The Year of the Elephant and Muhammad's traditional birthdate are both linked to c. 570, which is significant as approximating the beginning of this Long Century. The Ma'rib Dam collapsed around the same time. Overall in the Yemen, this period immediately prior to Islam saw the decline of (what the Yemenis were calling) Judaism and rise of (a form of) Christianity.

But the Christians weren't in much position to take advantage. They were divided amongst themselves. West Arabia and the Hijaz were in the west Syrian sphere of influence.

Christianity in the Long Century saw the rise of church canon [law] - perhaps revolution(s) in how local Christians interpreted their own faith. The Syro-Roman law book, compiled by Greeks and Latins from Theodosius to Justinian I up to the early 500s, was now translated to classical Syrian Aramaic.

So far nothing much has been said that most people here don't already know. SO HERE IS THE GOOD PART

Badawi sees sura 2 as like a Syriac canon lawbook...

It is divided out thus:
* address to oh people / Adam vv. 21-39,
* then Jew & Christian dispute vv. 40-123,
* shared legacy of Abraham [ed. in sura 2 it is spelled right] vv. 124-52,
* finally civil laws (contracts including marriage) and religious laws (prayer, warfare(!), fasting), vv. 153-286. [Interesting that warfare is a religious law!]

Some might see the Semitic ring structure here, but Badawi doesn't have a strong opinion on whether sura 2 is continuous / consistent. [pace Matthias Zahniser, who does argue for a consistent sura 2. I admit to being agnostic about the huge heapin' pile of mess that is sura 2 myself.]

Scholars argue about Q 112 - Ikhlas which Badawi calls the "Unity": Badawi says it is a creed of refutation. By contrast, Badawi sees Q. 2:185 as also a creed - a creed of affirmation, affirming the sura's choice of belief. Q. 2:185 is much like various ahadith on the pillars of iman - like Bukhari 4777 : God, Angels, Scriptures, messengers, meeting God, final resurrection.

There is parallel to the end of Nicene Creed / Apostles' Creed... but, of course, the two religions' creeds differ on Christ (and the Holy Spirit). For the Christians Christ is a third of everything. For the sura and the hadith, the Deen does not differentiate between Prophets.

Nicaea and Chalcedon were about MENDING SCHISMS. Badawi asks: Is it not similar that sura 2 was, likewise, trying to heal a schism...?

Then he brings up Q. 3:61, 64, 84; cf. 2:136. Are these the politics of an interconfessional synod? or was the sura at least playing off the Christian synods ... for rhetorical effect?

The sura presents these credal verses as if this "synod" had been convened by laity to condemn clergy for *their* disputes. The new faith (of sura 3) would be through consensus, which - in its terms - unmakes the institution of Church. The "sura 3 synod" affirms earlier Revelation outside of the Church and, implicitly, its own Revelation.

The clear Arabic language and insertion of Ishmael together implies Arabic religious consciousness. Badawi then says that the Qur'an assumes that this religious asabiya had already begun to take place, and in sura 3 simply needed to take form.

Jews and Christians made up the Umma, also made up the "munafiq" hypocrites; so the sura came out from the Jewish-Christian matrix, and opposed other Jews and Christians who - implicitly - would seem to be the rabbis and priests of Syria and Yemen.

Then came question-time...

Q.1 about baptism - Q. 2:136, 138 seem to imply that this was important to the Qur'an's opponents. Badawi admits to not having thought of this, so promises to look into that.

Q.2: was there a historical meeting behind sura 3? or is it literary? Badawi is leaning to literary. [ed. So I've presented the speech accordingly, above.]
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Reply #7 - November 20, 2015, 10:19 PM

Walter Ward, from the University of Alabama @ Birmingham was up next. He was talking about the term "saracen".

"Saracen" was an old Greek term for Arabs, that then got co-opted by Christians; to describe mainly those Arabs in Sinai. Christians decided this had to do with Sarah, wife of Abraham - which strawwoman the Christians then denied, because everyone "knew" that Arabs are Hagarenes.

Ward noted that "Saracen" was used by Christians to pigeonhole the Arabs as a race, who (in the Christian worldview) lacked a religion worth taking seriously (by contrast with Jews). In the old pre-Islamic days the Christians claimed the Saracens were into animal and human sacrifice. After Islam, the Christians kept calling the Arabs "Saracen" to "prove" that the new religion was just more of the same savagery.

The Arabs, Ward asserted, before Islam would not have traced their ancestry from the Bible. (ed. Ward had not read Philostorgius, who claimed that the pre-Islamic Himyar were claiming, exactly, descent from Abraham.)

Ward also seems skeptical that the pre-Islamic (and non-Biblical) Arabs could have really practiced human sacrifice. Ward said a lot about what the Christians told about the Arabs; he didn't muse upon whether the Christians might have reported their findings accurately.

Ward noted Sophronius, and the Doctrina Jacobi / Didascalia; that in the 10s / 630s the now-Muslim Saracens had emerged under a new Prophet and were rampaging through Palestine. After this the label "saracenminded" was an ongoing slur in Byzantine Christianity, against Christians they didn't like.

When Question Time came up, I raised my hand, and asked if there was evidence that the Saracens mentioned by Sophronius and in the Doctrina were really Muslims, in any sense by which we'd know them. (I was nervous and garbled this question a bit - but, luckily, not badly enough.) Ward said that there's an argument that they could be secular Arabs, or even Christians, just out for the loot - based on some of the texts; but that the second epistle of Sophronius implies Muslims, and that the Doctrina mentions Muhammad. Ward has a book out that argues this. (Probably Mirage of the Saracen.)

That was a misstep on Ward's part. Ayman Ibrahim in the audience piped up: but the name 'Muhammad' isn't in the Doctrina. Some stuttering ensued from Ward.

Ward wasn't even wrong. Ibrahim agrees with Ward - and so do I, and I'm pretty sure so does Zaotar here and most of us: the religion that became Islam *did* start out from an Arab prophet who preached about the keys to the Garden (swords). What Ward *should* have done is to bring up the agreements between the Doctrina's prophetic message and the hadiths on the Keys. The two words "Sean Anthony" might have sufficed.
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Reply #8 - November 20, 2015, 10:41 PM

Mushegh Asatryan and Dylan Burns ran a tag-team on ghulat Shi'ism.

1. Creation
2 chain of being
3 human god; divine man
4 reincarnation (tanasukh)
5 teaching about *shadows* and *phantoms*
6 seven adams, seven earths, seven heavens

I've not read much on post-Zaydi Shi'ism myself. Mostly my interest in the Shi'a begins and ends where they call(ed) shenanigans on the Sunnite Qur'an. Shi'ism for its own sake, especially the mystical stuff, always made my head spin... like the mystical stuff in Gnostic Christianity.

Asatryan and Burns figure that "Gnosticism" itself might be a misnomer for all the heterodox and just plain weird notions running around Late Antiquity, in sub-rosa Christianity and Islam both. There clearly existed ideas now associated with Gnosticism that, also, ended up in the ghulat Shi'a. But there weren't any direct quotes from, say, the Apocryphon of John.

Asatryan and Burns acknowledge a great debt to the Christian scholars of Nag Hammadi, who have presented to us what Christian Gnosticism actually was. The Islamic Nag Hammadi for them include the Kitab al-ashbah wa'l-azilla, Kitab al-kursi, Kitab al-sirat, Kitab al-haft. I hadn't read or even heard of any of this stuff. It all sounded fascinating but, mainly for the joke value at the mumbo jumbo. (For instance, seven hells to match the seven heavens. Isn't one hell enough?)

It was also noted that Patricia Crone had published some relevant work. Crone said that Zoroastrianism (sic; actually "Nativist Prophets" argued for para-Sasanian Iranian heterodoxy) is what influenced Shi'ism most. Burns suggested to look at Mani too. This seems reasonable.
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Reply #9 - November 21, 2015, 12:24 PM

Qur'an Seminar. (Not to be confused with other seminars.) These talks are looking into passages of the Qur'an without recourse to Tafsir. So, Mehdi Azaiez handles Q. 2:1-29; Gabriel Said Reynolds, 7:1-58; C. Wilde, Q. 54; Hamza Zafer, Q. 63.

Q. 2:1-29

This is a polemic that refers back to Christian and Jewish literature. Ephrem the Syrian may be referred to, when this sura talks about the rivers under paradise. Gabriel Reynolds piped in to note that the Rivers are, later, correlated to gardens of date-palms in *this* life, so might not be paradisical. It was agreed by everyone that the sura does not name whatever adversaries it has - much like the Psalms. Or, as another audience member noted, like the Talmud when it is insulting its own opponents (like Bar Pantera). But overall everyone seemed confused.

I decided (I didn't speak) that the panel had hobbled itself by not looking into whether sura 2 might rely upon suras before it - like sura 14, as Edmund Beck found in his "Figure of Abraham: At the Turning-Point of Muhammad's Development, Analysis of Sura II, 124-41". As a result nobody seemed even allowed to wonder if sura 2 was just quoting cliches it found in other contexts, and reapplying them, sometimes even ironically. But then... I confess to knowing squat about sura 2's context, either.

Q. 7:1-58

Here we have the scene where the angels bow to Adam and Iblis refuses to join them. This plays off Christian literature again but this time doesn't make an argument explicitly against it. Above all the notion that the angels bowed to Adam is Christian. Some Jewish traditions have God seclude Adam (who is made in God's image in that tradition as well) so that the angels are not even tempted to worship Adam. In Christianity, Adam is a prototype of Christ; it would appear to me that the Jewish traditions, being late, were put in to protect the angels and, thereby, Jews from Christian idolatry (as non-Christians term it).

So it is of interest that this Christian legend is played straight in the Qur'an, rather than denied / subverted as in post-Christian Judaism.

GSR opined that the scholars seem incoherent in studying the Qur'an, because they see parallels from all over the Late Antique world in Qur'anic tropes - one would hope to see one specific tradition. [I don't think that's the scholars' fault, though - if the Qur'an was, indeed, composed for Arabs dispersed all over the Near East.]

Q. 54

End of the world. There are plenty of parallels with the rest of the Qur'an, but Wilde noted that Shu'ayb from sura 11 does *not* appear here. The sura as a whole seems like a liturgy in that it is broken up with a refrain, which in varying forms runs "my punishment and warnings! / we have interpreted the Qur'an for recollection, so are there any here who will be reminded?"

Devin Stewart asked most of the questions / delivered most of the opinions from the audience. I wasn't sure what his point was, however. Something about "dhikr" meaning more than a "reminder".

Q. 63

Often translated the Sura of Hypocrites. There is no question of mercy for misbelievers here. There is no point even praying for them. (GSR noted a parallel with Sura 9.) In effect, the hypocrites have had their shot, and it's time to write them off. There's a subtext of: don't be more merciful than God; al-Rahman defines the outermost limit of how merciful men should be. (I caught shades of the Dark Enlightenment's meme of holiness-competition here.)

This is where I got to pipe in: I said that unlike suras 2 and 7, who are in conversation with Christians; sura 63 is in conversation with suras 9 and 19, that is with other Muslims. I also suggested that if munafiqs have something to do with the nifaq fi sabili llah, then sura 63 has to be very late in the chain - after the Muslims had already perceived that the nifaq was failing. I'm kind of a pest like that.
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Reply #10 - November 21, 2015, 03:12 PM

Quote from: Zimriel
I do hope I'm doing these discussions... if not justice, exactly, then at least a minimal amount of injustice.

It looks very useful to me and it all helps to make the academic discussion more accessible to the rest of us. Thanks for doing this.

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Reply #11 - November 21, 2015, 04:33 PM

#iqsa2015 on twitter: https://mobile.twitter.com/hashtag/iqsa2015?src=hash

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- Zimriel
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Reply #12 - November 21, 2015, 09:04 PM

The next session after lunch concerned ways to delineate the suras chronologically. It was the kiddie pool: 30 year old early postgrads delivering talks in front of Nicolai Sinai, who was there as lifeguard. Luckily for the speakers, only one of them strayed into the deep-end.

BTW, a lot of this comes from my notes - above and below. Assume that where I accurately give a speaker's words, it's *close* to their exact words and doesn't get quotes because I was too lazy to mark them out. Assume that where I get it wrong, I'm just an idiot. Either way this is a completely unauthorised summary. You will have to go to the speakers themselves to get the real scoop...

Adam Flowers spoke on The Quranic Conditional as Syntactic Evidence for the Periodization of the Qur'an. He concentrated on the fa-idha construction, and where it was used in relation to Noeldeke's attempts to mark out suras as Meccan, Late Meccan, or Madinan. It was Flowers' finding that the later Meccan and Madinan suras blend genres; early Meccan suras are mostly apocalyptic. But there's also sura 110 (Nasr), which is short like "Meccan" suras but is commonly located with the Madinans (that it uses nasr and futh as terms for victory for the deen Allahi would imply a late date). So maybe we should, when investigating chronological development, compare "Apples To Apples", legal texts only to legal texts etc. The whole Meccan / Madinan thing in some places makes more sense as a demarcation of genre than of relative date. [I agree 100%.]

Lauren Osborne dealt with the semantic field of SM', to hear. Another scholar Christina Nelson had related from the mufassirun that to recite with tajwid is a commandment from Q. 73:4 [although "tajwid" is not actually in that verse, which is more rattili... tartilan]. Anyway as well as RTL - which is rare, besides 73:4 - there are also QR' and TLW in the semantic field of recitation. Unlike Flowers, Osborne assumes the Meccan and Madinan stages: QR' is early Meccan, tilawah overtakes it in Middle Meccan. Listening to a recital, meanwhile, is SM'; NST is only used twice - as in, be quiet and listen. God listens as well, of course: 32 times he is sami' alim, 10 times he is sami' basir. Then Q. 17:1 made its appearance (yay!), and the possibility that it might be interpolated was brought up (yay, yay!). This sura represents emergence of a believing community in a Meccan context (literally, a Jerusalem context, I wanted to shout out, but didn't). Here the emphasis seems more on sight, like Westerners would say "seeing is believing". (I wasn't sure if there was anything implied about SM' in sura 17, or if this was supposed to represent an evolution in Qur'anic thought. My notes kind of sucked here, sorry.)

Emmanuelle Stefanidis also discussed the semantics of recital - Oral Proclamation and Written Text: situating chronological approaches in Qur'anic Studies. Richard Bell had noticed the same pattern of qur'an in Mecca and kitab in Madina. Neuwirth, more recently, has disagreed: for her, kitab is the celestial book from which qur'an is a reading. If Neuwirth is right, then at least these semantic differences between suras cannot be used to prove semantic development. Either way vocal transmission in those days implied direct interpersonal contact. So here was the social / cultural milieu of the suras' first audience - it was, ideally, an audience, listening to a performance by the qari from the minbar. She also defined Pragmatics: meaning of linguistic unit in relation to context of its production, and Syntactics: analysis of range of meanings that it *can* generate. I think I understood more of Stefanidis than I understood of Osborne's talk.

The fourth was Ryan Woloshen. He was working sura 52, for what Rudolf Geyer would call its "strophic structure". I have a bit of a quandary here - there was a paper handout, but the handout says on it "do not distribute or cite without author permission". Legally, he cannot tell me not to cite it; in fact, I just have cited it, right here. Woloshen *can* tell me that his rights are reserved and I cannot quote the whole darn thing. So, I shall summarise: he says there is a "Ring Structure" of rhyme in this sura. To get there he has to rearrange a verse or two, like v. 21 which Carl Ernst and indeed Noeldeke-Schwally had already marked as a moralistic intrusion.

Nicolai Sinai then blew his whistle (metaphorically: I'm back to that swimming pool analogy) and critiqued all the talks. Sinai agrees (with the first speaker Flowers) that we cannot simply assume that Theodor Noeldeke was the Mahdi sent to guide us to the correct chronology of the Qur'an. He does however believe that Mecca / Madina is useful as a model to Qur'anic style. He nitpicked a few points of all the talks. He reserved the bulk of his critique for Woloshen. But I think Sinai did it out of respect; we do in fact need an explication of sura 52 as good as the one Geyer gave us a century ago for sura 26.
- Zimriel
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Reply #13 - November 21, 2015, 09:36 PM

The last talk today (before the reception) was a roundtable on how the field of Qur'anic Studies is doing these days. It is probably best if we get back to this later, in a separate thread - because this has been discussed here before. But I can summarise the general sense of the room:

- Nicolai Sinai is the moral centre of the people on stage. He is a student of Angelika Neuwirth, but not as strident. Christoph Luxenberg is considered to be sometimes right, if for the wrong reasons most of the time; but still valuable as a force to get professional scholars to get off their rears and look at the Syriac, which simply hadn't been done beforehand properly. Having seen Sinai in action, I would have to say that he knows his sh!t and you'd be well advised either to have him on your side or else have an extremely good reason not to.

- Political correctness is not a thing in this field. It was admitted that P.C. used to be a thing. In the 1950s and 60s, there was this push for "dialogue!" that crippled Qur'anic studies for a generation or two. Then came "Hagarism" and "Qur'anic Studies".

- Qur'anic translations are still rotten. They are done by people who don't know Arabic well, or don't know English well, or both. Mustansir Mir was namechecked as having delivered an excellent text on Qur'anic idiom - here's one, although the article actually mentioned was "Some Figures of Speech" (2008). It's time that more translators used this. [Al-Jallad however has not come up yet.]

- Much has changed. Shawkat Toorawa when he started out was the only Muslim in the room. Now there are plenty of Muslims. Also there is scholarship being done in the Islamic world. [Farid Esack, the moderator, then facetiously asked if the Muslims were *still* Muslim after having read all this scholarship...] Also there are physically many more scholars in this field. In old days, Islamic scholars would preach to a room full of chairs. Now these events are "standing room only".

- Kecia Ali was very keen on there being more females in the room. She repeated that sentiment at the reception. Ali didn't show as much care about the field for its own sake - and it really does pain me to report this. Did Patricia Crone ever say there weren't enough females in the room? Did she ever make a *point* of it? or did she just publish her stuff while female and let the chips fall as they might? I think in this field if you make a point of your identity, then it's because you're insecure about your scholarship abilities. So, note to Ali - get back to basics. Note to Farid Esack as well because, when he takes over IQSA, he needs to become aware of the "social justice warrior" phenomenon which has already infested computer gaming and science fiction. Ali might not be a SJW but she is opening the gates for them, and that needs to be blocked off *now*.
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Reply #14 - November 21, 2015, 11:53 PM

Quote
Much has changed. Shawkat Toorawa when he started out was the only Muslim in the room. Now there are plenty of Muslims. Also there is scholarship being done in the Islamic world. [Farid Esack, the moderator, then facetiously asked if the Muslims were *still* Muslim after having read all this scholarship...] Also there are physically many more scholars in this field. In old days, Islamic scholars would preach to a room full of chairs. Now these events are "standing room only".

So... what was the answer?

Zimriel, what do muslim scholars generally think about Secular Quranic Scholarship? Do they still think that Quran is 100% word of God, like the traditional narrative? Do they still think Mo really got revelations from Jibreel? Any non-traditional interpretations from the muslims?
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Reply #15 - November 22, 2015, 12:18 AM

I saw a few (mostly) South Asians who wore Muslim garb at the talks: hijabs, skullcaps, those shirts that don't have collars. I could ask some of them tomorrow.

For now I can mention one guy from the audience at that last talk - a black man in full nonwestern regalia. I'm not sure if he was orthodox or from an American offshoot. None of that matters for this purpose -

This man noted that the secular Qur'anic studies (which was the point of this conference) had not, as yet, come up with a consistent theory on the Qur'an. And since there was no consistent theory, it could not be considered a success - in the way that Newton's theory of physics has proved to be a success. So, perhaps Qur'anic studies cannot be considered a science; perhaps the whole secular approach to the Qur'an is doomed to failure.

This was all straight up Al-Ghazzali. But this remains a serious enduring train of thought in modern Islam. It's worth asking to what degree this notion is shared.
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Reply #16 - November 22, 2015, 04:45 AM

Quote
This man noted that the secular Qur'anic studies (which was the point of this conference) had not, as yet, come up with a consistent theory on the Qur'an. And since there was no consistent theory, it could not be considered a success - in the way that Newton's theory of physics has proved to be a success. So, perhaps Qur'anic studies cannot be considered a science; perhaps the whole secular approach to the Qur'an is doomed to failure.

First of all, Zimriel what's your opinion about that? What do you think about that man's reasoning?

My opinion: Secular approach to Quran is really a new field. I mean really, they had traditional scholars going at it for 1400 years and now the secular approach just started. The secular approach had a long enough, great history of being successful in the field of science and historical journalism in general, as well as studying other religions like Christianity and Judaism. Not to mention that the secular approach is actually rooted on historical explanations + historical proofs, not just... "God did it!" brain-dead logic.

Saying secular approach to Quran is doomed to failure is just... showing the worst bias when you come to such a conference. If that's the case then all religions are based on God just because they claim it to be.

I mean a lot of Islamic history is based on hadiths, which are highly unreliable. The traditional narratives are not consistent, many hadiths are contradictory, blahblahblah their explanations are half-baked at best. The apologia of "anything is possible for God" just fails now that we demand higher standard of clarification.

Do you think that these muslims really believe that Nuh existed and he lived to 900 years old? Like really? Because that's not... just no.
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Reply #17 - November 22, 2015, 05:27 AM

Quote from: Zimriel on November 21, 2015, 09:36 PM
..............................................................

- Kecia Ali was very keen on there being more females in the room. She repeated that sentiment at the reception. Ali didn't show as much care about the field for its own sake - and it really does pain me to report this. Did Patricia Crone ever say there weren't enough females in the room? Did she ever make a *point* of it? or did she just publish her stuff while female and let the chips fall as they might? I think in this field if you make a point of your identity, then it's because you're insecure about your scholarship abilities. So, note to Ali - get back to basics. .............................

Kecia Ali

well she is a converted Muslim Feminist, ..........NOT HISTORIAN OF ISLAM... you except such words from such people

Do not let silence become your legacy.. Question everything
I renounced my faith to become a kafir,
the beloved betrayed me and turned in to a Muslim
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Reply #18 - November 22, 2015, 10:13 PM

Violence and belief, in the Qur'anic milieu -

Ra'anan Boustan chaired this panel. Here we have the first half - so I learnt - of a proposed IQSA series, building upon the work of one Thomas Sizgorich on that topic. The second half will happen next year. The IQSA plan is to collect both units into one volume.

Sizgorich didn't approve of Islamic violence, some of such violence has indeed occurred over the centuries; but also Sizgorich didn't think that the jihad was invented out of thin air. That one had traced a genealogy of this "holy war" meme back to Late Antique Christianity. [As... do I. I've been calling the Heraclius - Khusro war "Crusade Zero" for some years now.]

During the later, fading days of paganism one of the last classical Graeco-Roman authors, by name of Libanus, had bitterly complained about the "Black Robed Tribes" of wandering iconoclastic Christian monks. Those monks birthed a very "rough beast" indeed.

So - all that done, the first up was Pregill - scriptural virtuosity in the Qur'anic imperial context.

Pregill started off discussing Jews as targets of Qur'anic discourse. For Sizgorich, Jews didn't have agency - to the extent Jews participated or resisted the armies of 'Umar and Sa'd bin Abi Waqqas, he (accurately) perceived their actions as less important than Christian and Zoroastrian actions, and so Sizgorich waved them off. But the Jewish authorities, for their part, do have a voice in the Qur'an - as antagonists, mainly. There is a Jewish Counterdiscourse, in Mehdi Azaiez's term...

The Qur'an's author or authors(!) engaged in appropriation; scriptural one-upmanship against Judaism. As Sidney Griffith puts it (not wholly fairly) the Bible is everywhere and nowhere in the Qur'an.

Most of Pregill's talk compared suras 5 and 26 with each other.

Sura 26 has a schematic and stereotyped style. The example chosen here was vv. 105-22, Noah. But it's not just Noah; *all* that sura's stories are flattened, to deliver a general outline of the prophetic mindset, which will be the same for every prophet, because all prophets speak for God, who is One for all time. The actual biblical knowledge which sura 26 demonstrates is shallow. [I have said that sura 26 barely even has Biblical knowledge; it just digests the relevant material from suras 7, 10, 11...] Pregill, observing Nicolai Sinai in the audience, compared sura 26 with Arab poet Umayya bin Abi'l-Salt.

Q. 5:27-31 is (much) more sophisticated. This is a collection of Jewish material: Cain kills Abel, which is like killing all mankind (from the Mishnah); and now there is a corpse to deal with, so a bird teaches Cain how to bury the body, and Cain feels remorse and fulfills his duty in repentance.

Pregill noted Abel's death as Christlike in the Christian tradition; he seemed skeptical that the Jews would have come up with this story first. [I didn't see Abel as having any agency, though; I thought that the trope of taking care of dead relatives was more Jewish than Christian, myself.] But overall, Pregill correctly sees the main point of the story as Jewish, specifically Mishnaic.

Sura 5 was also concerned with communal stability. To that end, sura 5 was prepared to kill - to kill for vengeance, and to counteract corruption (fasad) in the land. In this sura and its parallels, fasad is associated with Jews especially. The sura claims that the Jews are guilty of fasad, and this sura is one way in which the Qurra "proved" that the Jews should have known better than to engage in it. In conclusion, sura 5 permits Muslims to make war upon Jews until they become Muslim Jews or otherwise not a fasad-threat to the Umma anymore.

Sura 5, compared to sura 26, is more mature and developed in its use of material. [However - I dispute that this must mean 26>5! Perhaps sura 26 had a different aim, that didn't require use of the Bible? perhaps sura 26 was arguing only against other sura-believers?]

Pregill then attempted to locate sura 5's stark anti-Judaism in its context. For that, he cited Glen Bowersock: "Empires in Collision", and "Throne of Adulis". In Late Antiquity, Arabia and Yemen endured incessant wars between Axsum and Lakhm and Ghassan; and in between them all, drifted tribes, all mobile and all warlike. Also in those days religion was political identity [and affiliation-by-treaty]. Pregill further cited Lecker, here. The Christian Monothelete Romans were out to strengthen Christian Monophysite Ghassan; and Khazraj were aligned with Ghassan. That made a military frontier of the northern Hijaz, against incursions from the sometimes-Jewish Yemen and from Lakhm-affiliated raiders from the east.

For Pregill, the historical context of a pro-Christian Meccan Quraysh, opposed to Jews like the Qurayza, is consistent with a setting that would make sense of a Madinese sura 5.

Audience questions: Nicolai Sinai noted that there are variant versions of the Mishnah upon the relevant sura 5 passage, the part about killing the whole world. Sinai then asked - which version did sura 5 use. Pregill didn't know (I didn't know either), and Pregill will check up on that.

Another person from the audience commented on the "crow" part of the sura 5 passage. These are recorded in later Jewish literature.
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Reply #19 - November 22, 2015, 10:25 PM

Christine Marquis was up next - as transmitted by Lily Wong, since Marquis wasn't here.

This was about Himyar in the Yemen and how violent it was down there. This kingdom was internally diverse, and surrounded by aggressive kingdoms. The first churches were for traders; later the locals built churches of their own. Najran sported Chalcedonian and Miaphysite establishments. The overall text for Marquis / Wong was this hagiography:
https://www.academia.edu/2916050/The_History_of_the_Great_Deeds_of_Bishop_Paul_of_Qentos_and_Priest_John_of_Edessa

Paul is a rogue from Italy. John hires Paul as a labourer. Then, both Paul and John set out to convert Himyar Arabs. The key here is that Paul and John were Miaphysite. So, when the author told this story up in Syria, they laid a Miaphysite claim upon the Himyar.

There was an ongoing theme of violence here - but a sort of passive aggression. Mainly it is the Himyari pagans initiating the violence. It is when the pagans' violence fails, that Miaphysite Christianity is thereby proven the correct faith. Overall the message is that - in Arabia - only through violence is the community allowed to exist.

In the ninth century, Tabari adopts this very narrative - but unchristianising the twos' names into Arab names like "Salih". Also the conversions, instead of taking place over all Himyaria, are now set in Najran. Also also, when the good Christians curse the Arabs' divine date palm - this is done in name of God without partner. [Zaotar would love this: Miaphysitism as protoIslam!]

The upshot seems to be that the Muslims approved of the violent themes of the original, and that's why Tabari nabbed it, and stuck that Islamised version into his work.
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Reply #20 - November 23, 2015, 02:41 AM

Zimriel Thank you for all that info.. interesting stuff

Do not let silence become your legacy.. Question everything
I renounced my faith to become a kafir,
the beloved betrayed me and turned in to a Muslim
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Reply #21 - November 23, 2015, 07:54 AM

Nicolai Sinai, on militancy in the Madinan Qur'an.

These suras currently tagged as "Madinan" assume that the followers have already been expelled by the mushriks. So, now mushriks are in control of the Masjid and/or the House. Exegetes have concluded, the cities of the Masjid / House are also those whence the Muslims were expelled. Later, the Believers will take it all back and ban the mushriks from premises.

The warlike verses start with Q. 3:13 and 59:2ff. There will be a lot of them.

Sinai cites Reuven Firestone, that even in the Madinan Qur'an there are verses that at least (try to) explain *why* there is all this warfare. Q. 22:39ff. grants permission for battle, to justify it only because the Believers had been wronged.

Next, Q. 33:60-2.

Sinai points out that jahada is less specific than qatala. Jihad also appears in non Madinan suras, where it is nonmilitary. But, usually, and the Qur'an's last word on the subject, is that jihad is violence, done for pragmatic aims. [Aggressive defence?]

More:
Q. 2:218, 3:157f., hijra is jihad.
3:142, 195, it's sabr, steadfastness.
9:111, the fighting has already been allowed in Judaism and Christianity and the Qur'an [implicitly, already a text, to which sura 9 is now adding].
2:191, 2:246, expel them from whence they expelled you.
2:250 / 286, grant assistance against the people who disbelieve. So, the whole of our edition of sura 2 cites v. 250 as a proof-text.
3:142, struggle / steadfastness earns paradise. [implies, jihad and sabr have to be toward death]
60:4 (later), hostility and hate against mushriks. There is no 'friendship' with misbelievers in the Madinan Qur'an [note - I'd argue that the wala' is a patron-client relationship and not alliance; Sinai has tripped across tafsir, as often happens when relying on translations. Admittedly, the interpretation of wala' as any sort of friendship has to be early. Certainly it is difficult to see how a nonbeliever in sura 9 could head down the pub for a pint with a believer in it.].

The Madinan Qur'an overall asserts that disbelief is a sufficient insult to God to provoke a military holy war. Sura 22's argument is nice for the Muslims to have, but superfluous.

Sinai has one dispute with sura 9; Sinai cannot find jihad in pre-Islamic poetry nor Syriac literature. This is the Qur'an's innovation. So off he goes for pre-Islamic potential para-jihadic proof-texts, if any.

Jihad could come from an Arabian tribal background. R. Firestone, in "Jihad": "what began as traditional Arabian raiding forays (albeit against one's own kin) came to be considered divinely sanctioned because of historical circumstances."

And then there's the Old Testament: Phineas - violent zeal, and Elijah executed Ba'ali priests. After that, we have a hagiography of Macarius in Egypt; he was willing to die for the Miaphysite faith, willing to kill for it. A Bishop destroyed a temple and is lauded as a new Phineas.

Q. 3:169-70 on those killed being now alive with their lord, parallels Mar Ishai, Syriac, here applicable to the martyrs. / 2:154

Lastly, there was the overall situation of early 7th century, which was hell on Earth. Sinai has access to Howard-Johnston (but not Pourshariati). So he knows Theophanes: Heraclius had promised his troops life in paradise.
Howard-Johnston argues this was a holy war - again, "Crusade Zero".
---

questions:

A German someone, who I think was Zellentin, cited Daniel Weiss - holy war in the religions. In orthodox Judaism there can be no prophetic office and no temple so, no jihad anymore. But in Muhammad the Semites had a prophet again - including those Jews who believed in him. (! DOCTRINA JACOBI !)

David Marshall from audience: intraquranic precedents. Sura 8 and 47, relating fighting against unbelievers to God's punishment. Meccan suras concentrate on God's punishment. (Marshall might be this guy.)

Matt Cuyper from Notre Dame asks Michael Pregill to define positivist and revisionist; if positivist seeks to situate the Qur'an in its context. Pregill's answer: no, even ethical nonrevisionists cannot trust the sira anymore. But analogy with anti imperial material in Gospels; the Gospel can at least be located in that general milieu. So, Pregill wants to locate Qur'an in the Late Antique world war era - which would, for him, be Crusade Zero. (I'd extend this period through to 'Uthman, at least...)

Someone else asked - what about Sasanian religious war? Maybe the Jews had an Iranian interest? Nicolai Sinai hasn't read that side of it... [At this point I blurted out "Pourshariati", because... I do that. I'm lucky not to have been thrown out :^)]

Another question: "Our lord is Allah" to be related to Deut 6. [Personally I see it as a response to "Jesus Christ is Lord".] Sura 5 as a new covenant?

Pregill cited Walid Saleh, on Saul in the Qur'an.

Another question: eschatology between Mecca and Medina; would fighting bring about the end of the world? Answer: not really, because believers enacting violence is taking over from God doing it - 'tis no longer true that "vengeance is Mine saith the Lord". A cyclical Divine wiping out of communities doesn't imply destruction of the entire world. [Note - even the Flood wasn't over the whole world, in the Qur'an.]

Question. Badawi cited Philip Wood on west Syrian sphere, east Syrian, that being Coptic meant being a Miaphysite; being a Roman meant Byzantine. Constant warfare in near east; a "spike of per capita violence" in 570. In effect the violence created Muhammad. Sinai agreed - the Christians weren't burning a synagogue every Sunday; usually they got along, but this time was special. Pregill piped in that the Christians'd talk about doing it every Sunday... Lecker and Bowersock are cited: Lecker thought Khazwaj (aligned with Ghassan); Qurayza with Sasanian interests. so... some of the Sira might be true. (repeat of what he'd noted earlier)

Keith Small: The first crusade (1100s) saw the first Christian holy order that gave the right to kill for God. Before that, even for emperors killing in war demanded penance after the war - it was a sin. Pregill: the east isn't like the west. In east, the emperor was a theological ruler; in west, the pope doesn't commission violence (although indirectly, he might crown a rival king).

But there's perhaps one analogy to the Sira in the West : The Hellion. This is an anglosaxon retelling of Christ as a saxon warlord.
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Reply #22 - November 23, 2015, 08:15 AM

Gabriel Said Reynolds on Noah's other son in the Qur'an - specifically, sura 11. This son disbelieves and drowns, Noah mourns, God slaps Noah down, Noah submits.

Usually when the Qur'an diverges from the Bible, the mufassirun jump to the Qur'an's defence. Here they didn't bother, excepting one Ibn Ashur (sp?). GSR guesses that this verse didn't attract attention from the Christians, so the mufassirs saw no need to defend it.

Academic scholars have shown more interest, starting with Abraham Geiger.

GSR draws attention to the agreement between this story, and the general Qur'anic idea that a Believer has no family ties with Kufr. Usually it's the Muslim son who has no ties with his father. In the Prophetic Cycle we have Abraham of course. Also in sura 26, Pharaoh brings up Moses as a son; but it does no good for Pharaoh when he reminds Moses of that. The reverse, GSR argues, is asserted outright in Q. 46:17-8.

Q. 66:10 connects Noah's wife with Lot's. This might be Biblical, if Genesis 19 is an exegesis of Noah's flood. It is more explicit in Luke 17:26-9 > 2 Peter 2:5-8 - Noah and Lot are together righteous men spared from evil.

So: Why a son? In Torah Judaism, ancestral merit may be inherited (R. Firestone confirms this from the audience). But elsewhere in the Bible, Ezekiel 14:13-20 claims the merit of a father does nothing for a son. Even if Noah, Dan'el *and* Job were in the world... they will deliver neither their son... [*This Dan'el is the Canaanite sage, not the guy in the book of Daniel.]

As a prooftext, Ezekiel's hypothetical son for Noah was used by Christians to prove that the Jews cannot claim an inheritance in holiness from Abraham. GSR believes that sura 11 took that son, and made him a real boy. Sura 11 had no wish to disprove Abraham's inheritance however [ed. I see that sura 11 is pleased to relate about Abraham and Isaac later on, this sura won't abandon Isaac even for Ishmael!].
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Reply #23 - November 23, 2015, 11:24 AM

for doing this Zimriel. Really nice of you
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Reply #24 - November 23, 2015, 12:01 PM

Zohar Allouche, on Eve as mother.

It has been argued that the Bible is more misogynistic than the Qur'an, on account that the Bible implicates Eve in the original sin - which doctrine is not in Islam. Also the Qur'an has Adam and his unnamed wife [Allouche'll get to that] disobey God concurrently.

The Bible has some respect for Adam's wife, in that she is able to give birth which is an act of creation. She may name what she creates, as God has named what He created. She then (only at 3:20 - Allouche was surprised her own self) takes on a name of her own, Eve. What she created first was, um, Cain, so... that's a whole 'nother pile of problematic. But being mortal and not God, she can hardly be expected to get everything right first time.

Also the Qur'an is unuseful as a feminist proof-text against the Bible: Its silence on Eve only shows that the Qur'an doesn't care about Eve. Eve does not give birth in the Qur'an; accordingly, she has no name. The Qur'an just cares about Adam.

The Arab folklore is different. Meet Islam's Little Nicky, Khannas bin Iblis: https://tmr123.wordpress.com/2009/03/09/484/

The myth goes that Iblis whelped Khannas, and brought him to Eve. Eve tries to adopt him, but Adam won't be raising the Devil's cuckoo. So Adam repeatedly kills Khannas, but keeps failing at it. Eventually Adam cooks Khannas into shawarma and eats him. (om nom nom) From then on, all the banu Adam now have a little Satan in us.

There are questions here about whether Eve is shown here as making an attempt to be a good (adoptive?) mother, as contrast to Adam who is full of rage.

Gerald Hawting was in the audience - the conversation pretty much went like this:
Hawting: If the child is Satan's, then Adam's desire to kill it isn't evil at all
Allouche: But the rage of Adam is of Satan; this is not Greek righteous thumos
Hawting: I still don't like it

Arguments like that should be taken off line, IMO. It was heading dangerously close to Argument Clinic.

-------
After that was Andrew O'Connor's discussion of mithaq and 'ahd.

He accepts Reuven Firestone (he's a big deal here): mithaq is usually the Islamic pact given to past generations; 'ahd is an oath contracted in the present day. 'ahd is also found in epigraphic south Arabian, so is a good stout Arabic word.

This mithaq is usually, in the Qur'an, broken. The notion that the Jews broke the old covenant appears in the Epistle of Barnabas, so is central to the Christian self-definition; without that, there cannot be any 'new covenant'.

-------
Shari Lowen, Son of Noah and the Daughter who Flew Away - Qur'an and Midrash

Lowen ran across a midrash that might depend on the Qur'an. This talk stole the show and nearly the whole event; it has everyone in stitches. I won't spoil the speech because, honestly, I'm hoping for video and/or a full writeup later.

For now, Lowen made an interesting observation that the Book of Jonah - already known as an anti-prophetic satire - might also object to the Noah story's inclusion in the Maccabean Torah. Jonah, like Noah, observes hamas in the land, which is usually translated as "utter evil". So both men decide not to prophesy to the sinners, instead running off to sea in a boat to avoid the punishment. In Genesis, God is fine with that; to Jonah, God tells him he's an asshole (pretty much).

The text of the torah is well-known (among the Biblical scholars anyway) to be fluid in its text: there's a Samaritan version, and a Greek version (which isn't just a translation) as well as the Masoretic Jewish = Latin = King James version, not to mention the Dead Sea Scrolls. Jubilees rewrites the Torah up to Sinai; 1 Enoch does not accept the Torah, preferring the authority of its proto-Essene priesthood. So: the Muslims do have a point when they pronounce shenanigans upon the Torah. The first Jews had done so first.
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Reply #25 - November 23, 2015, 02:30 PM

Two quick takes during this break:

Jessica Mutter on Iltifat. Shifts of I / We for the Divine narrator; of thou / you for its audience. She looks at middle to late Meccan suras 19, 20, 28. The singular God is always in narrative dialogue. The Divine We acts as a Greek chorus to comment upon what is going on in the narrative.

Genesis elohim, let us make man in our image... [I would add Jubilees, explicitly delivered by angels.]

There was also a poem from Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych, The Mute Immortals Speak: Pre-Islamic Poetry (1993)
https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0801427649
- this also shifts between "we" and "I".

Michael Sells once wrote on the temporality of the Qur'an, the eternal now. The perfect / imperfect shifts stymie the listener's attempts to place any Qur'anic message into a specific time and place. The iltifat acts like that.

---

Mohsen Goudarzi: "Tale of two kitabs, radical reconsideration of Qur'anic Scripturology". But, it's not all that radical...

The claim is that the two kitabs are the Book of Moses / Torah of Israel [it's never the Torah of Moses], and the Book which is the Qur'an.

Jesus and John each get a book in their parts of sura 19, but this is in the context of inheriting the Prophetic office of Abraham and Jacob. So, their book is probably the Torah. Otherwise the Qur'an doesn't allow any prophet to get a book directly except for Moses and the usually-unnamed present Arab Prophet.

---

Leyla Ozgur Alhassen, spoke on Abraham's promise.

This ties the threats Abraham got from his father, with his future attempt to sacrifice his son. Upshot: Abraham is the ideal son and the ideal parent, both. At least, according to the suras.
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