News
13 February 2024: Nicolai Sinai gave a workshop presentation on his QuCIP commentary monograph in a lecture entitled "On Writing a Historical-Critical Tafsīr" and hosted by the Islamic College, London.
6 December 2023: Nicolai Sinai gave a talk entitled "Sacred Locales in the Qur'an" presenting some of the results of his QuCIP research at the seminar Crossing Ancient Sacred Landscapes at the University of Oxford.
11 July 2023: Nicolai Sinai has just published Key Terms of the Qur'an: A Critical Dictionary, a key project output.
16 June 2023: Nicolai Sinai gave a paper entitled "Qur'anic Chronology and Its Limits" at a colloquium held at the Collége de France, Paris.
5 June 2023: QuCIP PI Nicolai Sinai led an online discussion of selected excerpts from his forthcoming Key Terms of the Qur'an, hosted by the Qur'an and Bible Reading Group based at the Woolf Institute, Cambridge.
27 and 28 April 2023: QuCIP researchers Nora K. Schmid, Holger Zellentin, and Nicolai Sinai are presenting papers at the conference Regulative Verses of the Quran at Al-Mahdi Institute, Birmingham.
12 December 2022: Nicolai Sinai discussed his research in a YouTube interview with Gabriel S. Reynolds on Exploring the Quran and the Bible.
8 October 2022: QuCIP's PI Nicolai Sinai gave a talk (entitled "Notions of Social Hierarchy and Inequality in Formative Islam") based on his project research at the conference Freedom and Liberation in Mediterranean Antiquity at the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies.
13 September 2022: QuCIP member Nicolai Sinai is presenting some results of his current work in a talk entitled "Five Theses on Qur'anic Wisdom" at the online conference Wisdom Literature in Early Islam, convened by the Leiden University Centre for Islamic Thought and History.
5 September 2022: QuCIP members Marianna Klar, Nora K. Schmid, Nicolai Sinai, and Holger Zellentin are presenting their research in a panel at the Annual Meeting of the International Qur'anic Studies Association in Palermo.
29–31 August 2022: QuCIP researchers Nora K. Schmid, Nicolai Sinai, and Holger Zellentin read papers at the conference Unlocking the Byzantine Qur'an at Paderborn University.
25 August 2022: Nora K. Schmid offered an online panel on "Exhortation and Law in the Qur'an and in Early Islam at the Summer School on Early Islam convened by the University of Exeter, Inekas, and Shahid Behesthi University.
4 July 2022: Nicolai Sinai gave a lecture entitled "Jewish Motifs in the Theology of the Meccan Qurʾān" at the colloquium From Jāhiliyyah to Islam at the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities.
21 June 2022: QuCIP member Nora K. Schmid gave a paper on "'Muḥammad's Farewell Sermon' and its Intertextual and Rhetorical Links to the Qurʾān and Late Antique Legal Paraenesis" at the Conference Forms and Functions of Legal Discourse Intertextuality in Works of Jewish and Islamic Law and Literature: Quotations, Allusions, References, and Plagiarism (University of Münster).
11 March 2022: Nicolai Sinai has just edited the volume Unlocking the Medinan Qur'an. The volume exemplifies a rich array of scholarly approaches to the Medinan Qur’an’s distinctive textual, literary, and theological features; among its thirteen chapters are contributions by QuCIP members Klar, Schmid, and Zellentin that form important project outputs. Sinai's contribution, too, touches on aspects of the Medinan Qur'an that are crucial to the work of QuCIP.
3 March 2022: Nora K. Schmid participated in the Reading Group of the network of Early Text Cultures, run by graduate students and early-career researchers from Oxford and other universities. Her Talk was entitled "Legal Paraenesis in Muḥammad's Farewell Sermon."
10 November 2021: Nora K. Schmid's article "From Ethico-Religious exhortation to Legal Paraenesis: Functions of Qur'anic Waʿẓ", a project output, has been published in Islamic Law and Society 28 (2021).
31 August 2021: Nora K. Schmid gave a paper on "Scriptural Enactment in the Sermons of Abū Ḥamza al-Shārī" at the 11th Conference on Ibadi Studies in Tübingen.
23 April – 7 May 2021: QuCIP's second workshop "Late Antique Legal Instruction and the Qur'an", convened by Nora K. Schmid, was devoted to Qur'anic strategies for imparting legal knowledge. Speakers and participants explored these strategies in light of legal communication in Late Antiquity and early Islam. Three online meetings were held on 23 April, 30 April, and 7 May 2021. A report can be found here.
5 March 2021: Nicolai Sinai gave a lecture on "Qur’anic Militancy and the Arab-Islamic conquests" at the conference Discourses of Mass Violence in Comparative Perspective at Ludwig Maximilian University Munich.
11 February 2021: Nicolai Sinai presented his ongoing research in the QuCIP project and the corresponding book project in a lecture entitled “Qur’anic Semantics and the Nascency of an Islamic Lexicon” at Yale Law School. A recording can be found here.
1 January 2021: Marianna Klar has just published an edited volume showcasing a wide range of contemporary approaches to the identification of literary structures within Qur’anic surahs: Structural Dividers in the Qur’an. Klar’s own contribution to the volume, “A Preliminary Catalogue of Qur’anic Sajʿ Techniques: Beat Patterning and Parallelism, and Rhyme”, presents some of the research she has undertaken in the framework of the QuCIP project and is available as an open-access publication. The book also contains chapters by project members Schmid, Sinai, and Zellentin.
17 December 2020: QuCIP’s PI Nicolai Sinai delivered an invited online lecture at the University of Erlangen entitled "Versuch zum Leben Muhammads" ("An Essay on the Life of Muhammad").
14 May 2020: QuCIP researchers Klar and Sinai just published two chapters in the Oxford Handbook of Qur’anic Studies, entitled "Qur’anic Exempla and Late Antique Narratives" (by Marianna Klar) and "Inner-Qur’anic Chronology" (by Nicolai Sinai).
11 February 2020: Nicolai Sinai published an article analysing the Qur’anic food taboos, entitled "The Qurʾān’s Dietary Tetralogue: A Diachronic Reconstruction" and available in Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 46 (2019).
28 January 2020: Nora K. Schmid gave a paper entitled "From Ethico-Religious exhortation to Legal Paraenesis: Functions of Qur'anic Waʿẓ" at the Research Center for Islamic Legislation and Ethics in Doha.
7 December 2019: Behnam Sadeghi gave a paper entitled “An Apocryphal Hadith from the Mid-First Century AH (AD 650–693) Illuminates the Kūfan Qurrā’, Vindicating the Historical Sources” at the workshop The Transmission and Reception of the Qurʾān in Light of Recent Scholarship at Harvard University. A video recording of the presentation can be found here.
22–25 November 2019: QuCIP researchers Saqib Hussain, Nora K. Schmid, Nicolai Sinai, and Holger Zellentin presented aspects of their ongoing research on the Qur’an in papers read at the Annual Meeting of the International Qur’anic Studies Association (IQSA) in San Diego. Saqib Hussain spoke about “Q 56 as a Group-closing Surah.” In the Panel The Qur’an and the Biblical Tradition, Nora K. Schmid read a paper on “The Embodied Appropriation of God’s Word in the Qur’an and in Ascetic Circles” and Nicolai Sinai on “The Qur’an on Divine Embodiment.” Holger Zellentin’s paper focussed on “The Qur’anic Community, Their Prophet, and Their Personal Encounters with Jews and Christians.”
17 November 2019: QuCIP researcher Behnam Sadeghi served as a chair and discussant for the panel “Women as Patrons and Producers of the Islamic Sciences” at the Annual Meeting of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA).
4–6 November 2019: QuCIP member Nora K. Schmid has co-convened the conference “Prophetic Knowledge – Figurations of Prophecy and Transfer of Divine Knowledge in Premodern Traditions” together with Anne Eusterschulte, Nora Schmidt, and other members of the Collaborative Research Center 980 “Episteme in Motion: Transfer of Knowledge from the Ancient World to the Early Modern Period” at Freie Universität Berlin. The programme can be found here.
4 October 2019: Nicolai Sinai has just published an essay entitled Rain-Giver, Bone-Breaker, Score-Settler: Allāh in Pre-Quranic Poetry (New Haven: American Oriental Society), which presents some preliminary findings of his research as part of the QuCIP project. The essay attempts to reassess how poetry, and more briefly the epigraphic record, can help us reconstruct pre-Qur’anic Arabian notions of the deity whose name is allāh. After some reflections on the relationship between the word allāh and the expression al-ilāh, “the god” or “the deity,” the essay succinctly examines what we can learn about Allāh’s status and functions from our chronologically earliest sources, Ancient North Arabian inscriptions, which are conventionally, though uncertainly, estimated to take us up to ca. 400 ce. Allāh’s relative lack of prominence in the epigraphic record is thrown into particular relief when juxtaposed with the beliefs about Allāh that the Qur’an ascribes to its pagan opponents. The study then turns to evidence from pre-Qur’anic poetry, which in many respects aligns with the beliefs about Allāh that were held by the Qur’an’s pagan adversaries. Such mutual corroboration confirms that the poetic record does in fact provide us with nonanachronistic insights into pre-Qur’anic notions of Allāh. The concluding section considers the historical context that may help us explain Allāh’s significant surge in prominence between the Ancient North Arabian inscriptions, on the one hand, and poetry and the Qur’an, on the other.
1 October 2019: The initial proclamation of the Qur’anic texts is plausibly reported to have taken the form of oral recitation, and oral delivery has continued to be a crucial dimension of the way in which the Qur’anic corpus has functioned in the subsequent Islamic tradition. How are the various compositional devices structuring Qur’anic discourse geared to speak to aural recipients? How do these devices resemble and differ from those characterizing two other bodies of literature that were orally performed in the Qur’an’s milieu of origin, namely, ancient Arabic poetry and the Psalms? These questions were at the heart of QuCIP’s first workshop, entitled “Approaching the Qur’an as an Orally Structured Text” and convened by QuCIP researcher Marianna Klar. A report can be found here.
18 July 2019: Nicolai Sinai gave a lecture entitled “Regenspender, Knochenbrecher, Tatvergelter: Allāh in vorislamischer Zeit” at the University of Bamberg.
3 July 2019: Saqib Hussain presented a paper entitled “Q 38 as Re-written Bible” at the International Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) in Rome.
26 June 2019: Nora K. Schmid gave a paper on “Louis Cheikho and the Christianisation of Pre-Islamic and Islamic Ascetic Poetry” at the workshop The Early Modern Christian Cultural and Literary Heritage in the Eyes of Nahḍa Scholars, convened by Feras Krimsti at Balliol College, Oxford.
12–15 May 2019: Holger Zellentin spoke about “Gentile Purity in Judaism and Christianity” at the conference Negotiating Identities: Conflict, Conversion and Consolidation in Early Judaism and Christianity (200 BCE–400 CE), convened at Lund University.
10 May 2019: Holger Zellentin gave a guest lecture on the topic “Circumcision in Late Antiquity: the Ethnic and Ritual Context in Judaism, Christianity and Islam” at the University of Oslo.
5 April 2019: Holger Zellentin has just published the edited volume The Qur’an’s Reformation of Judaism and Christianity: Return to the Origins (Routledge). The volume explores the relationship between the Qur’an and the Jewish and Christian traditions, considering aspects of continuity and reform. Its twelve chapters include contributions by QuCIP researchers Zellentin (“Gentile Purity Law from the Bible to the Qur’an: The Case of Sexual Purity and Illicit Intercourse”) and Sinai (“Pharaoh’s Submission to God in the Qur’an and in Rabbinic Literature: A Case Study in Qur’anic Intertextuality”).
18 March 2019: Marianna Klar spoke about “Major Qur’an Translators and Their Strategies” at the workshop Making Sense of the Qur’an in Translation, hosted by Bruce Lawrence at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter.
