Conference on the Transmission and Reception of the Qurʾān in Light of Recent Scholarship

December 7, 2019

At the end of the Fall 2019 semester, Professor Shady Nasser convened a conference in which leading experts in Qurʾānic studies from North America and Europe shared their recent and impactful work related to the history of the reception of the Qurʾān.

Quran conference pictures

The conference attracted both specialists and a general audience from across Harvard and other universities including Brandeis University, Yale University and the University of Chicago. The speakers included François Déroche, Professor of the History of the Qurʾān, Text and Transmission, Collège de France; Walid Saleh, Professor of Islamic Studies and Director of the Institute of Islamic Studies, University of Toronto; Behnam Sadeghi, Fellow in QuCip, University of Oxford; Gabriel Reynolds, Professor of Islamic Studies and Theology, University of Notre Dame; Alba Fedeli, Research Associate, Universität Hamburg; Geoffrey Khan, Regius Professor of Hebrew, University of Cambridge; Intisar Rabb, Professor of Law and Director of the Program in Islamic Law, Harvard Law School; and the chair of the conference, Shady Nasser, Assistant Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University. 

This conference was sponsored by the Alwaleed Program's Early-Career Faculty Grant, the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, the Center for Jewish Studies, the Program in Islamic Law at Harvard Law School and the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School. 

 

Videos of the panels are now available: 

Panel 1

Ahruf, Clausules and Variations - François Déroche

The Realm of the Qurʾān - Walid Saleh

An Apocryphal Hadith from the Mid-First Century AH (AD 650-693) Illuminates the Kūfan Qurrā’, Vindicating the Historical Sources - Behnam Sadeghi

 

Panel 2

‘There is No Town That We Are Not Going to Destroy Before the Day of Resurrection’: On Human Rebelliousness in the Qurʾān - Gabriel Reynolds

Early Qurʾānic Manuscripts in a Digital Horizon:Reconsidering Diacritic Meta-markup, and Other Remarks - Alba Fedeli

Some Parallels Between the Transmission of the Qurʾān and the Transmission of the Hebrew Bible - Geoffrey Khan

 

Panel 3 

The Qurʾānic Uncanon - Intisar Rabb

Arabic, Qurʾān and Poetry - Shady Nasser

 

 

The Transmission and Reception of the Qur'an in Light of Recent Scholarship