Christianity and Qurʾān.

Transcription

1 SYMPOSIUM Christianity and Qurʾān. From the Origins of Islam to the Medieval Period 12 March 2018 (2:00 pm 6:00 pm) KU Leuven Mithridates, Flavius. Edition and translation of surahs 21 and 22 (c ). Vatican City, BAV MS urb. lat. 1384, fol. 65.

2 KU LEUVEN Organized by Prof. Dr. Mehdi Azaiez with the collaboration of Dr. Chaïma Ahaddour in partnership with the University of Notre Dame, Indiana (USA) 1/11

3 PRESENTATION It is well known that Muslim linguistic and theological expressions made a variety of impressions upon the historical development of both Western and Eastern forms of Christianity. The Qurʾān, the founding text and cornerstone of the Islamic faith, has held a privileged place within this encounter, occupying a vivid locus of dialogue and confrontation. Indeed, since its appearance in the seventh century, this text has raised questions, fascination, and criticism in Christian contexts (as in Jewish contexts). Translations of the holy book of Islam, works, and theological responses in Greek, Latin, Arabic, Syriac were brilliant witnesses of this interest throughout the medieval era. Many scientific contributions from recent decades (critical editions, comparative theological works, bibliographical dictionary...) have cast new light on the use and interpretation of the Qurʾān by Christians in Europe or those living directly under Islamic rule. Parallel to these studies, other lines of research have renewed our understanding of the origins of the Qurʾān by locating it in the broad context of Late Antique religious literature. In particular, the works of historians and philologists have focused on how canonical and apocryphal Christian texts have played a major role in the development of quranic discourse. In light of these studies, the present symposium has a twofold aim. First, it presents some of these new contributions to the history and genesis of the Qurʾān (Speakers 1, 2 & 3). Second, it aims to understand the reception and interpretation of the Qurʾān and its message in Western and Eastern Christianity (Speakers 4, 5 & 6). This symposium was made possible by the collaboration between the Catholic universities of Notre Dame and Leuven and especially the active support of Prof. Thomas Burman and the Notre Dame s Medieval Institute. Prof. Dr. Mehdi Azaiez 2/11

4 PROGRAM Mehdi Azaiez (KU Leuven) Supplications in Hell in Christian Apocryphal Texts and Qurʾān Gabriel Reynolds (University of Notre Dame) Biblical Allusions in the Qurʾān Guillaume Dye (Université Libre de Bruxelles) Ascetic and Non-Ascetic Layers in the Qurʾān Questions & Break (25 mn) Thomas Burman (University of Notre Dame) Inspicientes et non inspicientes eius legem: Thirteenth-Century Dominicans, the Qur an, and Islam Bert Jacobs (KU Leuven) The Qurʾān Against the Muslims: Dionysius Bar Ṣalībī's Qurʾānic Translations and Exegesis Samuel Noble (KU Leuven) "Al-Mukarram": The Authority of the Qurʾān in the works of Badr Zākhe bar Wahīb (d. 1332) Questions (30mn) 3/11

5 SPEAKERS Mehdi Azaiez Assistant Professor of Islamic Studies Faculty of Theology Department of Biblical Studies KU Leuven Belgium Biography Mehdi Azaiez is Assistant Professor of Islamic Theology and Studies at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium. He completed his Ph.D. at the University of Aix-en-Provence. His main fields of research are Qurʾanic Studies and early Islam. During , he was an instructor in Islamic Studies at the University of Notre Dame and co-director, along with Gabriel Said Reynolds, of the Qurʾan Seminar, an academic project dedicated to increasing scholarly understanding of the qurʾanic text. He recently published Le Contre-discours coranique (2015) and Le Coran: Nouvelles approches (2013). Personal webpage: Quran and Early Islam: 4/11

6 Gabriel Said Reynolds Professor of Islamology and Theology Department of Theology University of Notre Dame South Bend Indiana USA Biography Gabriel Said Reynolds is Professor of Islamic Studies and Theology at Notre Dame. His research is focused above all on the Qur'an and Muslim-Christian relations. At Notre Dame, Reynolds has organized two international conferences (2005, 2009) on the Qur'ān, and edited the acts of the conferences as The Qur'an in Its Historical Context (Routledge 2008) and New Perspectives on the Qur'an: The Qur'an in Its Historical Context 2 (Routledge 2011). In Prof. Reynolds directed, along with Mehdi Azaiez, The Qurʾan Seminar a yearlong project with a team of 28 international scholars, which led to a collaborative commentary, The Qurʾan Seminar Commentary, published by De Gruyter (2016). Currently, Prof. Reynolds serves on the Executive Board of The International Qurʾanic Studies Association (iqsaweb.org). Prof. is the author of The Qur'an and Its Biblical Subtext (Routledge 2010). He has also published The Emergence of Islam (Fortress, 2012), an introduction to the Qurʾan, the life of the Prophet Muhammad, or the classical period of Islam. Currently, he is working on The Qurʾan in Conversation with the Bible, a Biblically-minded commentary on the Qurʾān which will be published by Yale University Press in Personal Website: 5/11

7 Guillaume Dye Professor of Islamic Studies Faculté de Philosophie et Sciences sociale Université Libre de Bruxelles Biography Guillaume Dye is Professor of Islamic Studies at the Université libre de bruxelles, holder of the Chair Islam: histoire, cultures et sociétés, and cofounder and codirector of the Early Islamic Studies Seminar. His main field of research is Qur anic and Early Islamic studies. His many publications include books : Guillaume Dye & Fabien Nobilio (eds.), Figures bibliques en islam, Bruxelles-Fernelmont (2011) ; Isabelle Dépret et Guillaume Dye (eds.), Partage du sacré : transferts, dévotions mixtes, rivalités interconfessionnelles, Bruxelles-Fernelmont, EME, (2012) and many major articles in the field of quranic studies : «La nuit du Destin et la nuit de la Nativité», in Figures bibliques en islam, pp ; with Manfred Kropp, «Le nom de Jésus ( Īsā) dans le Coran, et quelques autres noms bibliques : remarques sur l onomastique coranique», dans Figures bibliques en islam, pp ; «Lieux saints communs, partagés ou confisqués : aux sources de quelques péricopes coraniques (Q 19 : 16-33)», dans Partage du sacré, pp ; «La théologie de la substitution du point de vue de l islam», in Thomas Gergely et Eliezer Ben-Rafael (eds.), Judaïsme, christianisme, islam. Entre théologie de la falsification et théologie de la substitution, Bruxelles, Didier Devillez Editeur, 2010, pp ; and «Le Coran et son contexte. Remarques sur un ouvrage récent», Oriens Christianus 95, 2011, pp Personal Website: 6/11

8 Thomas Burman Professor and Robert M. Conway Director Medieval Institute University of Notre Dame South Bend Indiana USA Biography Thomas E. Burman is the Robert Conway Director of the University of Notre Dame s Medieval Institute. His research and teaching focus on the intellectual and cultural interactions between Jews, Christians, and Muslims in the Medieval Mediterranean, especially as revealed in Arabic-to-Latin translations, religious polemical literature, and scriptural commentary (especially Latin Biblical and Arabic Quran commentaries). His many publications include Religious Polemic and the Intellectual History of the Mozarabs, c (Brill, 1994); Religion, Text, and Society in Medieval Spain and Northern Europe: Essays in Honor of J. N. Hillgarth, edited with Mark Meyerson and Leah Shopkow (PIMS, 2002); Scripture and Pluralism: Reading the Bible in the Religiously Plural Worlds of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, edited with Thomas J. Heffernan (Brill, 2005); and Reading the Qur ān in Latin Christendom, (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007) for which he won the American Philosophical Society s 2007 Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History. He is now at work on a book called Ramon Martí and the Trinity: Islam, Judaism, and the Scholastic Project in which he explores thirteenth-century Latin-Christian interactions with Islam and Judaism through the life and works of the greatest medieval Catholic scholar of those religions. Personal Website: 7/11

9 Bert Jacobs Doctoral Researcher Faculty of Theology Department of Biblical Studies KU Leuven Belgium Biography Bert Jacobs is a doctoral researcher of the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO), affiliated to the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies, KU Leuven. He is a member of the Research Unit History of Church and Theology, and of LOCEOC (The Louvain Centre for Eastern and Oriental Christianity). His research focuses on the theological and cultural interaction between Christians and Muslims in the Islamic world. He is currently preparing a dissertation on the refutation of Islam written by the Syriac Orthodox bishop, Dionysius Bar Salibi (d. 1171). The project is supervised by Prof. Dr. Herman Teule and Prof. Dr. Mehdi Azaiez. He recently published Unveiling Christ in the Islamicate World: Fakhr al-dīn al-rāzī s Prophetology as a Model for Christian Apologetics in Gregory Bar ʿEbrōyō s Treatise on the Incarnation (Intellectual History of the Islamicate World, 6, ) and Wie zeggen jullie dat Mohammed is? Kritische analyse van een eigenzinnig antwoord op een klassieke vraag in de christelijk-islamitische dialoog. Collationes: Vlaams Tijdschrift voor Theologie en Pastoraal, 46 (1), Personal webpage: 8/11

10 Samuel Noble Doctoral Researcher Faculty of Theology Department of Biblical Studies KU Leuven Belgium Biography Samuel Noble is a doctoral researcher in the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies, KU Leuven. He is a member of the Research Unit History of Church and Theology, and of LOCEOC (The Louvain Centre for Eastern and Oriental Christianity). His research focuses on the social and intellectual history of Arabic-speaking Christians, particularly Antioch during the Byzantine Reconquista and patristic translations into Arabic. He is currently editing and translating the Kitāb al-manfaʿa of ʿAbdallāh ibn al-faḍl al-anṭākī (fl. 1050) under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Herman Teule and Prof. Dr. Joseph Verheyden. He is the co-editor, with Alexander Treiger, of The Orthodox Church in the Arab World : An Anthology of Sources (2014) and, with Stephen J. Davis and Bilal Orfali, of A Disputation over a Fragment of the Cross: A Medieval Arabic Text from the History of Christian-Jewish-Muslim Relations in Egypt (2012) and co-translator, with Brittany Pheiffer Noble, of Arab Orthodox Christians under the Ottomans by Constantin Panchenko (2016). Personal website: 9/11

11 PLACE COLLEGE DE VALK Tiensestraat Leuven Room : AULA ZEGER VAN HEE (Faculty of Law) Practical information Contact: Chaïma Ahaddour (chaima.ahaddour@kuleuven.be) 10/11

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