The Qur’an and the Biblical Tradition (IQSA)

Call For Papers: This unit was established in order to study the Qur’an’s relationship to the biblical tradition in the broadest possible sense of the term. We are interested, for example, in exploring the Qur’an’s reaction to the exegetical, homiletic, and narrative traditions of the Bible, in both written and oral form. We invite an engagement with the books of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, regardless of a particular book’s status of canonization within specific Jewish or Christian groups, and in the various languages of their original composition as well as in later translations. We especially encourage studies of the legal corpora that have developed in close dialogue with this biblical tradition prior to the emergence of the Qur’an and, subsequently, in exchange with the Qur’an. For the 2019 Annual Meeting we further announce a themed session: “Theology of the Body in the Biblical Tradition and in the Qur’an.” This session will investigate the body as a useful site for studying qur’anic theological discourses in comparison with the biblical tradition. Since Peter Brown’s groundbreaking work, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (1988), the scholarly turn to the body has transformed the study of religion. In the Qur’an as well as in biblical traditions, the body figures prominently both as a site of human agency and as an agent itself. We welcome proposals for papers that deal with the diverse ways in which theological discourse shapes human attitudes towards the body (e.g., attitudes towards celibacy, diet, discipline, the embodied components of ritual, etc.), as well as papers that investigate the impact of the somatic on theological discourse (e.g., embodiment in devotional piety, corporeal aspects of apocalyptic representations, etc.), in the Qur’an and in biblical traditions.

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