"Origin Stories: A Forum on the Discovery and Interpretation of the Birmingham Quran"

Roundtable Discussion

Thursday, October 29, 2015 2:00 PM to 5:00 PM EDT
Off-Campus Location, Freer Conference Room at the Freer Gallery of Art, 1050 Independence Ave SW, Washington, DC

BQOn October 29, the First Millennium Network will be hosting a roundtable discussion at the Freer Gallery of Art on the recent discovery of the Birmingham Quran. These manuscripts have been stored in the Cadbury Research Library at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom for decades, however since they were bound together with another similar text, researchers were not aware that these unique pages are in fact some of the earliest writings of the Quran available today and were possibly written during the lifetime of Muhammad. This roundtable will feature several scholars to shed light on the significance of these findings.

Speakers

Maria Dakake, Co-Director, Ali Vural Ak Center for Global Islamic Studies at George Mason University

Sidney Griffith, Professor Emeritus, The Catholic University of America

Ahmet Karamustafa, Professor, University of Maryland

Behnam Sadeghi, Assistant Professor, Stanford University

 

Sponsored by the First Millennium Network, a cross-institutional organization in the DC metro area which seeks to extend scholarly perspectives by finding creative ways to encourage interdisciplinary and comparative study of the entirety of the first millennium of the Common Era, particularly in Western Europe, Byzantium, and the Islamic world.

Co-sponsors include Mason's Ali Vural Ak Center for Global Islamic Studies, Department of History and Art History, and Department of Religious Studies, University of Maryland's Department of History and Department of Middle Eastern Studies, Catholic University's Center for the Study of Early Christianity, MARGINALIA Los Angeles Review of Books, and the Smithsonian Institution's Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery

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