God’s Other Book: The Qur’an Between History and Ideology
ACGIS Faculty Talk with Mohammad Salama
Wednesday, March 1, 2023 12:00 PM to 1:15 PM EST
Horizon Hall, 3rd Floor Conference Room #3225
Abstract:
"God’s Other Book is an interdisciplinary text. I invite the reader to walk with me through Qur’anic Studies, Classical Arabic, Philosophy, Historical Criticism, Aesthetics, and Literary Theory. Above all, this is a book about the Arabic language, especially the beauty of pre-Islamic poetry that has been nearly entirely lost in academic studies, including for scholars versed in Arabic literature. In addition to highlighting the relationship between pre-Islamic poetry and the Qur’an, this study focuses on the travels of the Qur’an itself: its reception in postcolonial Euro-American scholarship, the status of its less-studied Arabicity, its aesthetic imbrications, and the significance of all this for future scholarship on the Qur’an. While the method of this study investigates the past, the implications bear on the future: it is only with a renewed attention to the Qur’an itself, in all of its beauty and complexity, that readers in the West can begin to engage attentively and ethically not just with other academic fields, but with the cultures and traditions of those who live according to another book."
Mohammad Salama is Professor of Arabic and Chair of the Department of Modern and Classical Languages at George Mason University. He holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and has held faculty positions at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater and San Francisco State University. Dr. Salama’s work focuses on the analysis of literary and cultural trends, with particular emphasis on “theorizing” Islam in postcolonial Arab and Western thought. Dr. Salama’s best-known books include Islam, Orientalism, and Intellectual History (I.B. Tauris, 2011), The Qurʾan and Modern Arabic Literary Criticism (Bloomsbury, 2018), and Islam and the Culture of Modern Egypt (Cambridge UP, 2018).
Pizza and refreshments will be served.
