Pembroke Hosts International Workshop ‘Unlocking the Medinan Qur’an’

NEWS |

On the 19th–21st March 2017, researchers from across the globe assembled at Pembroke College to attend ‘Unlocking the Medinan Qur’an’, an international workshop that examined the surahs (chapters of the Qur’an) commonly associated with the Medinan period of Muhammad’s life. According to Islamic tradition, these passages were revealed at Medina after Muhammad and his followers had to leave their hometown Mecca in 622 CE.

The workshop was convened by Professor Nicolai Sinai, Pembroke Fellow and Tutor in Islamic Studies and Sheikh Zayed Associate Professor of Islamic Studies. He commented, ‘A proper comprehension of the Medinan Qur’an is crucially important to our understanding of Islamic religious history in general’.

Speakers represented a diverse range of institutions, including the University of Notre Dame, the Free University of Berlin, the University of Chicago and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, to name a few. The audience included scholars from Oxford and other universities as well as members of the general public, with some attendees travelling from as far afield as Lebanon and the US. Also among the hearers were a number of Pembroke students.

A fundamental question raised through the workshop was if and to what extent the subdivision of the Qur'anic body into earlier Meccan and later Medinan layers (a separation inherited from medieval Islamic scholarship) is a valid assumption for researchers today. Speakers approached the Medinan Qur’an from a variety of perspectives, and occasional disagreements prompted enriching debates. The range of topics discussed was wide, including the literary organisation and compositional history of Qur’anic texts, their links to earlier Jewish and Christian traditions, and the peculiar theological concerns of the Medinan material.  Prof. Sinai’s own presentation focused on serially iterated paragraph openers, revealing how they are employed to create patterns of clustering and alternation that serve as the structural backbone of many Medinan texts.

For a full report of the workshop, click here.

 ‘Unlocking the Medinan Qur’an’ was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council UK; the attendance of a large number of non-speakers was supported by a generous donation from alumnus Brian Wilson (1948, PPE) a long-standing benefactor of Arabic and Islamic studies at Pembroke College.