ReOrient: The Journal of Critical Muslim Studies Special Issue Volume 9, Issue 1

The latest issue of ReOrient Volume 9, Issue 1 is a special issue on The Qur’an and the Humanities. ?The issue intends to showcase the significance of a purposefully multidisciplinary examination of the Qur’an and its myriad dimensions as a way to firmly situate Qur’anic studies as an integral part of the Humanities, beyond specific silos of technical specialisations.?Tehseen Thaver introduces the issue in “Toward a Post-Orientalist Conception of Qur’anic Studies”.

Walid Saleh connects questions of chronology in the Qur’an with larger problems to do with processes of identity formation in early Islam in “Early Medinan Suras: The Birth of Politics in the Qur’an”. ?Ash Geissinger seeks to reformulate our understanding of gender in the Qur’an in “Notes on the Siege’s Aftermath and Gendered Rhetoric in the Qur’an: Towards a Reconsideration of Q. 33:34”?

In “Finding the Qur’an in Imitation: Critical Mimesis from Musaylima to Finnegans Wake” William Sherman turns his attention to instances of attempts on the part of a range of actors, Muslim and non-Muslim, to produce Qur’anic imitations. Drawing on tools of literary theory Emmanuelle Stefanidis examines the stakes involved in offering competing chronologies of the Qur’an by Western scholars in ”In Search of Chronology: Narratives of Qur’anic Evolution in Western Academia”.

Tehseen Thaver asks, and addresses, the question of how we might theorise the relationship between Qur’an exegesis, ritual practice, and the formation of religious identities and communities in “Retrieving the Senses in Qur’anic Exegetical Texts: Shaykh Abu al-Futuh Razi’s Persian Qur’an Commentary”. In “Qur’anic Orality and Textual Epistemologies of the Humanities” Lauren Osborne makes a case for rethinking the exclusive privileging of textual interpretation as the touchstone of scholarship on the Qur’an.

And finally in “Ignoring the Bible in Qur’anic Studies Scholarship of the Late Twentieth Century” Devin J. Stewart uncovers the multiple political, institutional, and disciplinary factors that might explain this odd absence, through a focused intellectual history and analysis.