I am no poet, just a historian of Islamic thought, but last year a student at a local high school invited me to read, edit, and write responses to her poetry. The resulting collaboration has now been published:
Callie Grey. Persephone: Collected Poems with Notes from David Vishanoff. Green Heron, 2024.
It was a transformative experience, and one of the best and most difficult acts of sacrificial listening I have done.
The book is available from amazon.com as a nice and inexpensive hardback as well as a cheaply made paperback and a Kindle ebook.
The Al-Mahdi Institute’s 2024 annual summer workshop on Islamic law was a spectacular demonstration of scholarship on classical and current Shi`i legal theory, focused on highly technical questions of language and meaning. My contribution was:
“Clarity, Ambiguity, and Interpretive Flexibility in Islamic Legal Theory from al-Shāfiʿī to Hassan Hanafi.” The 12th Annual AMI Contemporary Fiqhī Issues Workshop “Language and Meaning in Islamic Legal Theory,” Al-Mahdi Institute, Birmingham, UK, July 4, 2024.
The papers will be published by the Al-Mahdi Institute Press in 2025, in a volume edited by myself and Professor Mohsen Kadivar.
Many thanks to Adam Mestyan and Sabine Schmidtke for their wonderful hospitality during the March 2024 workshop on digital publication of right-to-left editions at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. My contribution was:
“Are Current Trends Leading to a Dead End? Two Case Studies on the Limits and Potential of Digital Methods for Arabic-Script Scholarly Editions.” Scholarly Digital Editions of Arabic-Script Texts, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, March 22, 2024.
Many thanks to Lejla Demiri and her team for great conversations about the field of Muslim reception of the Bible, and about some fascinating textual examples, at a workshop they hosted in Tübingen September 27-29, 2023. My contribution was:
“The Islamic Psalms of David in Ottoman Manuscript Collections.” Workshop on Muslim Readings of the Bible, Center for Islamic Theology, University of Tübingen, Germany, September 28, 2023.
Several translated selections from the Islamic Zabur that are of special interest for Christian-Muslim relations, and that are also available in the affordable Bloomsbury Reader in Christian-Muslim Relations, are now also included in the monumental new three-volume anthology Christian–Muslim Relations: Primary Sources, edited by David Thomas and available from Bloomsbury. My contribution is:
“Islamic Psalms of David.” In Christian–Muslim Relations: Primary Sources, Volume 1, 600–1500, ed. David Thomas, et al., 33–36. London: Bloomsbury, 2023.
It includes the following excerpts:
A rewriting of the Biblical Psalm 2 that alludes to a Qur’anic verse and seeks to preempt the Christian view that Psalm 2 asserts Jesus’s divine sonship.
A prediction of Muhammad and of the corruption of the Bible.
Another psalm that predicts Muhammad, alludes to the Qur’an’s echo of Psalm 37:29, criticizes Christian worship, and tells a story involving a dragon.
An assertion that Muslims do better than Christians at fulfilling Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount.
