At IQSA’s 2015 international meeting in Indonesia I presented my vision for a new digital humanities tool, the OU/Exaptive Discourse Map ‘Xap’:
“Genealogies of Qur’anic Hermeneutics: Tracing Trajectories through Online Data.” International Conference “New Trends in Qur’anic Studies,” co-hosted by the International Qur’anic Studies Association (IQSA) and the State Islamic University (UIN) Sunan Kalijaga. Yogyakarta, Indonesia, August 6, 2015.
Here are links to the richly illustrated full paper and the slide show presented at the 2015 IQSA meeting in Indonesia.
Congratulations to IQSA for this lively and diverse meeting, which was a major step toward IQSA’s vision of being a truly international scholarly organization.
My review of an important new book on how Islamic law came to be based on the Qur’an and Hadith.
David R. Vishanoff. Review of Ahmed El Shamsy, The Canonization of Islamic Law: A Social and Intellectual History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Islam and Christian–Muslim Relations 26 no. 2 (2015), 256-258.
This paper, presented at IQSA in 2014, compares how several modern Muslim thinkers have made use of the Ashʿarī theological doctrine that God’s speech is eternal but its expression is temporal. Special attention is paid to Aksin Wijaya, an Indonesian thinker who employs a version of the Ashʿarī doctrine to support his creative new approach to Qur’anic interpretation.
“Reenchanting the Qurʾān: Hermeneutical Applications of the Ashʿarī Concept of God’s Eternal Speech.” International Qur’anic Studies Association, San Diego, November 23, 2014.
Here is a pdf of the oral presentation version of the paper, without documentation. This was the first of several conference presentations about Aksin Wijaya and other contemporary scholars of Qur’anic hermeneutics in Indonesia. Future publications will incorporate some of the material presented here, with full documentation.
What, exactly, are we saying when we casually refer to various Muslims (and others) as literalists? Here is my detailed review of an ambitious book that identifies a whole range of different conceptions of literal meaning in several Islamic disciplines, especially legal theory.
David R. Vishanoff. Review of Robert Gleave, Islam and Literalism: Literal Meaning and Interpretation in Islamic Legal Theory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013). Islam and Christian–Muslim Relations 25 no. 4 (2014): 553–557.
David Vishanoff, translator. “ʿAbd al‑Jabbār on Rational Interpretation of Scripture.” In Islamic Theological Themes: A Primary Source Reader, ed. John Renard, 58–65. Oakland: University of California Press, 2014.
This published translation is an excerpt from `Abd al-Jabbar’s Mutashabih al-Qur’an. It explains why rational considerations necessarily govern the interpretation of scripture.
