14b. Qur’an Translations II: Global Exegetical Dimensions

Chair: Johanna Pink, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg

The bipartite panel “Qur’an translations” offers a fresh perspective on two crucial and interrelated topics which, we hope, have the potential to stimulate discussions in the field of Qur’anic studies as a whole. The first part of the panel looks at the idea and practice of framing the Qur’an as “literature” which emerged in Europe. This had many implications for how the Qur’an was presented, arranged and rendered into other languages, and a study of these renditions will yield insights into the development of intellectual and ideological perspectives on the Qur’an at the center of the modern world-system. Taken together, the papers in this panel raise questions of positionality and complicate two central and often unquestioned frameworks in the study of the Qur’an: its “literary” quality and the “explanation of its meanings”.