13a Neoplatonism and the Qur’an: From Late Antiquity to Ismaili Hermeneutics
Chair: Nuha Alshaar The term Neoplatonism is a modern neologism that modern scholars used to classify worldviews across multiple faith traditions that posit certain theological and cosmological claims about the nature of reality. These claims include the belief in an absolutely singular, simple, transcendent and ineffable God who is beyond all ontic predication as the source or ground of all reality and the existence of cosmic intermediaries or emanations (such as Intellects and/or Souls). Major schools of Islamic philosophy and mysticism subscribe to Neoplatonic ideas and structures; these include the Avicennian, Akbarī, Illuminationist, and Ismaili traditions. Muslim thinkers within these traditions offered distinctively Neoplatonic readings of the Qur’ān in which Qur’anic motifs, divine names, and symbolic objects are understood as descriptions of the Neoplatonic structure of reality. At first glance, these interpretations appear to be nothing more than eisegesis, as if Muslim Neoplatonic thinkers are merely imposing theological into the Qur’anic text. The four papers on this panel collectively argue that Neoplatonic readings of the Qur’ān are not as unusual as originally thought.
13b. Qur’an Translations I: European Literary Frameworks
Chair: Sohaib Saeed, Ibn 'Ashur Centre for Quranic Studies 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. 1) Francesca Badini will shed light on the popularization of Qur’an translations in 19th-century Europe, often building on Savary’s literary Qur’an translation into French. 2) Elvira Kulieva will discuss the integration of the Qur’an into the novel concept of ‘world literature’ in the twentieth century in the early Soviet Union. 3) Johanna Pink will analyze the role of European literary models in the production of Qur’an translations in the postcolonial successor states of French West Africa. 4) Yulianingsih Riswan will present Abdollah Kader’s use of literary approaches in his Dutch Qur’an translation (2008). The second part of the panel focuses on global Muslim exegetical discourses and the ways in which they function both in individual translations and in the activities of influential institutions, shedding light on global networks and controversies that shape the interpretation of the Qur’an. 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”.
