Excerpt from an Interview with Angelika Neuwirth

"If one reads and interprets the Koran as a kind of information medium – as many contemporary Koranic researchers do – one does not do justice to it. The Koran is heavily poetic and contains a whole range of messages that it imparts at a semantic level – not at all explicitly, not at all unambiguously; it gets these messages across through poetic structures; if it didn't, it wouldn't be as vivid as it is. What makes the Koran unique is its complexity, its multiple layers, the fact that it speaks at different levels. On the one hand, of course, that is the huge aesthetic attraction. However, it is also, if you like, hugely attractive in rhetorical terms or in terms of its power of conviction.  

While it might be possible to sum up the mere information in the Koran in a short newspaper article, the effect would not have been the same. It really is about enchantment through language. Language itself is also praised in the Koran as the highest gift that humankind received from God. Naturally, this is related to knowledge. Language is the medium of knowledge. This is why one should never on top of everything else accuse the Islamic culture of being averse to knowledge. The entire Koran is basically a paean to knowledge, the knowledge that is articulated through speech."

https://en.qantara.de/content/interview-with-angelika-neuwirth-the-claim-that-islam-lacks-an-enlightenment-is-an-age-old

She's the author of The Qur'an and Late Antiquity: A Shared Heritage.

Session 1 - Hadith Criticism Muṣṭalaḥ - Origin And Evolution - Dr Issam...

on Orientalist book collecting

Instead of repeating earlier notions of Eastern wisdom to be discovered and learned from, Sprenger [(1813-93)] announces an alternative project: although the works he has collected have no useful substance whatsoever, they allow the reconstruction of a civilization that for him is clearly inferior to that of Europe but that can be studied on a larger historical scale than is possible in the European case. His analogy to the dissection of animals is revealing and suggests a particular explanation for the uneasiness of Muslim scholars who encountered Orientalist book collecting. Although this activity aimed at a comprehensive reconstruction of the Islamic intellectual heritage, it did not perceive its object as a living and breathing intellectual tradition. Rather, the collectors sought Oriental books as the raw material for the construction of a taxidermic replica, a stuffed corpse of the Islamic cultural edifice to be placed in the mental museum of European thought.

Ahmed El Shamsy, Rediscovering the Islamic Classics: How Editors and Print Culture Transformed an Intellectual Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020), p. 16.

Session 1 - Qur’anic Studies in Western Academia - Dr. Issam Eido at Darul Qasim

"Islam's Loneliest Cosmopolitan: Badr Al-Din Hai Weiliang, the Lucknow–Cairo Connection, and the Circumscription of Islamic Transnationalism"

Abstract

Badr al-Din Hai Weiliang (1912–?), a Chinese Muslim from rural Hunan, led a deeply transnational life. Hai was the only Chinese Muslim known to have studied in both India and Egypt in the modern period, spending considerable time at both the Nadwat al-‘Ulama in Lucknow and al-Azhar in Cairo. After Chinese, he learned four more languages in two decades: Arabic, Urdu, English, and Persian. While the Second World War transformed him into a longtime Guomindang diplomat, his time at the Nadwa and al-Azhar in the 1930s was largely devoted to questions of Islamic unity. Hai first pursued these questions in a doctrinal mode informed by Salafi currents, then in a political mode influenced by his translation of Iqbal’s “Allahabad address.” His move to Cairo brought him closer to the network of al-Fath and its editor Muhibb al-Din al-Khatib, a strong voice on behalf of Islamic unity, but geopolitics soon intervened. Disillusioned by the failure of the East Turkistan Republic, Hai coped by turning toward a cultural-historical mode of imagining Islamic unity, one that did not require specific political action. The eventual result was his Arabic-language opus Relations between the Arabs and China. Overall, Hai’s story defies both Sino-centric and peripheralized characterizations of Chinese Islam, showing that early-twentieth-century Chinese Islam can be used to write a highly integrated history of the Islamic world. This article contrasts Hai’s numerous Arabic and Chinese writings to show how he embodied the tensions felt across the Islamic world during this period between the national and transnational community.

John Chen, ReOrient, Vol. 3, No. 2 (Spring 2018), pp. 120-139 (20 pages).

e: Just found the title and abstract fascinating!..

Recording: Life & Achievements of Sh. Muhammad Mustafa al-Azami

Shaykh Mustafa al-A‘zami was one of the leading Islamic scholars of the modern age, with numerous works in Arabic and English (with an emphasis on Hadith). His initial Islamic studies were at Darul Ulum Deoband, India. After obtaining a Master’s degree at al-Azhar University, Egypt, he successfully completed a PhD at the University of Cambridge on the subject of Hadith. Thereafter he held various lectureships at the universities of Oxford, Princeton, Michigan and Colorado, amongst others. He later taught in universities in Saudi Arabia, and was granted Saudi citizenship. He was the recipient of the King Faisal International Prize for Islamic Studies in 1980 for his contribution to Hadith studies. He passed away in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on 20 December 2017. 

Speakers and Topics: 

Shaykh Akram Nadwi, ‘The Distinction of Shaykh Mustafa al-A‘zami’ 

Ustadh Imtiyaz Damiel, ‘Reflections on 15 Years in the Company of Shaykh al-A‘zami in Saudi Arabia’ 

Ustadh Sohaib Saeed, PhD, ‘The Contribution of Shaykh al-A‘zami to Quranic Studies’ 

Andrew Booso, ‘Shaykh Mustafa al-A‘zami in Western Academia’

New Book: Travelling Home: Essays on Islam in Europe by Abdal Hakim Murad

Released May 1, 2020. Available as an e-book at B&N.

"A forceful study of Islamophobia in Europe in an age of populism and pandemic, considering survival strategies for Muslims on the basis of Qur'an, Hadith, and the Islamic theological, legal and spiritual legacy."

See interview about the book here.

عبدالحكيم الأنيس مجلس سماع وإجازة لكتاب "مقاصد الصيام" لسلطان العلماء العز بن عبدالسلام ت:660هـ

https://youtu.be/v1jZQEyrxxY

“O ye people

you were not created in negligence, nor have you been left on your own. You have a destination where God, Most High, will judge among you and sort you out; ruined indeed and damned is the one whom God, Most High, puts outside His Mercy, ‘which envelops all things’, and outside His Heaven, ‘the breadth of which is that of the heavens and the earth’. But safety will be his morrow who fears and reveres God; who barters what is small for what is vast, what is ephemeral for what is eternal, what brings suffering for what brings joy. Do you not see that you are in the ranks of that which perishes and that you will be replaced hereafter by those who shall remain behind? Do you not see that each day you take to the grave a traveller journeying towards God, his term fulfilled, his future hopes cut short, you put him in a place burrowed in the earth, neither smooth nor cushioned—stripped of means, friends departed and a reckoning ahead?’

[From the sermons of ‘Umar b. ‘Abd al-‘Aziz]

Quoted in Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya’s The Invocation of God, Translated by Michael Abdurrahman Fitzgerald and Moulay Youssef Slitine. (Cambridge: The Islamic Texts Society, 2000 [2004]), pp. 19-20. See footnote 45 for citations from tafsirs where this is quoted. 

Why So Many Young Doctors Work Such Awful Hours

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/02/doctors-long-hours-schedules/516639/