Stanford University Press Blog

American Academy of Religion and Society of Biblical Literature Conference 2021

 

To capture some of the spirit of gathering together in the AAR & SBL exhibit hall, we offer this virtual space, showcasing our new authors, award-winning books, and highlights from the last year of religion publishing at SUP.

 

New Books and New SUP Authors

Award Winners

AAR & SBL Resources

 

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New Books and New SUP Authors

Announcing new books, published in the last year. We’re offering 30% off  and free North American shipping on these and other recent SUP titles with discount code S21XAAR-FM through our virtual exhibit ».

 

 

Michael Marder discussed his book Green Mass: The Ecological Theology of St. Hildegard of Bingen » with Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback and Peter Schuback. Green Mass is a meditation on—and with—twelfth-century Christian mystic and polymath Saint Hildegard of Bingen. Attending to Hildegard's vegetal vision, which greens theological tradition and imbues plant life with spirit, philosopher Michael Marder uncovers a verdant mode of thinking. The book stages a fresh encounter between present-day and premodern concerns, ecology and theology, philosophy and mysticism, the material and the spiritual, in word and sound.

American Academy of Religion Conference 2020

 

To capture some of the spirit of gathering together in the AAR exhibit hall, we offer this virtual space, showcasing our new authors, award-winning books, and highlights from the last year of religion publishing at SUP.

 

Events

New Books and New SUP Authors

2021 Religion Catalog

From the SUP Blog Archives

New in Stanford Digital Projects

This Year’s Award Winners

AAR Resources

 

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Events

 

All times are listed in Eastern Standard Time

 

Stanford University Press

Meet David J. Halperin, author of Intimate Alien: The Hidden Story of the UFO (Stanford University Press)

Tuesday, December 1, 1:00 PM–1:30 PM

UFOs are a religious phenomenon—a UFO encounter is a bona fide religious experience, UFO lore a religious myth. As a collective cultural dream, UFOs transport us to the outer limits of that most alien yet intimate frontier, our own inner space. In his new book David Halperin, Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and lifelong specialist in Judaica, explores what UFOs and UFO belief mean for us as individuals, as a culture, as a species.

 

Stanford University Press Publishing with Stanford University Press

Tuesday, December 1, 2:00 PM– 2:30 PM

Interested in pitching your book to Stanford University Press? This brief presentation, led by SUP’s Executive Editor for the Humanities Erica Wetter, will cover the proposal and submissions process, including: What are the key components of a strong proposal? What makes a project stand out? What should you expect during peer review? What happens after a book is contracted? And, how can you make the most of your publishing experience? A Q&A period will conclude the event.

 

Our Mothers, Ourselves

Reckoning between the saintly and the monstrous

NATALIE CARNES

Virgin and Child with St Anne by Leonardo da Vinci. Public Domain. Via Wikimedia Commons.

 

In the last several years, there has been a surge in writing by women pondering the metamorphosis into mothers. Motherhood is a strange passage that leaves many women wondering how their new, maternal identity sits with their other identities—as lover, maker, reader, athlete, friend, and, especially, writer. Most women at least some of the time experience these roles in tension with one another, and writing mothers have been probing that tension, asking what part of it speaks to the social conditions of motherhood in our world today and what part taps into something deeper and more intractable about motherhood.

The mystery of the tension is one aspect of the strangeness of the passage to motherhood. Another is coming to inhabit such an outsized figure in the cultural imagination—and one outsized in ways that are not always positive. There is a moment in season 2 of that font of earthly wisdom, The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, when Kimmy finally realizes that the cause of her anger is her mother’s neglect, and Tina Fey’s therapist confirms her realization, saying, “It’s always the parents.” And most of the time, it’s the mother.

The insight is comical because it speaks a cultural truth. In pop psychology, the mother is the monster behind every malady, the villain lurking in our subconscious. Hers is the reproachful voice that we are not good enough, pretty enough, or thin enough. Insecure attachments to the mother explain the inability to form healthy relationships throughout one’s life. Her emotional comportment puts us at-risk for anxiety, depression, self-harm, and other-harm. It’s always the mother.

When I first watched that episode of Kimmy Schmidt, I thought, somewhat improbably, of a story a teacher told me years ago in a class on ancient Greek theologians. Two monks hiked through the mountains. The older, an abbot, trotted across the craggy precipices with the agility of a mountain goat as the young novice followed behind him. Taught to bring every troubling thought before the abbot, the novice confessed to his mentor, “Father, I have just had the thought that I should push you off this cliff.” The abbot continued spryly along as he replied, “Oh, pay no attention to that thought. That’s just the devil.”

And yet, besides babies, is there any group more sentimentalized than mothers? As Mother’s Day approaches, that sentimentality is on full commercial display.

Mortality, Myth, and the UFO

UFOs may not exist—but in the age of Trump and COVID-19, they’ve taken on fresh relevance and power.

DAVID J. HALPERIN

                                      Free for commercial use. Via Pixabay.

 

Are UFOs real? Or a myth? I would say they’re both—understanding “myth,” not in its common sense of “bunk” or “falsehood,” but as something vital and profound: a collective dream, a symbolic display of cultural and human realities of which we hadn’t let ourselves be aware.

Which, for our ancestors, might have been visions of God.

UFOs have fascinated me for nearly my whole life, starting when I was a teen “UFOlogist” back in the 1960s. I grew up to become a professor of religious studies, with special expertise in traditions of heavenly ascent and otherworldly journeys. Once, I believed UFOs were visitors from other planets. I now recognize them as a religious phenomenon. A UFO encounter, insofar as it’s not a simple misinterpretation of something in the sky, is a bona fide religious experience. The lore surrounding the UFO is a religious myth—or rather a full mythology, complex and ramified; a product of the space age, yet as rich and evocative as the great mythologies of antiquity.

      Ever hear of Roswell, New Mexico? Area 51? Chances are you have, even if you’re not sure just what happened at Roswell or what Area 51, the top-secret tract of Nevada desert that saw some of the Cold War’s most horrific weapons tests, has to do with UFOs. When Barack Obama declared in 2013 that “when you first become president, one of the questions that people ask you is, ‘What’s really going on in Area 51?,’” of course he was joking. But the joke would have fallen flat if there hadn’t been some truth in it that his audience could understand and appreciate. Hillary Clinton may have been less than serious when she promised a New Hampshire reporter at the beginning of 2016 that if elected she’d “get to the bottom” of UFOs, sending a “task force” to Area 51. But surely she’d crunched the numbers—polls have consistently shown that one-third to one-half of Americans believes in UFOs.

Christian Theology’s Economy of Conquest

Martin Luther King Jr.’s challenge to the American church’s capitalist God of war.

by DEVIN SINGH

In 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “Beyond Vietnam” speech.

As an extension of his fight against racist laws at home, Martin Luther King Jr. became increasingly critical of US policies abroad. Indeed, many speculate that King’s progressively strident critique of US militarism and intervention, particularly in Vietnam, and his challenge to American market priorities were factors that accelerated plans for his assassination—the 50th anniversary of which we recently marked as a nation. Among his many detractors were white clergy who, already incensed at King’s challenge to segregation and Jim Crow, were dumbfounded that he would move to oppose US warmongering and to call out the evils of capitalism. As King’s confrontation revealed, their theology was not only implicated in their racist vision of society, but also in a worldview that prioritized economic supremacy by any means necessary.

On April 4th, 1967, exactly one year to the day before he was murdered, King gathered with other religious leaders to protest the war in Vietnam at the Riverside Church in New York, where he delivered his famous sermon, “Beyond Vietnam.” As he began, King addressed his critics, those who asked, “Why are you speaking about the war, Dr. King? Why are you joining the voices of dissent?”; “Peace and civil rights don’t mix.” To such complaints, King responded: “the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment, or my calling. Indeed, their questions suggest that they do not know the world in which they live.”

The Prophetic Dreamer

A centuries-old story casts light on the cognitive potentials of our sleeping minds.

by KELLY BULKELEY

"View of Toledo" by El Greco, circa 1599–1600.

On May 25, 1590, by direct order of King Philip II, the Spanish Inquisition arrested a young, uneducated woman from Madrid named Lucrecia de León on charges of heresy and treason. She was brought to a secret prison in Toledo, interrogated, and tortured to make her confess her guilt. The evidence against her was overwhelming. She had been caught conspiring with known rebels, publicly slandering the king, defying direct orders from the church, and stirring up dissent against the imperial government.

Most damning was the collection of Lucrecia’s dreams, carefully recorded by a group of priests interested in apocalyptic omens who came to her house each morning to transcribe what she had seen the previous night. The dreams were filled with scandalous political and religious imagery, and Lucrecia had been openly sharing them with people at the highest levels of Spanish society.

The trial of Lucrecia de León is a story of a young woman defiantly dreaming truth to power.

It seemed like an open-and-shut case. The Inquisition had dispatched thousands of heretics to their eternal fate based on far less evidence than this. And yet, Lucrecia’s trial did not end quickly. It dragged on for five years, one of the longest trials in Inquisition history, and the final verdict against her deviated in several ways from the normal process of punishment.

Why did the Spanish Inquisition, at the height of its brutally oppressive power, struggle for so long to resolve Lucrecia’s case?

Because her dreams had come true.

Exploring the Zohar

A syllabus for plumbing the depths of a multi-volume masterpiece of Jewish mysticism.

Photo by Kalie Caetano.

Ever since it emerged mysteriously in thirteenth-century Spain, the Zohar has enthralled, confounded, challenged, and enraptured readers. Composed mostly in lyrical Aramaic, the Zohar is a mosaic of biblical interpretation, medieval homily, spiritual fantasy, and imaginative commentary written in the form of a mystical novel in which a group of rabbis wander through the hills of Galilee, discovering and sharing secrets of the Torah along the way.

This immense compendium of writings, widely regarded as the apex of medieval Jewish mysticism’s intellectual and literary prowess, forms the centerpiece of the kabbalistic tradition within Judaism today and is regarded by many as sitting alongside the Torah and Talmud as a sacred text in its own right. Comprising twelve large volumes, the Zohar is virtually an entire body of literature, and after two decades of painstaking translation, all volumes are now available in an authoritative English translation (a limited edition collector’s set is also available). No longer bound by its ancient Aramaic vault, the English translation found in The Zohar: Pritzker Editions opens myriad avenues of religious and academic exploration to English-speaking audiences for the first time.

To help guide curious seekers through this monumental text, we’ve gathered below a short syllabus of books that will help unpack the many subtleties, splendors, and mysteries of the Zohar as well as the history of medieval Jewish mysticism.

The Erotic Image

What differentiates holy desires from pornographic ones?

by NATALIE CARNES

"Madonna of the Nursing Child" by Lorenzo di Credi.

Mary looks down toward her bared breast, which is shaped like a cone and placed rather high on her chest in Lorenzo di Credi’s Madonna of the Nursing Child. The Christ-child’s lips part to receive her breast. He seems moments from suckling, yet his eyes remain locked on the viewer.

Di Credi’s is one of many images of the nursing Mary (Maria lactans) that appear in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. (Byzantine iconographers had been producing them for centuries, calling images of the bare-breasted Mary Galaktotrophousa, the Milk-giver.) But by the seventeenth century, these once-popular images had become much less common. In 2008, the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano responded to the decline of Maria lactans by calling for the rehabilitation of a semi-nude nursing Mary. Such images, it maintained, are important testimonies to the humanity of Christ, ways of nurturing desire for the God made flesh.

Later in 2008, Playboy in Mexico ran a December cover with a woman posing in front of stained glass, her hand cupping her exposed breast. The headline read, “Te Adoramos, María.” The Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights denounced the image. This was not the kind of Mary the Catholic Church had in mind. It was certainly not the kind of desire it wanted to nurture.

Most of us, whether or not we identify with the Catholic Church’s line on pornography, can still discern a difference between di Credi’s Mary and Playboy’s María. But how, exactly, can one name it?

Rapprochement in the Ruins

An enchanted Islamic ruinscape in Delhi sheds light on the Indian past and future.

by ANAND VIVEK TANEJA

The ruins of Firoz Shah Kotla (in Delhi) on a Thursday afternoon. Photo by Anand Vivek Taneja.

Monuments built by India’s pre-modern Muslim rulers are increasingly the target of Hindu nationalist ire. Even one of India’s biggest tourist attractions, the Taj Mahal, built by the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan and long considered one of the wonders of the world, has recently been excoriated as a “blot on Indian culture” by a Minister of the Union Cabinet. Hindu nationalist groups affiliated with the fascist organization Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS)—including the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) that currently controls the central government—have a long history of antagonism towards medieval Islamic architecture. In 1992, a mob egged on by RSS and BJP leaders destroyed the sixteenth-century Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, which they claimed was built over the birthplace of the Hindu god-king Rama.

Jinnealogy » provides a fresh vision of religion, identity, and sacrality that runs counter to state-sanctioned history.

However, as I show in my book, antagonism is not the only relationship that Hindus in contemporary India have with the built remains of the pre-modern Muslim past. In Delhi, Firoz Shah Kotla, the ruins of a fourteenth-century medieval palace built by Sultan Firoz Shah Tughlaq have become famous as a dargah, or Muslim saint shrine, to which Hindus and Muslims flock in the thousands every Thursday. The common sense here, among both Hindus and Muslims, is that more Hindus come here than Muslims do. Unusually, the saints here are not human, but jinns or genies.

In Islamic cosmology, the jinn are mortal, but they live much longer than human beings. Stories are told in Delhi, for instance, about a jinn who had met both Moses and Jesus and brought their greetings to Prophet Muhammad when he encountered him. The ability of the jinn to supersede human chains of memory and genealogy through their sheer longevity is what I call jinnealogy. These jinnealogical narratives are often told and retold at Firoz Shah Kotla, a site where jinns—in a theologically novel fashion—are considered saints. This sanctification of the long-lived jinn happens in a city where human chains of memory and belonging—and the geography of Muslim saint shrines—has been violently disrupted by the violence of Partition in 1947, and by post-colonial politics, which have sought to remake the city anew, and disconnected it from its pre-modern Muslim past.

From the Vote to the Vatican

In the Trump era, the relationship between Catholics and U.S. politics is complicated.

by MANLIO GRAZIANO

Donald Trump and Pope Francis. Image by DonkeyHotey. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr.

The November election showed a major shift in the Catholic vote: for the first time since 1968, the majority of Catholics did not vote in the same way as the majority of Americans. In 1968, the majority of Catholics voted for Hubert Humphrey, while the majority of the popular vote went, as we know, to Richard Nixon (though Humphrey lost almost 20 percentage points to the Republicans as compared to the 1964 elections). Even in 2000, Catholics voted in the same way as the majority of their fellow citizens: 51% of them chose Al Gore, who was eventually defeated by the Electoral College system. This identity between “Catholic vote” and popular vote has led many observers to state that a “Catholic vote” simply does not exist, or even that “Catholics are the bellwether voters: as go Catholics, so goes the nation.”

Last November, the majority of Catholics voted by a comfortable majority (55%) for the candidate who collected only a minority of the popular vote (46.1%), a difference of about nine percentage points. This is a noteworthy change, one that signals at least two things: first, that the Catholic hierarchy did not challenge Donald Trump, despite what certain statements made by Pope Francis during the campaign had led people to think; and second, that there is a majority of Catholics in the United States who want to carve their social, and therefore political, advancement in stone. And that these two phenomena influence each other.

Last November, the majority of Catholics voted by a comfortable majority for the candidate who collected only a minority of the popular vote.

 

In Rome We Trust » reveals how Catholics have come to play an increasingly significant role in American politics.

This thirst for social advancement can be explained in the following way: since the end of the World War II, Catholics have climbed the social ladder, achieving the pre-eminent role in the political life of the country that I describe in my new book, In Rome We Trust. The result is that they now have dreams of overcoming the traditional social hierarchy that identifies America with WASPs. Some of them want to see a “De-WASPing of America’s Power Elite,” as Robert C. Christopher puts it in Crashing the Gates–something achieved in the Supreme Court before the death of Antonin Scalia, when three Jews and six Catholics made up the country’s most important judicial body. Others (now clearly a majority) on the contrary, aspire to join the WASP ranks, thus distinguishing not from the WASPs themselves, but from those Catholics who remain on the lowest rungs of the social ladder, essentially, recent immigrants from Latin America and the Philippines. The most radical wing of this latter group has pushed its “WASP-ing” agenda to the point of abandoning Catholicism for militant evangelicalism (Mike Pence, Sarah Palin, Ted Cruz, and Neil Gorsuch are the best known examples).

Modern Politics in Premodern History

How national narratives have obscured the history of India’s most controversial king.

by AUDREY TRUSCHKE

This portrait of the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb mounted on a horse, and ready for battle, was originally produced circa 1660.

In 1700, the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb was arguably the richest, most powerful man in the world. He ruled for nearly fifty years, from 1658 until 1707, over a vast empire in South Asia that boasted a population exceeding the entirety of contemporary Europe. Today, he has been forgotten in the West.

The Mughal Empire at Aurangzeb’s death in 1707. Reproduced with permission from Juggernaut Books.

In modern-day India, however, Aurangzeb is alive in public debates, national politics, and people’s imaginations. From Mumbai to Delhi to Hyderabad, Indians debate his legacy and, overwhelmingly, condemn him as the cruelest king in Indian history. The list of charges against Aurangzeb is severe and, if they were all true, shocking. Aurangzeb, a Muslim, is widely thought to have destroyed thousands of Hindu temples, forced millions of Indians to convert to Islam, and enacted a genocide of Hindus. As I am reminded daily on Twitter, many Indians sincerely believe that Aurangzeb was Hitler and ISIS rolled into one with a single objective: To eradicate Hindus and Hinduism.

My narrative of Aurangzeb in Aurangzeb: The Life and Legacy of India’s Most Controversial King—based on extensive research and relying on primary source documents—does not match his current reputation. Accordingly, much of the response to Aurangzeb in India, published in February 2017 under the title Aurangzeb: The Man and The Myth, has been fierce. I am the target of daily, sometimes hourly, hate speech on social media. I am regularly attacked on the basis of my gender, nationality, race, and perceived religion. I have even faced (so far, limited) calls to ban Aurangzeb and even to ban me from India. In this blog post, I explore the roots of the controversy over Aurangzeb, my role therein as a historian, and the harsh realities of producing historical analysis in a world where many privilege politically expedient falsehoods.

The Not-So-Secular Age

In times of neoliberal precariousness, religion helps master everyday dread and ignominy.

by VIKASH SINGH

An image from Kanwar, India's largest annual religious pilgrimage. Photo by Vikash Singh.

In his 1967 book, The Sacred Canopy, sociologist, Peter Berger, famously argued that religion would decline and become redundant as the world modernized. Three decades later, equally famously, he did a volte-face and said he had been proven wrong; religion was back with vengeance. Like so many “theorists of modernity,” Berger had made the mistake of thinking of modernization as abstract history instead of concrete social reality, a tack sociologists inherited from Enlightenment philosophy. The philosophes of that era entertained a conceptual understanding of history as a long arc with an inbuilt direction, purpose, or goal (telos) and seen through this lens the decline of religion, as science and technology took over, was regarded as an inevitable, scientific truth—one of sociology’s own “laws” to rival the inviolable rules that govern the hard sciences. Yet in our fascination with science, carried away by the systematic biases of Cartesian objectivity, we have ignored something critical: the concrete conditions of human existence.

We are wont to approach the resurgence of religion, as it is often called, with suspicion, as fundamentalist and fanatic. But one must be careful.

I spent about a year, studying the Kanwar, a religious movement in India, in which millions of people carry water from the river Ganga to local Śiva shrines. This used to be a modest event, involving a few thousand people, but the pilgrimage has grown explosively over the last couple of decades. We are wont to approach such resurgence of religion, as it is often called, with suspicion, as fundamentalist and fanatic. And considering the rapid political ascendancy of the Hindu right over the same period of time, there may be some justification for such a reading. But one must be careful, because that is precisely the trap of abstraction.

As soon as I approached these subjects in their situated material and moral circumstances, I found not “fanatics,” but poor young men and women coming of age in conditions of hopeless uncertainty. These were people trying to find a meaning for their lives and find a path to life, livelihoods, and honor, in a sea of traumatic misfortunes and deprivation. In an exclusive global economy, premised on seducing and ingesting people as consumers while violently rejecting them as workers, religion becomes an alternate field for performed existence as well as social and self-recognition. In conditions where the overwhelming majority of workers are informally employed, and the prospects of a stable livelihood and respectable future are faint if not illusory, the often painful journey repeats, performs, and prepares for a daunting transition to an elusive adulthood. It is an open and freely accessible, yet formidable and valued stage for people to practice and demonstrate their talents, resolve, and moral worth.

Debating Moderate Islam

On the post-9/11 Muslim American experience and the “Ground Zero Mosque” controversy.

by ROSEMARY R. CORBETT

Military and civilian personnel attend a Muslim prayer service at the Washington Navy Yard Chapel, Washington, D.C., 2010. Public domain.

 

In December 2009, Feisal Abdul Rauf, a prominent imam, Sufi shaykh, and the internationally recognized leader of the Cordoba Initiative, announced plans to open Cordoba House, a thirteen-story Islamic community center in Manhattan. The proposed center was to be built on a location two blocks from the World Trade Center site. Though designed to educate Americans about the truths Islam shares with other faiths and to exemplify “moderate Islam”—something Rauf had spent nearly a decade promoting—the proposed center was quickly embroiled in debate that eventually became known as the “Ground Zero Mosque” controversy.

After 9/11 both local leaders and international elites had widely praised Rauf’s core message, delivered at his mosque, in his public appearances, and in his 2004 book, What’s Right with Islam. That message emphasizes Islam’s place within an ethical tradition originating with Abraham (the biblical patriarch common to Judaism and Christianity). Further, it holds that of all the governments in the world, American liberal democracy best embodies this ethic in social form. Because US multiculturalism, pluralism, and “democratic capitalism” are expressions of the “Abrahamic” ethic, Rauf argues, US laws and institutions comply with Islamic law (shari‘ah). Consequently, non-Muslim American can accept Muslims as Abrahamic siblings, while Muslim Americans can promote American liberal values and social systems worldwide.

Because US multiculturalism, pluralism, and “democratic capitalism” are expressions of the “Abrahamic” ethic, Rauf argues, US laws and institutions comply with Islamic law (shari‘ah).

The Mission of Medina

How Saudi religious education has dynamically expanded the influence of Wahhabism.

by MICHAEL FARQUHAR

Congregants at the Mosque of the Prophet in Medina, 2009. Photo by Omar Chatriwala. CC BY 2.0 via Wikipedia.

In the last decades of the twentieth century, many Muslim communities around the world witnessed the growing influence of Salafism, a style of Islamic religiosity characterized by a distinctive set of creedal and legal principles which are understood by its adherents to reflect the beliefs and practices of the earliest generations of Muslims. The rise of Salafism, with its perceived rigidity, antimodernism and exclusivism, has been the cause of considerable anxiety on the part of Muslim and non-Muslim observers alike.

What exactly is the “export version of Wahhabism” and through what channels has it been disseminated to the wider world in recent decades?

Seen as an alien intrusion in many of the communities within which it has gained a foothold, it has come to be associated in the popular imagination with atavistic brutality, misogyny, sectarianism, anti-Semitism and political violence. In the clamor to understand the nature of this phenomenon and to explain how it has achieved such seemingly unprecedented momentum, it has become common to invoke a form of cultural imperialism emanating from Saudi Arabia. A 2012 article from France 24, quoting an expert on the region as explaining that Salafism is an “export version of Wahhabism” and that “the Saudis have been financing [Wahhabism] around the world,” is emblematic of this line of thinking. Elsewhere, Saudi religious sway has similarly been identified as a source of social conflict across the Global South, from Indonesia to Kashmir. Meanwhile, alleged creeping Wahhabism in Muslim communities in Europe and the United States has time and again been condemned as “a Saudi export we could do without.”

On the face of it, efforts to explain the worldwide rise of Salafism in these terms, as the product of an extension of Wahhabi influence made possible by Saudi oil money, appear to offer an appealingly neat and compelling narrative. Yet on closer inspection, this narrative raises as many questions as it initially seems to answer. What exactly is the “export version of Wahhabism” and through what channels has it been disseminated to the wider world in recent decades?

Reason in the Holy Writ

How the Qur'an heralded a quest for knowledge and rational inquiry in Arabia.

by SARI NUSSEIBEH

Public domain.

By any measure, the changes that gripped Arabia and its surroundings in the seventh century CE are extraordinary. The major players of the day—the Roman, Byzantine, and Sassanid Empires—set the course of history on a broad scale. Yet within a few decades an Arab world, previously regarded as a culturally insignificant backwater, catapulted to center stage.

Besides constituting a major political power in its own right, the Arab world emerged as an intellectual powerhouse that energized a new phase in the history of civilization. A desert people—hardly in possession of a script for their language (much less adequate material for making use of such writing)—brought forth, as if by magic, scholars and intellectual giants who made invaluable contributions to intellectual history. A marginal language spoken by a marginal people transformed into a language of power—a medium bearing the most advanced scientific thought. How did this transformation occur? What sparked this intellectual revolution, the birth of reason, which ultimately produced some of the greatest minds in the history of thought and science?