Background
Founded under the aegis of Respect Graduate School (RGS), Interdisciplinary Journal of Islamic Studies (IJIS) aspires to become an indexed international English-language journal of Islamic studies, humanities, and social sciences. Published bi-annually, it aims to become a forum for double blind peer-reviewed articles that highlight critical points of intersection between religious traditions and sociocultural phenomena, faith and science, theology and philosophy, religious diversity and unity. Inspired by the vision offered by modern Islamic renewal traditions and intersectionality theories, IJIS invites its readers to reflect on the profundity of the divine aspects of the world as manifested not only by the sacred traditions of humankind but also by the world around in the multiplicity of its innumerable aesthetic, cognitive, and spiritual aspects. It is dedicated to discussion, exchange, advancement, and dissemination of scholarly research on Islam and Muslim societies on a global scale and examines historical and contemporary encounters between faith traditions.
Theme of Our First Issue: Qur’anic Studies in the West: Perils, Pitfalls and Prospects
In his 1983 article, “The Qur’an as Literature: Perils, Pitfalls and Prospects,” Andrew Rippin (d. 2016) provided insights into the field of Qur’anic studies in his day and age, addressing the intersections of the field with developments in literature. Rippin is also well known for explaining and promulgating the theories of John Wansbrough (d. 2002), who located the origins of the Qur’an in the Jewish or Christian sectarian milieu of Iraq of the 2nd- 3rd centuries of Islam. Since then, the publication of Behnam Sadeghi and Mohsen Goudarzi’s “Ṣanʿāʾ 1 and the Origins of the Qur’an” (2012) revisited the theories of Wansbrough and other sceptics, relocating the emergence of the Qur’an to Mecca and Medina of the first Islamic Century. Their use of manuscript evidence brought the somewhat elusive and heuristic nature of Wansbrough’s theories into relief, so that they no longer enjoy their erstwhile fame and spread. As this brief glimpse may suggest, Qur’anic studies is emerging as a dynamic discipline, characterized by the plurality of its voices, the breadth if its concerns and the multiplicity of its positionalities and methodologies. A little more than four decades after the publication of Rippin’s article, this issue provides insights into the state of the scholarship in Qur’anic studies today, as well as some of its more current challenges and opportunities.
Papers may address one or more of the following themes:
- The state of the scholarship in Qur’anic Studies in the West today
- New or established methodologies, hermeneutical approaches, or emerging fields of inquiry in the study of the Qur’an
- Past, present and future of iʿjaz theory (theory of inimitabilty or impeccability of the Qur’an)
- Challenges and opportunities of Qur’an translations
Articles should be sent to the journal’s editor Dr. Albert Frolov ([email protected]) in the form of e-mail attachments in a simple Word format. All articles should be prefaced by an abstract (no more than 250 words). The author’s postal and e-mail addresses, together with brief biographical details of about 50-150 words, should appear on a separate page. All pages should be numbered. Articles should be 8000-13000 words in length, including footnotes, references, appendices, tables, and figures.
- Those articles which the editors deem to have merit will be anonymously sent to two referees. Based on the referees’ reports, authors might be asked to introduce changes and adjustments.
- The detailed guidelines for submissions can be found at Guidelines for Submissions page.