IQSA Annual Meeting
The International Qur’anic Studies Association (IQSA) is the first learned society dedicated to the study of the Qur’an. It holds conferences around the world and publishes cutting-edge research and scholarship. The IQSA community and its partners include scholars, students, publishers, and members of the public.
The last IQSA Annual Meeting took place in Palermo, between 5/7 September 2022.
Many relevant personalities contributed to the initiatives that built those three days:
The Institutional Greetings of
Alberto Melloni - Secretary of FSCIRE
Massimo Midiri - Rector of the University of Palermo
Alba Fedeli and Devin Stewart - Co-directors of IQSA Annual
Meeting in Palermo
Hythem Sidky and Holger Zellentin - IQSA executive director
and IQSA Board of directors’ Chair
Roberto Lagalla – Mayor of Palermo
The 3 Keynote Lectures:
Qur’anic Studies Today: Composing Past Approaches and Building New Perspectives by Roberto Tottoli (University of Naples L’Orientale)
The Light of Civilization, the Shadow of Empires: Mediterranean Muslims and the Qur’an under British and French Colonial Rule by Johanna Pink (University of Freiburg)
Presidential Address: A Historian Looks at the Qur’an by Fred Donner (University of Chicago).
The Event: A Read-Through of “Surah Yusuf, A Translation in 5 Acts” by Shawkat M. Toorawa from Yale University, New Haven, CT.
Professor Toorawa in this regard stated:
It was only after I had started learning Arabic that I began truly to appreciate the artistry in the Qur’an’s rhythms and rhyme. It was also then that I realized how poorly these acoustic and sonic qualities were served in translation. I resolved, both modestly and brazenly, to help remedy the situation. My first translation was of Sûrat al-Insân (Q. 76), which I’d heard recited in the Prophet’s Mosque in the late 1980s. I then tried my hand at some of the short surahs. I published these translations in the Journal of Qur’anic Studies so that colleagues who teach the Qur’an would have available to them translations that were attentive to sound. As I continued to translate over the years, I realized that I was mainly choosing surahs that Muslims the world over use in their devotions, thus surahs or surahs containing passages, that were recited in the daily ritual-prayers (salât) or recited devotionally in Ramadan or that featured in widely attested supplications (du‘â) and remembrance (dhikr). (Revised versions of these translations are forthcoming in The Devotional Qur’an: Surahs and Passages from the Heart of Islam).
One surah I have always wanted to translate is Sûrat Yûsuf (Q. 12), not for its rhythms and rhymes alone, but for its (unique) rhetorical features. I decided to attempt an innovative, perhaps even radical, way of translating the sura, a translation as playscript. I tested this on three of my dearest friends and colleagues: Joe Lowry, Devin Stewart, and Nora Schmid. With their (re)assurance that it “worked,” I proposed to IQSA that we hold “A Read-Through of ‘Surah Yusuf, A Translation in 5 Acts’.” My aims were threefold. First, to demonstrate through oral performance some of the most prominent and "cinematic" rhetorical features of this surah, including stage directions, scene-setting, cuts, and dramatic dialogue. Second, to show, as I have in my previous translations, that rhyme can be incorporated effectively in any translation of the Qur’an, and that narrative economy can be preserved. And third, to provide all in attendance with an opportunity to interact with the Qur’an in a completely new and embodied way—as scholars, speakers, listeners, translators, and performers—I enlisted 14 colleagues to read various parts—all at one and the same time. Interacting with the surah in this way, with friends and colleagues I admire, was a priceless, and unique, experience. I am immensely grateful to Francesca Badini and Alba Fedeli for making it such a success.
Judging from the reaction of the “reader-performers” and of the audience in the spectacular Sala dei Musici in the Palazzo Alliata di Villafranca, this “experiment” worked. By interacting with the surah in this way, we all learned much more about the genre, narrative structure, dramatic and rhetorical choices, ambiguities and foreshadowings, and storytelling force of the surah. And for me personally, I came away with a new understanding of what makes the recounting of this surah ahsan al-qasas (v. 3) a phrase that means “the best story,” one I now think of also meaning “the best told story.”
I should note that I have learned that I am not the first to translate the surah in dramatic form. In 1994 James Morris published the regrettably largely unnoticed, “Dramatizing the Sura of Joseph: An Introduction to the Islamic Humanities,” in Journal of Turkish Studies (Festschrift for Annemarie Schimmel) 18 (1994): 201–224. Although Sûrat Yûsuf has received an inordinate amount of scholarly attention, it is my hope that with Morris’s and my efforts, we can gain a deeper understanding of this “beautiful story.”
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