Lecture
The Emotive Qur’an in its Late Antique Context, part 2: Qur'an
- Karen Bauer
- Date
- Tuesday 27 March 2018
- Time
- Explanation
- Free to visit
- Series
- LUCIS Spring Fellow 2018: Karen Bauer
- Location
-
Lipsius
Cleveringaplaats 1
2311 BD Leiden - Room
- 130
Qur'anic emotion through the ages
This lecture follows on from the previous lecture, by examining the control and expression of fear, grief, love, and compassion in the Qur’an, in order to show that the Qur’an broadly advocates emotional restraint on the part of the believers. Bauer then examines whether the Qur’anic message changed through time by using a recent chronology of the Qur’an proposed by Sinai (2017) and cross referencing this with her own data on the occurrence of the terms for fear, grief, love, and compassion/mercy (which alone occurs over 300 times in the Qur’an). Such analysis enriches our understanding of the way that the Qur’an appealed to its audience at different stages, and may shed light on the overall diachronic development of the behavioural norms expected of the believers.
About Karen Bauer
Dr. Karen Bauer (PhD, Princeton, 2008) is a Senior Research Associate in the Qur’anic Studies Unit at the institute of Ismaili studies. She specialises in Islamic social and intellectual history; her specific interests include the Qur’an and Qur’anic exegesis, emotions and emotional rhetoric in Islamic history, and gender in Islamic history and thought. Her research centers on medieval texts, but she occasionally ventures into modern territory, such as when she interviewed religious scholars (ʿulamaʾ) in Iran and Syria for her book Gender Hierarchy in the Qur’an. She has published on subjects such as emotional rhetoric in the Qur'an, women’s right to be judges in medieval Islamic law, the potential and actual audiences for medieval tafsīr, and the formula pertaining to kindness in marriage present in both tafsīr and the documentary evidence of contracts of marriage. She is active in the International Qur’anic Studies Association (IQSA).