Building from efforts within Islamic studies, Qur’anic studies, and literary studies, this seminar invites papers that examine the question of aesthetics, broadly conceived, in and around the Qur’an. Our aim will be to examine how the study of Muslim scripture and the aesthetic and intellectual traditions that have come up around it can be further illuminated by critical frameworks within the humanities, and how the Qur’an and Islam trouble those frameworks.

The extreme metatextuality of the Qur’an encourages us to adopt a capacious understanding of the term aesthetics and to engage a series of wide-ranging questions. For instance, how might we think what Hoda El Shakry calls the “literariness” of the Qur’an in conjunction with its sonic dimensions? What role do language and aesthetics play in medieval Islamic philosophy, theology, law, and exegesis, which both rely on and often depart from the Qur’an? Northrop Frye claimed that the Bible tells stories, while the Qur’an is a series of nonnarrative fragments. What stories does the Qur’an in fact tell, and how does it tell them? How might we think of the cultures of Qur’anic recitation through the scholarly rubrics of performance studies and film and media studies? If, as Ayman El-Desouky has argued, the Qur’an is uniquely useful for interrogations of literary critical method, and, as Rosalind Gwynne and Mehsi Azaiez have shown, the Qur’an is rife with various styles of argument, what insights does the Qur’an provide in terms of the aesthetic modalities of theory and critical argumentation within literary studies and related fields? How is the Qur’an, and by extension Islam, informed by the aesthetics and aesthetic traditions of the particular languages of its translations, given the vastness of the global Muslim community and the multiple contexts in which—and various conditions under which—it is read and recited?

The seminar will also encourage consideration of the Qur'an and Islam within comparativist analysis, with an eye, too, toward the methodological challenges that such analyses face especially when engaging with the philosophical and aesthetic legacies of Europe and the United States. What, for example, are the affordances and limits of thinking about the literature of Qur’anic encounter through the Enlightenment discourse of aesthetic experience? How is the taste of revelatory experience as it is suggested in some of the more ecstatically oriented surahs related, if at all, to early modern and modern European notions of aesthetic judgment and standards of taste? If, as scholars have begun to argue, the fragmentary nature of the Qur’an can be thought in tandem with the fragmentation of Euro-American modernism, how must scholarly inquiry into these points of commonality be rhetorically and theoretically handled? Encouraging discussion of these and other matters, this seminar takes as its starting point an understanding of the Qur’an as a text that inspires complex aesthetic questions.