The Lived Quran - Journée d’études internationales

Introduction

The Koran is and has always been one and several, an object with extraordinary versatility for becoming manifest in different guises: voice and audition, a sacramental object both tactile and auditory, an object of veneration and devotion, an occasion for beatific audition and the evocation and invocation of an absent presence, the guarantor of oaths, the activator of blessings and curses, a source of prized proverbial inflections of language.

The Koran has also been a text, the occasion for exegesis, a mine for proof-texts to justify (and on very few occasions, to establish) theological dogmas and legal rulings, a source of historical knowledge, a repository of myths, a symbolic point of reference. And quite naturally, it is a text with a history of composition, canonisation, redaction, distribution. The Koran shares most of these features with other Scriptures. In modern times, all the above manifestations of the text persisted, in different proportions, but they were joined by something very new.

Under the combined impact of Muslim Reform, the global Protestantisation of conceptions of religion, and the cultural predominance of the print medium, the Koran was reconfigured as a book standing alone, independent of context and genre. It became in itself the unmediated source of political ideas and actions, a template for social organisation, and a paradigm for daily behaviour. This has generally been conjugated with the expansion of the religious field and its redefinition, which is what one finds in the output of integralist Islam in both its social and its political varieties.

The journée intends to broach the different lives of the Koran at a number of indicative points in light of the present state of knowledge and modalities of use.

The Lived Quran

10h - Opening : Thierry Fabre, director of the Mediterranean program

10h15 – Introduction : Aziz al Azmeh, Holder of the Averroès Chair

10:45 : Break

11h - Roundtable 1

Kevin Reinhard (Dartmouth College), The Notional Koran - More (and less) than the mushaf

Nikola Pantić, (Central European University), The Quran and the grimoires of pre-modern Damascus

12h : Discussion

12h45 Lunch

14h30 : Roundtable 2

Abdessamad Diyalmi, (Mohamed V University), Quran, penal law and society in the Moroccan sexual field

Belkacem Benzenine (CRASC/ IMéRA), the Quran in everyday life: study from a corpus of fatwas from al Azhar
 

15h30 : Discussion

16h : Break

16h15 : Roundtable 3

Aziz al Azmeh, (Averroès/ IMéRA Chair)

Mohammed Tozy (Sciences Po Aix/ Mesopolhis), The practice of the Quran according to the survey on Islam in everyday life

17h30 : Discussion and conclusion

18h : Cocktail reception