Presentation

Recent scholarship is offering fresh insight into the complex and fascinating history of Muslim engagement with the Bible, a history that stretches back to the very beginnings of Islam. Despite the importance of this topic for Muslim-Christian relations and for everyday inter-faith conversations, few ordinary Christians and Muslims are aware of how rich and multi-dimensional Muslim attitudes to the Bible have been, and how much these have varied over time. In this workshop we will engage with scholars who have recently published ground-breaking work on Muslim approaches to the biblical text.
Panelists include:

• Daniel Brown, moderator (PhD Chicago). Dr. Brown directs the Institute for the Study of Religion in the Middle East and is author of Rethinking Tradition in Modern Islamic Thought (Cambridge 1996) and A New Introduction to Islam (Wiley, 2017).

• Georgina Jardim (PhD University of Gloucestershire) is Lecturer in Islam, World Religions at the University of Gloucestershire and author of Recovering the Female Voice in Islamic Scripture (Ashgate, 2014) and co-editor of Reading the Gospels in Islamic Context (Routledge, forthcoming).

• Charles M. Ramsey (PhD Birmingham). Dr. Ramsey is the author (with Christian Troll and Basharat Mughal) of The Gospel According to Sayyid Ahmad Khan (Brill, 2020) and God’s Word, Spoken and Otherwise (Brill, 2022). He has held appointments at Baylor University and Forman Christian College in Lahore, Pakistan.

• Samuel Ross (PhD Yale). Dr. Ross is the author of Qur’an Commentary and the Biblical Turn: A History of Muslim Exegetical Engagement with the Biblical Text (De Gruyter, 2024). He is Associate Professor of Religion at Texas Christian University.

• Martin Whittingham (PhD Edinburgh) is the author of A History of Muslim Views of the Bible: the First Four Centuries (De Gruyter, 2020). Dr. Whittingham serves as Academic Dean of the Centre for Muslim-Christian Studies Oxford and is an associate member of the Theology and Religion faculty of Oxford University and a Research Fellow at Regent’s Park College Oxford.

This event will be hosted by the
– Institute for the Study of Religion in the Middle East in partnership with the
– Pontifical Institute for Arabic and Islamic Studies (PISAI) and the
– Centre for Muslim-Christian Studies Oxford.

Credit Photo : Christian Bibles in Muslim Robes with Jewish Glosses: Arundel Or.15 and other Medieval Coptic Arabic Bible Translations at the British Library - Asian and African studies blog (https://ar.inspiredpencil.com/pictures-2023/muslim-bible)