Names of the Prophet Muhammad

  • April 5, 2017
  • 4:00 PM - 5:00 CST
  • Quinlan Life Sciences Building, Room 142
  • Marcia Hermansen, mherman@luc.edu 8-2345
  • free
  • all
     Open to the public.
  • http://www.luc.edu/media/lucedu/theology/pdfs/quraishi.pdf
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    ¿The Names of the Prophet: A Metaphysical Approach to Understanding the Life of Muhammad¿
    Was Mu¿ammad a prophet of light or a prophet of politics? The vast majority of twentieth-century literature on the founder of Islam measures the ¿prophet of light¿ through the ¿prophet of politics.¿ That is, we assess the accomplishments of Mu¿ammad against the patchy historical, contextual, and chronological data supplied by the early medieval sources. In contrast to this inductive approach, medieval Muslim literature on the Prophet of Islam was typically deductive: the ¿historical particulars¿ or the ¿prophet of politics¿ were assessed against the ¿trans-historical universals,¿ or ¿the prophet of light.¿ This talk will explore the ways in which medieval writers from al-Andalus and North Africa envisaged the pre-existential, terrestrial, and post-existential life of Mu¿ammad, and saw the Mu¿ammadan Reality as a manifestation of the principle that ¿God¿s Mercy overcomes His Wrath.¿
    Speaker Bio:

    Yousef Casewit is Assistant Professor of Qur'anic Studies at the University of Chicago Divinity School. His research areas include Qur¿anic studies, medieval intellectual history of North Africa and al-Andalus, commentaries on the divine names in medieval Islam, and Muslim perceptions of the Bible. He has several publications, the most recent is a critical edition of a Qur¿an commentary by the Sevillan mystic Ibn Barrajan (d. 536/1141) published with Brill (TSQ Series, Oct. 2015). His most recent book, *The Mystics of al-Andalus,* will be available by June 2017 with Cambridge University Press. Born in Egypt and raised in Morocco, he is fluent in Arabic, French and Spanish. Yousef has traveled throughout the Islamic world, and has studied with Muslim scholars in Morocco, Syria, and Mauritania.