festschrift volume in honor of John W. Welch<\/a>). \u00a0My faculty appointment is in Asian and Near Eastern Languages, which is why I participated in the lunch, although I\u2019ve also taught courses in Philosophy (and, in fact, will be doing so again this next term). \u00a0The get-together was interesting, and was devoted almost entirely to a lively and candid series of questions and answers.<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
But, somehow, during the time that we were sitting there, I began to think of one of my great disappointments at BYU.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
During most of the years that I was seriously involved in the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies, or FARMS, and its successor organization, the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship, there was a real feeling of excitement and camaraderie as we brought the tools of biblical studies and ancient Near Eastern studies and other such fields to bear on the Book of Mormon, the Book of Abraham, and related topics. \u00a0We gathered together a constellation of Latter-day Saint scholars with expertise in early Christian literature, Egyptology, Semitics, Islamic studies and Arabic, biblical law, and the like. \u00a0I actually began to think of something like an emerging \u201cProvo School\u201d of scriptural scholarship, a distinct family of approaches to the topic \u2014 born from unique and distinct questions and interests. \u00a0I thought that maybe we were in the early formative stages of such a thing.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
And then I began to think about how the tools that were being applied to the extrabiblical scriptures of the Restoration might fruitfully be applied to yet another extrabiblical text of world scripture, the Qur\u2019an. \u00a0I began to dream of a \u201cBYU Qur\u2019an.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
There has long been a tendency to see Islamic studies and biblical studies as areas of study that are hermetically sealed off from one another. \u00a0The Qur\u2019an was, and continues to be, primarily viewed as the beginning of the Islamic tradition \u2014 which is, obviously, an entirely legitimate way of looking at it. \u00a0On the other hand, although it\u2019s relatively late it\u2019s actually older than at least a few of the texts that are included in Jim Charlesworth\u2019s two-volume anthology of the Old Testamant pseudepigrapha \u2014 which led me to wonder why the examination of those texts was considered more or less part of biblical studies, while the Qur\u2019an, a Near Eastern text from late antiquity, is not. \u00a0People who do biblical studies don\u2019t typically do Qur\u2019anic studies. \u00a0People who do Qur\u2019anic studies rarely if ever do biblical studies.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
In the old classical days of \u201corientalism,\u201d however, this wasn\u2019t necessarily so. \u00a0For instance, the great Julius Wellhausen (1844-1918), one of the originators of the \u201cdocumentary hypothesis\u201d regarding the Old Testament, also wrote on the New Testament and made extremely important contributions to the study of earliest Islam. \u00a0And his fellow German Eduard Meyer (1855-1930)\u00a0published extensively on ancient history generally and on Judaism in particular, and is still fairly\u00a0well known among Latter-day Saint scholars for his Ursprung und Geschichte der Mormonen<\/em> (1912), in which he very knowledgeably compared the Restoration to the rise of Islam. \u00a0They hadn\u2019t compartmentalized their approach to nearly the extent that \u2014 for easily understandable reasons \u2014 we do today.<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
My thought was to convene on ongoing seminar in which our people, coming from such diverse disciplines as Syriac studies, Egyptology, Hebrew legal history, patristics, Old Testament studies, comparative Semitics, and the like, would read the Qur\u2019an at a rather leisurely pace together over a period of years and discuss it, noting things that, because of their particular backgrounds and specialties, jumped out at them \u2014 but that would not necessarily strike those coming from the more common background of Islamic studies as such. \u00a0I thought that an interesting volume, a commentary, might result from such an enterprise.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Anyway, that was one of the dreams that died with the upheaval at the Maxwell Institute of 2012.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
For all sad words of tongue and pen,<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\nThe saddest are these, \u2018It might have been\u2019.\u00a0<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\nJohn Greenleaf Whittier (1807-1892)<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u00a0 \u00a0 BYU\u2019s Departments of Asian and Near Eastern Languages and of Philosophy had an informal lunch today with the University\u2019s president (Kevin Worthen) and its academic vice president (James Rasband, who contributed the foreword to the Interpreter Foundation\u2019s 2017 festschrift volume in honor of John W. Welch). \u00a0My faculty appointment is in Asian and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1019,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-68100","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n
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![\"Professor](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/186\/2018\/12\/591px-Eduard_Meyer.jpg\")
<\/a>