Symposia
August 12th 2022
Daniel in the Hadith
Presenters:
Dr Mohamed Wardany Abdel Rady Abdallah (Al-Azhar University, Cairo), 'The (Sunni) Hadith narrations concerning Daniel'
Azadeh Rezaie (Islamic Apocalyptic Research Group), 'Shi'i Hadith and traditions about Daniel'.
June 10th 2022 0900-1130 Houston time/1500-1730 UK time
Daniel Apocalypses
Presenters:
David Cook (Rice University, Houston), 'Daniel in Christian Arabic'
Here is the source to be discussed
Mehdy Shaddel (University of Leiden), 'Ethno-religion Meets Universal Empire: The Judaeo-Persian Apocalypse of Daniel in Its Early Abbasid Context'
The Qiṣṣa-yi Dāniyāl, or the Judaeo-Persian apocalypse of Daniel, is a most important but oft-overlooked witness to late ancient Jewish apocalypticism. In this talk I will argue that the text contains two recensions, the first dating to ca. 810-19 CE and the second ca. 837-8 CE, and hails from Babylonia based on its historical allusions. I will then address myself to its eschatological drama and how political developments of the time were read by the apocalyptist onto pre-existing eschatological schemes to demonstrate the proximity of the end. Finally, I will argue that the peculiar punishment meted out to the unbelievers in this text is a novel preoccupation with the religious other previously unattested in Judaism and that this development is a response to supersessionist Muslim and Christian imperial ideologies that demanded the triumph of, respectively, Islam and Christianity at the end of time.
Abstracts accepted for other future symposia include
Blake Evermon, 'Social media, Daniel and Islam: a survey of web-based material'
Ida Glaser, 'What have we learnt? the potential of the biblical book of Daniel as a resource for Christian-Muslim engagement'
Judy Wangombe, 'Africa International University, Nairobi, 'Islamic Apocalyptic Perceptions: A contextual reading of the Johannine epistles with a focus on the anitchrist'