I am very happy to announce the forthcoming international workshop, ‘Jews, the Qur’an and Islam: Contacts and Influences’ which will take place on 1-2 February 2023 in Copenhagen.

The workshop, which I am organising as part of the EuQu project, aims to explore how Jews approached the Qur’an and Islam from the Middle Age to the early modern period both in the lands of Islam and in Europe. Through various sources and textual genres ranging from polemics, exegesis to Qur’anic translations, we will discuss how Islam was perceived, how the Qur’an was used and how the Jews in some contexts were influenced by the material, textual and theological aspects of the Islamic tradition.

The event will include a keynote lecture by Susannah Heschel (Dartmouth College) along with a public lecture by Joanna Weinberg (Oxford).

Online participation is possible via Zoom. You can learn more about these events here or contact me: naima.afif@teol.ku.dk

I am pleased to announce the upcoming online seminar “The Circulation of the Masāʾil ʿAbdallāh ibn Salām (Liber de doctrina Mahumet) in Europe”.

This event, which I am organising in the frame of the EuQu Project at the Faculty of Theology of the  University of Copenhagen, will be held on the 29 April 2022, 14 – 16 PM CET.

The Masāʾil ʿAbdallāh ibn Salām (Abdallāh ibn Salām’s Questions) is a fictional dialogue between a learned Jew who converted to Islam and the prophet Muḥammad. Originally written in Arabic, it enjoyed a great popularity in the West. The text was translated into Latin as part of the Corpus Toletanum in the 12th century under the title Liber de doctrina Mahumet and then served as the basis of several translations in European vernaculars. In this online seminar we will discuss the transfer and wide European reception of this work, and assess how it influenced European knowledge of Muḥammad and Islam over centuries.

The Congress ‘Humanizing Digitalization. Digitalizing Humanities’ organised by El Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC) in Madrid took place online on the 20 and 21th October 2021. In the first session devoted to text analysis, I explained how to create a multilingual corpus (in Latin, Italian, Hebrew, Arabic) by using the textual analysis software Sketch Engine and how to use this corpus to construct a glossary with Lexonomy an open-source, web-based dictionary writing and publishing system.

I am very happy to present you the result of my online collaboration with the John Rylands Library  in 2020. I have compiled TEI XML descriptions of Syriac manuscripts from the John Rylands Research Institute and Library’s collection. This material was presented in the exhibition Seeing the Invisible (2019-2020) and is now freely accessible on the Manchester Digital Collections. You can discover the manuscripts here.

New publication: Naima Afif, Peter E. Pormann, William I. Sellers, Natalia Smelova, Siam Bhayro, « The Syriac Text of Book Nine of On Simple Drugs. New Evidence from the Syriac Galen Palimpsest » in Archives Internationales d’Histoire des Sciences (Galen’s Treatise On Simple Drugs: Interpretation and Transmission), 70/184-185, 2020, pp. 130-149.

Discover how our research team at the University of Manchester is uncovering the lost heritage of Syriac Christians through the exhibition ‘Seeing the Invisible’.

Curated by Professor Peter Pormann and Dr Natalia Smelova, the  exhibition will run from October 2019 to March 2020 at the John Rylands Library and will display the Syriac Galen palimpsest for the first time in the UK.

For more information, see here.

The Syriac Galen Palimpsest is an exceptional manuscript containing the Syriac translation of a pharmacological treatise by Galen. Our team at the University of Manchester is organising a two-day conference under the auspices of the British Academy. This conference will gather scientists and humanities scholars who will discuss the methods employed to decipher the palimpsest and the contribution of Eastern Christians in the history of medicine.

More details here: https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/events/exploring-syriac-galen-palimpsest-ancient-drugs-synchrotron-radiation/