Rhyme’s Reason: Translating the Qur’an’s (Most) Important Features
FALL 2025 Lecture Series
Seyyed Hossein Nasr
Being and Consciousness
September 5, 2025 - 12:00PM (EST) - 1 hour
Carl Ernst
Modern Misreadings of Mystical Commentaries on Hafez
September 10, 2025 - 7:00PM (EST) - 1 hour
Asma Afsaruddin
An Islamic Ethics of War and Peace
September 17, 2025 - 12:00PM (EST) - 1 hour
Shawkat Toorawa
Rhyme’s Reason: Translating the Qur’an’s (Most) Important Features
September 24, 2025 - 10:00AM (EST) - 1 hour
Abdallah Rothman
What is “Islamic” about "Islamic Psychology?
October 1, 2025 - 11:30AM (EST) - 1 hour
Maria Dakake
The Relationship between Prophecy and Sanctity: The Significance of Non-Prophetic Figures in the Qur’an
October 8, 2025 - 12:00PM (EST) - 1 hour
Mahmut Erol Kılıç
Multiple Degrees of Being in Sufism: An Interpretive Tool for Religious Understanding
October 15, 2025 - 12:00PM (EST) - 1 hour
Peter Adamson
From Ibn Sina’s Necessary Existent to Fakhr al-Din al-Razi’s God
October 24, 2025 - 10:00AM (EST) - 1 hour
A working command of the vocabulary of Islamic metaphysics — wujūd, māhiyya, the gradation of being — used precisely, not loosely.
The capacity to read primary texts of Ibn Sīnā and Mullā Ṣadrā with comprehension rather than reverence alone.
An understanding of why the tradition treats metaphysics as the science of realities — and what that claim asks of the knower.
Direct exchange with Professor Nasr in open Q&A after every session — the part no book can replace.
Shawkat M. Toorawa is one of the leading contemporary scholars of Arabic literature and Qur’anic studies. His research spans classical Arabic literary culture, Abbasid intellectual history, the Qur’an, translation, comparative literature, and Indian Ocean studies. Renowned for his wide-ranging scholarship and literary sensibility, Professor Toorawa has illuminated the rich writerly traditions of the Arabic-speaking world while helping bring classical and modern Arabic texts to broader audiences through translation, editing, and public scholarship.
