Reading the Quran in Germany
German scholar Stefan Wild on Tuesday (Oct. 26) delivered the first of his three H.A.R. Gibb Arabic and Islamic Studies Lectures, a series sponsored by Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies. The talk —“The History of the Quran: Why Is There No State of the Art?”— drew a large and avid audience to Tsai Auditorium. Wild was for 25 years professor for Semitic languages and Islamic studies at the University of Bonn, where he remains a professor emeritus, and is co-editor of the International Journal for the Study of Modern Islam. He began the evening — after noting that “the only way we can tackle a topic as vast and complicated as the Quran is by insisting on subjectivity” — with a discussion of the history of Quranic studies in Germany and the religious text’s role in politics there, saying that though Islamic studies were only a small part of academia...