Public Lecture: Current Research Projects on Dead Sea Scrolls and Islamic Texts
Event Details
- Date:
- Tuesday, 05 September 2006
- Time:
- 10:00 am - 12:00 pm
- Room:
- The Innes Room
- UQ Location:
- Student Union Complex (St Lucia)
- Event category(s):
Event Contact
- Name:
- John Moller
- Phone:
- 3365 2737
- Email:
- j.moller@uq.edu.au
- Org. Unit:
- Protocol
Event Description
- Full Description:
- Despite its saturation coverage in the media, the vast majority of westerners, including many opinion leaders and commentators, have little understanding of Islam and what drives its adherents. Media coverage typically and understandably focuses on the immediacy of current events, but seldom has the time to provide essential cultural and historical information.
Yet, in the Islamic world (and quite unlike the Western world where the eighth century Old English literary character, Beowulf, is of absolutely no relevance to contemporary politics), events and symbols from the seventh and eighth centuries still reverberate in the minds of all devoted Muslims. They are not only relevant to today but have a compulsive influence on the terror-stricken conflicts of the 21st Century.
In his presentations in the capital cities of Australia and New Zealand, Professor Daniel Peterson will interlink modern-day events with their ancient foundation. He will explore the contemporary implications and inter-relationship between religion and violence, the prospects for democracy in Islamic societies, orderly political transitions, the rule of law, the rights of ethnic and religious minorities, and Islamic relationships with non-Muslim nations.
Peterson is eminently qualified to comment on formative and contemporary Islam because of his extensive research into Islam and the Middle East. This is reflected in his narrative biography of the Prophet Muhammad (published in David Noel Freedman and Michael J. McClymond, eds., The Rivers of Paradise: Moses, Buddha, Confucius, Jesus, and Muhammad as Religious Founders [Grand Rapids and Cambridge: William B. Eerdmans, 2001]), and his directorship and editorial supervision of the Middle Eastern Texts Initiative, which publishes dual-language editions of classical Islamic as well as “oriental” Jewish and Christian books from the pre-modern Near East.
Professor Peterson holds a doctorate in medieval Islamic intellectual history from the University of California at Los Angeles. He has lectured on Islamic topics (and to Islamic groups) on every inhabited continent except South America and has resided for lengthy periods in both Jerusalem and Cairo. He is professor of Islamic Studies and Arabic in the Department of Asian and Near Eastern Languages at Brigham Young University (BYU) in Provo, Utah, the largest private university in the USA. He is also editor-in-chief of BYU's Middle Eastern Texts Initiative.
Directions to UQ
- Google Map:
-
- Directions:
- St Lucia Campus | Gatton campus.
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