This presentation focuses on the ecumenism of Ferdowsi with regard to religion. Such ecumenism can best be understood in terms of the reception of this poet’s poetry—a reception extending from the poet’s own life and times in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries CE all the way to the era of the Timurid prince Bāysonghor in the fifteenth century CE.

“The Global Qur’an (GloQur)” will be the first project that tackles the global dimension of Muslim Qur’an translation in the 20th and 21st centuries, a topic that has so far attracted surprisingly little attention in Islamic Studies.

On the October 3, 2014 episode of the HBO talk show Real Time with Bill Maher, the panel included New York Times bestselling author (and key figure in the New Atheism movement) Sam Harris; actor/filmmaker Ben Affleck; Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nicholas Kristof; and former chairperson of the Republican National Committee Michael Steele. During the panel’s discussion, both Bill Maher and Sam Harris asserted that Islam fundamentally clashes with liberal principles, yet liberals in the U.S. fail to point this out because of their commitment to political correctness. The only solution to this problem, Maher and Harris argued, was for the West to throw support behind “nominal Muslims”...