The Coming of the Comforter: When, Where, and to Whom?: Studies on the Rise of Islam and Various Other Topics in Memory of John Wansbrough

by Carlos A. Segovia (Editor), Geneviève Gobillot (Contributor), Gabriel Said Reynolds (Contributor)

John Wansbrough is famous for his pioneering studies on the "sectarian milieu" out of which Islam emerged. In his view, Islam grew out of different - albeit rather marginal - Jewish and Christian traditions. In the present volume, which is dedicated to Wansbrough's memory, specialists in Islamic studies and students of the Jewish and early Christian traditions summarise Wansbrough's achievements in the past thirty years and chart the future of the tradition study of the "sectarian milieu."

480 pages, ebook

Published February 1, 2012

About the author

My view is that, unlike art, which lends an event a new body, and unlike philosophy, which extracts only the event as such (I’m relying here on Peter Hallward’s reading of Deleuze), historical-critical scholarship is always about rethinking/remapping the articulation of past events, so as to extract from them a new tentative picture (necessarily more complex and surely more ambiguous than the one that results from the appropriation/representation of the past events themselves by any master-narrative) which, by subtly “brush[ing] history against the grain” (Walter Benjamin), may thus help us gain a better and radically different perspective of its events in order to draw from them new virtual possibilities susceptible of transforming both the present and the future – i.e. susceptible of helping us become different by means of re-imagining the very premises of our own identities, and hence these, otherwise.

Currently I am Lecturer in Quranic and Islamic Studies in the Humanities Division at Saint Louis University in Madrid, Spain, as well as Co-Director (with Guillaume Dye, Manfred Kropp, and Emilio González Ferrín) of the Early Islamic Studies Seminar: International Scholarship on the Qur'ān and Islamic Origins, Series Co-Editor (with Isaac W. Oliver and Anders Klostergaard Petersen) of Apocalypticism: Cross-disciplinary Explorations (Peter Lang International Academic Publishers), and Associate Editor of 4 Enoch: The Online Encyclopedia of Second Temple Judaism (Jewish, Christian, and Islamic Origins).