Daniel A. Beck

I’m doing an ask me anything on March 14th on Reddit … ask any questions you like! reddit.com/r/AcademicQura…

@Rurouni_Phoenix It’s a really fascinating subject, glad you raised it!

@Rurouni_Phoenix I tend to side with Sinai in seeing Q 97 as counter ephremic, in that what is sent down by such ‘measuring divine will’ on this night is not incarnation but rather a rebuttal ideology. What, exactly, was sent down remains debatable.

I tend to think Surah 97 may have taken partial inspiration from Ephrem the Syrian's first Hymn on the Nativity. Note the third and fourth photograph mentioning the serenity of the night of Jesus birth and possible similarities with Q 97:5

AMA reminder with Daniel Beck! Hello everybody! Reminder that our AMA with Daniel Beck is only three days away, on March 14th. Beck will make the AMA post on March 13th, which is when everyone will be able to begin submitting their questions. If you have not already done so, start preparing your questions! More details here: reddit.com/r/AcademicQura…

@ShaykhIshraq A brilliant and groundbreaking paper … I can’t wait to read the final version!

I and Dr. Patrick McNamara, a prominent cognitive neuroscientist of religious and spiritual experiences, have co-authored a very extensive paper situating the early Qur'an and the psychology of the Prophet within the ecological conditions of Arabia.

@iqsaweb This paper was awesome and a well deserved winner. The presentation was great too.

The 9th annual Andrew Rippin Best Paper Prize has been awarded to Salma Albezreh for her paper: “Who But You Can Save Us? Allāh's Theological Position in Ancestral Arabian Religion and Its Relevance for Understanding the Qurʾānic Opponents.” Learn more at beta.iqsaweb.org/andrew-rippin-…!

For those that missed it, we're going to have an AMA over on AcademicQuran March 14th with @DanielABeck reddit.com/r/AcademicQura…

@OCIANA_OSU That is great to know, as I have a couple of narrow astral questions at the moment!

@DanielABeck9 Long train rides = OCIANA updates! Always feel free to write us if you have specific questions about content that you cannot find on the searchable OCIANA. There are thousands of inscriptions that I can see as editor that are read but without proper interpretations.

#New on #OCIANA - Perhaps the most creative part of the Safaitic inscription is the dating formula. Our man had to return to permanent water,because of drought, which he expressed astrally: 'the year the later rains were withheld by stars'. Find more: ociana.osu.edu/inscriptions/1…

@koutchoukalimar @LouisC55835 It strikes me that the ‘deep’ or substrate terminology tends to look more aligned with ASA while narrative material looks more northern. Maybe waves of Syrian/Jordanian influence moving south into a substrate with archaisms. Kind of similar to Arabicization of the peninsula.

@LouisC55835 That said, I think we don't have to be maximalist or mutually exclusive in our treatment of the material. I think it's very possible that Quranic religious vocabulary and ideology reflects a coalescence of both - Syriac Christian thought in a South Arabian coat, if you want.

Having written my dissertation on South Arabia, I disagree. In fact, I think up until a few decades ago the South Arabian inscriptions received an almost undue amount of attention compared to the rest ot Peninsula. The Syrian/North Arabian shift is long overdue, in my opinion.

Q 53 delivers a newer answer to this excruciating old cosmic conflict: Salvation will come in the afterlife, hard as this one might be. Secondary intercession is futile.

The grievance is so intense: The Lord of Heaven has clearly left us to die, so why shouldn’t we seek intercession from a fallback seven?

This is an amazing new inscription and there should be more discussion about it. It is about as close to the intercessory ideology that Q53 attributes to the opposing Quraysh as you might get, like an ancestral example.

@Saudi_Gazette @IASArabia Awesome!

The skies over Saudi Arabia witnessed Monday night the conjunction of the Pleiades star cluster with the Moon, an astronomical event known as the “Seventh Qiran." saudigazette.com.sa/article/659176…

@OCIANA_OSU Is it possible it means ‘join me with my love’, ie wishing to be reunited, rather than ‘accompany my love’? Btw Yaguth is the most Lovecraftian of all Arabian deity names, it’s great to see epigraphic attestation of it.

#OCIANA is back online! We return with a remarkable #Dhofari inscription, a prayer to the god Yaġūth, of sūrah 71 fame, to protect the author's love. This is another connection with East Arabia. Find more here: ociana.osu.edu/inscriptions/4…