Julien Decharneux

In Creation and Contemplation, Julien Decharneux explores the connections between the cosmology of the Qur’ān and various cosmological traditions of Late Antiquity, with a focus on Syriac Christianity.

The first part of the book studies how, in exhorting its audience to contemplate the world, the Qur’ān carries on a tradition of natural contemplation that had developed throughout Late Antiquity in the Christian world. In this regard, the analysis suggests particularly striking connections with the mystical and ascetic literature of the Church of the East, which was in effervescence at the time of the emergence of Islam.

The second part argues that the Qur’ānic cosmological discourse is built so as to serve the overarching theological message of the text, namely God’s absolute unity. Despite the allusive, and sometimes obscure, way in which the Qur’ān talks about the world’s coming into being and its maintenance in existence, the text betrays its authors’ acquaintance with cosmological debates of Late Antiquity.

In studying the Qur’ān through the prism of Late Antiquity, this book contributes to our understanding of the emergence of Islam and its relationship with other religious traditions of the time.

This article analyzes two specific themes related to ships, sailors, and seafaring in the Quran in light of biblical and parabiblical literatures, especially psalms. The first part of the article deals with the seemingly odd Quranic inclusion of a boat within lists of cosmic signs that testify God’s beneficence. after having disambiguated the meaning of these verses, we suggest that pericopes enumerating God’s signs are tightly connected to the beginning of Psalm 104. The second part of the article engages with various pericopes describing sailors experiencing a storm at sea. We show that this story finds its roots in Psalm 107 in which a similar “storm narrative” is told and which was interpreted in late antique Christianity as an allegory of the Church. finally, we suggest that this alleged link between the Quran and the Psalms has far-reaching implications as regards to our understanding of the Quran’s historical context.

This workshop explores the relationship between "wisdom" (resting on the late Old Testament wisdom writings) and "science." It brings together experts in Syriac studies, philosophy, and Jewish, Qur'ānic, and Old Testament theology to trace the history of wisdom and science in Syriac knowledge practices. It brings to the fore a category, "wisdom," that per definitionem arose through application and connected different religious strands. At the same time, it reveals the impact of Syriac on the development of that category out of Old Testament wisdom literature, which was itself shaped by Egyptian, Mesopotamian, and Near Eastern wisdom traditions.

Communication aux Journées des orientalistes belges (59ème session) organisée par la Société Royale Belge d'Etudes Orientales (SRBEO).
Thème des journées : "Les écritures orientales : inventées, cryptées, détournées, oubliées, redécouvertes..."

Table ronde, Foire du livre de Bruxelles
De nombreux chercheurs n’ont cessé d’approfondir l’exégèse des textes sacrés pour mettre en lumière les « ajouts » parfois contradictoires des versions successives. Est-ce encore concevable ou nécessaire aujourd’hui ? Avec le même regard qu’auparavant ?
Intervenants : Julien Decharneux (ULB), Guido Latré (UCL et UGent)
Animé par Hugo Marquant (UCL et USL-B)

Organisé par la Foire du Livre de Bruxelles en partenariat avec l’ULB et l’UCL.

Texte intégral en ligne : http://publis-shs.univ-rouen.fr/reare/index.php?id=478#

This article discusses the occurrences of the figure of Alexander the Great in the Sīrat ʿAntar, one of the most famous medieval Arabian epics. This epic, which belongs to the popular genre of the siyar šaʿbiyya (popular epics), relates the life (sīra) of the famous preislamic black poet and warrior ʿAntara bin Šaddād. Although the text often has the hero interact with famous Arab and non-Arab historical figures in order to confer upon the text a pseudo-historical tone, the references to Alexander the Great in the text appear to serve a slightly different purpose. Alexander plays a very minor role in the Sīrat ʿAntar – he does not even interact with the hero but is only referred to. However, these references made to the Macedonian king, although insignificant for the narrative itself, give us a glimpse at the very temporality wherein the epic is intended to unfold.
Quite interestingly, there existed in medieval times an Arabic epic concerning the life of Alexander the Great, the Sīrat al-Iskandar. In this text, Alexander is presented as a Prophet travelling around the world to convert peoples to monotheism. This article shows that the Alexander to which the Sīrat ʿAntar refers is precisely this Alexander, prophet and king, depicted in the Sīrat al-Iskandar. In mentioning Alexander’s name in the text, we argue that the storyteller aims at establishing a kind of prophetic typology between ʿAntar and Alexander, in order to confer upon the former a sacred dimension.
The study of the mentions of Alexander the Great in the Sīrat ʿAntar therefore contributes to the reassessment of the status bestowed upon Arabic popular epics in medieval times. It also suggests that the different Arabic epics interact and complete each other to a significant extent, a phenomenon that remains ill-studied in modern scholarship.