Qur’anic Crossings: Senses, Media, and Epistemology

This roundtable discussion considers the Qur'an's circulation as a religious scripture in daily life through its manifold "crossing" of sensory and communal boundaries. Though the Qur'an has been richly analyzed through both its vocal recitation and the visuality of manuscript reproductions, other anthropologists of religion have productively engaged scriptures in "transmedial" form, that is, as expressions that "cross" material and sensory thresholds. Drawing on these critiques, the various participants on this roundtable engage different iterations of Qur'anic "crossing," from the Qur'an's circulation as an object of both interfaith understanding and intercommunal violence in the U.S.; to the "voicing" of the Qur'an in the visual medium of American Sign Language; to the Qur'an's remediation through the "interpretive" genre of oral exegesis (tafsir). In doing so, we hope to encourage other anthropologists of religion to rethink the ontologies and sensory epistemologies of the texts and material artifacts in the traditions they study.