‘Qur’an Fragments in the Cairo Genizah Collections’ with Magdalen Connolly and Nick Posegay

The Cairo Genizah collections are famed for their extensive Hebrew and Judaeo-Arabic contents, which have transformed our understanding of Jewish communities in Islamicate lands. These collections are also home to a substantial number of Arabic manuscripts and fragments, which have been largely overlooked in scholarship. In this lecture, Magdalen Connolly and Nick Posegay examine Arabic-script Qurʾān fragments found in the Cairo Genizah collections, exploring their material history, their value for scholarship on the Qurʾān, and their broader significance for the study of Jewish-Muslim relations throughout the medieval and early modern periods. Ultimately, they answer the question: why were Qurʾān manuscripts stored in a medieval synagogue?

Biographies
Nick is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Cambridge, where he researches interfaith exchange in the intellectual history of Middle Eastern languages. He is also a Research Associate at the Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit.

Magdalen is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Cambridge, where she researches written linguistic features of Jewish, Muslim, and Christian folktales from the early modern period. She is also a Research Associate at the Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit and a Fellow and Tutor at St. Edmund’s College, Cambridge.

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