Subject: Mosaic Journeys - A historico-critical study of Q18:60-82.
Supervisor: Dr. Yosef Witztum and Dr. Naphtali Meshel.
Abstract: Sarah’s doctoral research focuses on the Moses episode in Sūrat al-Kahf 18:60-82 and its literary background in Late Antiquity. She traces the narrative predecessors of Moses’ journey to sources as diverse as the Gilgamesh Epos, Apocalyptic Literature and the Sayings of the Desert Fathers.
Reading the classic Islamic commentaries as polytexts, she demonstrates their interplay with the many archives of Late Antiquity. Sarah’s research sheds new light on the traditional exegetes as sensitive readers with their own modes of critical thought and philological practices. By combining the study of Arabic, Hebrew, Syriac, Greek, and Latin sources, she examines the stories of stories in the Qurʾān.
Sarah believes that motifs are not static elements but instruments of transformation– discursive devices for memory and forgetting; that travel narratives are also travelling narratives and that the world is made of stories and not of atoms.
Azrieli Scholarship 2022/23
President Stipend