Integrated Encyclopedia of the Qur'an (IEQ)--Vol I

This is an ambitious multi-volume publication project on a new encyclopedia of the Qur’an undertaken by the Center for Islamic Sciences in Canada. Initiated in late 2007 by the Center’s president, Muzaffar Iqbal, IEQ garners the intellectual resources of a global network of scholars, translators, editors, proofreaders and advisors, as well as the financial support of business people and philanthropists throughout the world. The acknowledgement pages, “By Way of Recounting Blessings,” provide an interesting insight into the complex, cross-regional dynamics involved in the making of such a huge, visionary project. This is the first volume of a projected seven-volume 3,000-page encyclopedic reference work in English “encapsulating fourteen hundred years of scholarship on the Qur’an,” while taking a “committed scholarly approach” to that long tradition, and as such, it can be rightly called the first serious work of its kind in a western language, notwithstanding the Brill Encyclopaedia of the Qur’an (BEQ), which does not demand a personal commitment to the truth of the Qur’an on the part of its contributors.