In this interview I chat with Professor Shari Lowin of Stonehill College. We discuss questions about prophecy in the Qur'an vs the Bible and why the Biblical and Qur'anic prophets are so different? Along with this we also speak about Jews in the Qur'an and why the Qur'an attributes certain theological statements and attributes to the Jews.

Professor Lowin's research centers on the interplay between Judaism and Islam in the early and early medieval Islamic periods, c. 800-1200 CE, focusing mainly on the development of Jewish and Muslim exegetical narratives. She is particularly interested in the ways in which the Muslim and Jews living in Islamic societies interacted with one another, namely as they contributed to and drew from each other’s exegetical corpus on shared scriptural forefathers. She is the author of, Arabic and Hebrew Love Poems of al-Andalus (Routledge, 2013). In the seven chapters of this book, she examines Hebrew and Arabic eros poetry (shirat ḥesheq/ `ishq poems) of religious scholars in 10th-13th century Muslim Spain. Her earlier work on Judaism and its relationship with Islam focused on the narratives of Abraham and on accounts of enemies of God in the midrash aggadah and in the ḥadīth. In one such study, a monograph entitled The Making of a Forefather: Abraham in Islamic and Jewish Exegetical Narratives (Brill, 2006), she demonstrates that while Judaism and Islam used each other’s narratives to create narratives of sacred history, they tweaked and adjusted each other’s accounts in their retellings.

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