Vanessa De Gifis is associate professor of Islamic Studies and director and graduate advisor for the Near Eastern languages program at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. Her book, Shaping a Qur'anic Worldview (Routledge, 2014), applies classical Arabic-Islamic rhetorical and semantic theories to analyze references to the Qur'an in early medieval caliphal politics. With a sustained interest in the scriptural ... Read moreunderpinnings of Muslim thought, her current research digs deeper into the qur'anic concept of divine blessing, its exegetical history and its significance in Muslim political and social theologies. Michael E. Pregill is Interlocutor in the Institute for the Study of Muslim Societies and Civilizations at Boston University, where he is the coordinator of Mizan (www.mizanproject.org), a new digital scholarship initiative, and edits the peer-reviewed, open access Mizan: Journal for the Study of Muslim Societies and Civilizations. Previously, he was Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Elon University in North Carolina. His main areas of academic specialization are the Qur'an and its interpretation; the origins of Islam in the late antique milieu; and Muslim relations with non-Muslims. Much of his research focuses on the reception of biblical, Jewish, and Christian traditions in the Qur'an and Islamic discourse. Ryann Craig is a Ph.D. candidate in Semitic Languages at The Catholic University of America (CUA) in Washington, DC, where she studies early Syriac and Christian Arabic engagement with Islam and the Qur'an as a proof-text in Christian-Muslim polemics. She is the project manager for the Christian Communities of the Middle East: A Cultural Heritage Project, a digital archive for the preservation and dissemination of the cultural record of Syriac Christian communities. Show Less