Interview with Professor Aaron Hughes: American Orientalism and Understanding the Quran in the Light of Late Antiquity

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This study includes our interview with Aaron Hughes, who continued his studies on Islam in the United States. Hughes, a professor at the University of Rochester, is highly knowledgeable and widely recognized in the field of Religious Studies. The questions we posed to Hughes were re-lated to two subjects: American Orientalism and Late Antiquity. As far as we can determine, there are very few studies on these two subjects in Türkiye. This interview will attempt to contribute to the Turkish academic community. The question of which centuries are included in the Late An-tiquity created by Peter Brown is a matter of debate. This period, which generally covers the pe-riod from the 2nd century AD to the end of the 8th century in historiography, is constantly being stretched by researchers in the United States. Garth Fowden, who expanded the period even fur-ther and extended it to a longer period, put forward the theory of the “First Millennium”. This periodization, which has made a great leap forward in the field of history with the studies con-ducted in recent years, has begun to be used effectively in Qur’anic studies. Angelika Neuwirth, a German-born orientalist, has conducted an intertextual reading by placing the Quran within the epistemic fabric of Late Antiquity with her Corpus Coranicum project. This method, which is also used in the works of American orientalists such as Stephen Shoemaker, Daniel Beck, Sean Anthony, Gabriel Said Reynolds and David Powers, seems likely to dominate the field in the coming years.