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It has already been established that that the “founder of Arabic prose,” ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd al-Kātib (d. 132/750), used the Qurʾān extensively in his letters, borrowing from it using numerous techniques. One would expect, thus, that ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd’s “religious letters” would be saturated, perhaps more than his other letters, with Qurʾānic materials in various forms of formulation. A close examination of these letters, however, shows that, surprisingly, this is true only to an extent, and sometimes even not a great one; other sources, strikingly non-religious, influenced their textual choices too: narrative, desciptive, secretarial, and some ḥadīth-based. This is a rather peculiar phenomenon that calls for explanation, and this is what I intend to do in this lecture. I plan to first identify and group what I call ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd’s religious letters as those that deal with issues of law and theology, then analyze each one of them, showing Qurʾānic and non-Qurʾānic influences on it. I shall conclude with an attempt at identifying the reasons behind the clear mix of sources with which ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd was inspired in this particular epistolographic corpus.Wadad Kadi (al-Qāḍī) is The Avalon Foundation Distinguished Service Professor Emerita of Islamic Thought at the University of Chicago. She received her Ph.D. from the American University of Beirut (AUB) in 1973, and taught, until her retirement in 2009, at AUB, Harvard, Columbia, Yale and the University of Chicago, where she spent by far most of her teaching career. She has produced several critical editions of medieval Arabic manuscripts and published widely on early Islamic thought, literature, and history, especially under the Umayyads, using frequently documentary, in particular papyrological, materials. She is currently finishing the first of her series of books on the Umayyads: Umayyad Studies I: Historiography, and continuing her examination of the epistolography of ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd al-Kātib, the "founder of Arabic prose" and chief secretary in late Umayyad times. She has received several awards, including the King Faisal Foundation Prize in Ancient Arabic Prose in 1994. DR. WADAD KADI,PROFESSOR EMERITA OF ISLAMIC THOUGHTUNIVERSITY OF CHICAGOMENAS Colloquium SeriesFriday, January 30, 20153pm in Marshall 490 Click to return to main Colloquium page