The conference “Writing and Religion in Arabia, 500-700 C.E.” will be convened at the University of Chicago on May 18-19 (Thursday-Friday), 2017, calling together leading scholars who deal with these questions, whether their specialization is South Arabian studies, pre-Islamic and early Islamic Arabic dialectology and epigraphy, Qur’anic studies, or Arabian archaeology.  Its goal is to generate a rich interdisciplinary discussion of these basic issues of writing and religion that provide the background to the appearance and coalescence of the Qur’an, to help place that enigmatic text into a firmer historical, linguistic, religious, and literary context.

https://cmes.uchicago.edu/page/conference-schedule#overlay-context=page/scripts-and-scripture-language-and-religion-arabia-circa-500-700