I am proposing an author meets critics roundtable panel on Professor Tehseen Thaver of Princeton University’s new book Beyond Sectarianism: Ambiguity, Hermeneutics, and the Formations of Religious Identity in Early Islam (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023). Beyond Sectarianism focuses on the literary Arabic Qur’an exegesis of the highly influential yet less studied poet, historian, and exegete al-Sharif al-Radi (d. 1015) titled Hermeneutical Realities in [Uncovering] the Ambiguities of Revelation, (Haqa’iq al-Tawil fi Mutashabih al-Tanzil), an exegesis centered on the Qur’an’s ambiguous verses or the mutashabihat. Through a close reading of the text, context, and key theoretical concerns showcased in al-Sharif al-Radi’s Qur’an commentary, Beyond Sectarianism makes two major arguments. First, and conceptually, it argues that a narrow sectarian driven approach to the study of Shi‘i Qur’an commentary traditions, one that assumes perfect correspondence between sectarian identity and hermeneutics, conceals more than it reveals. Although marked as a Shi‘i scholar and exegete, the interpretive and political horizons that informed al-Radi’s scholarly endeavors were irreducible to predetermined templates of sectarian identity corresponding to often presumed signature features of Shi‘i theology and identity such as privileging interiority and the religious authority of the Imams. Rather, Thaver argues, al-Radi was an active participant and beneficiary of critical intellectual currents and debates that animated the wider Muslim humanities during his life, especially on questions of language, poetry, and theology. And second, Thaver argues that at the heart of al-Radi’s literary Qur’an commentary was the project of articulating a theory of language as a reflection of ontological reality. In the process of curating an exegetical program that amplified such a theory of language, al-Radi both drew from and contributed to an emerging canon of the Arabic language constituted by the Qur’an, pre-Islamic Arabic poetry, and the everyday speech of Arabs. Therefore, al-Radi’s efforts at resolving Qur’anic ambiguities were interlocked with the project of the canonization of the Arabic language. The central contribution of this book lies in the way it reconsiders and provides conceptual alternatives to dominant assumptions about the interaction of sectarian identity and scriptural interpretation in the study of the Qur’an. This book is also distinctive in the way it offers a fundamental reevaluation of how one should think about the relationship between the Qur’an, Shi‘ism, and religious identity. The format of this panel will be as follows: after a brief 5-minute introduction to the book by the presider, four discussants (all experts of the Qur’an) will engage key aspects and arguments of the book (for 12-15 minutes each) followed by a response from the author (20-25 min) then a hopefully robust audience discussion. This roundtable panel should attract an audience of a