Qur'anic studies, Ulum al-Qur'an, is a multi-disciplinary field of scholarship. Its development is necessarily governed by the progress achieved in social sciences in general and in linguistics, semantics and hermeneutics in particular. The assumption underlying the idea of the symposium is that the long history as well as the well-established tradition of Qur'anic studies in Islamic culture have been under the great influence of modern political and cultural changes in the Muslim world. The twentieth century witnessed the emergence of almost a new world order, which affected all fields of knowledge. As for the Muslim world it has been a century of external as well as internal conflict.