Introduction
In 1926, Paul Casanova, professor of Arabic language and literature at the Collège de France and a specialist in Egypt, passed away in Cairo. Born in Algeria in 1861, he had spent his childhood there, and it was there that his interest in the Arab-Muslim world had developed. In addition to his editions of texts and studies on the history of medieval Egypt, P. Casanova made his mark with his book *Mohammed and the End of the World *, published in 1911 and supplemented with notes in 1913 and 1924, in which he developed, amongst other things, an original thesis on the chronology of the Qur’an: rejecting the date of the text’s compilation held by Muslim tradition and adopted by Theodor Nöldeke, he proposed that this event took place during the Umayyad period (661–750). The conference organised to mark the centenary of this scholar’s death aims to review his career and his body of work, particularly his research into the history of the Qur’an.