ERC Consolidator Grant

The of Islam (SENSIS): A cultural of perception in the Muslim world

Name of PI: Prof. Dr. Christian Lange PI’s host institution: Utrecht University Duration in months: 60

1. Scope, objectives, and relevance

Sensory perception is not only a physical but also a cultural act: how people experience and understand sight, sound, smell, , and touch differs according to the historical, geographical, social and intellectual contexts in which perception occurs. How, then, is one to conceive of the Muslim sensorium, past and present? The aim of The Senses of Islam (SENSIS) is to write a cultural history of the senses in Islam, by examining how the senses have been conceptualised, and calibrated, in a variety of Muslim spatio-historical environments. Despite the rich promise that a sensory history of Islam holds, no sustained, comprehensive reflection on this question exists in current scholarship, whether in historical-critical, text-based Islamic Studies, the field of study in which this project is primarily located, or in any of its cognate disciplines.

The topic is important and timely on three accounts. First, reality is perceived through the senses: we see, hear, taste, smell and touch the world around us. The way in which our environment shapes our senses, therefore, determines how we relate to the world. This invests the senses with the power to engender cultural difference; thereby, the senses both complicate and enrich multicultural coexistence. In the case of Islam, European societies continuously, and increasingly, wrestle with this challenge—think of debates surrounding veiling in public, the sounding of the Muslim call to prayer, the shaking of hands (or indeed other, unsolicited forms of bodily contact) between Muslims and non-Muslims, or halal food. A coherent and properly communicated account of the variety of Muslim attitudes towards the senses would go a long way in making such sensory encounters more comprehensible, and easier to navigate.

Second, the history of the senses is closely entangled with that of modernity, while Islam’s compatibility with modernity remains the subject of controversy. Following the seminal, and disputed, work of Marshall McLuhan (1962) and Walter Ong (1982), it has been suggested that the Islamic denigration of vision—what Daryush Shayegan (2003) has termed the regard mutilé of Islam—undermines Islam’s ability to modernise. However, such sweeping narratives, influential though they may be, rarely stand the test of closer inspection. The Quran, for example, clearly elevates sight above . The relationship in Islamic culture between the senses, and the two distal senses (sight and hearing) in particular, is far from evident. Therefore, granting that Islam’s ability to modernise is tied up with the sensory regimes it promotes, there is a need to study the issue.

Third, disembodied Western rationalism is often contrasted, by both its defenders and its detractors, with an alleged Muslim celebration of the senses. This finds expression in enduring stereotypes about an indulgent Orient full of colours, smells, and tactile sensations. Besides facilitating caricatures of Muslims as irrational and easily aroused, such characterisations ignore the important strands of denial in Islamic thought, which always existed side by side with notions of sensory, embodied religion. The alleged Muslim emphasis on the senses, particularly the proximate senses, should therefore be critically re-evaluated, and the varieties of sensory discourses in Islam comprehensively examined.

On this background, the questions that are posed in SENSIS are as broad as they are fundamental. For example, how many senses should one count from a Muslim perspective (subprojects 1, 2, 5)? How are the senses activated and used in Muslim devotional practices (subprojects 2, 3)? What are the regulatory - 1 - mechanisms by which the various senses are silenced, restricted, or enhanced, in Islamic ethical and legal traditions (subprojects 3, 4)? How are the senses deployed in the construction of identity and alterity (subprojects 4, 5)? What kind of shifts and variations in Islamically founded sensory regimes can we observe in different intellectual currents, as well as different places and epochs of Islamic history (all subprojects)?

2. State-of-the-art and imbedding in scholarship

Despite the pioneering work of sociologists such as Georg Simmel (1907) and cultural such as McLuhan and Ong, it is only in the last thirty years or so that sensory studies have become a full-fledged field of study in the humanities, complete with its learned scholarly associations, book series, journals, and online collaborative forums. A towering synthesis has recently been produced under the editorship of Constance Classen (A Cultural History of the Senses, 6 vols., 2014). It is striking, however, that Islam receives no more than passing mention in Classen’s multi-volume work. Neither does Islam figure prominently in the equally impressive Sensational Religion: Sensory Cultures in Material Practice (ed. Sally Promey, 2014), of whose 37 chapters a mere four touch on Muslim cultures. While, as some have claimed, in other fields of the humanities “a sensorial revolution” is well underway (Howes 2003: 39), scholars of the Islamic world are only beginning to sketch the contours of a sensory history of Muslim societies.

The most important exceptions to this generalisation are found in the work of historians and anthropologists of Islam, particularly the latter. Next to a few explorations by historians and art historians of smell (Thurkill 2007; Bonneric fc.), taste (Lewicka 2012), and vision (Necipoglu 1993; Belting 2008) in premodern Middle Eastern cultures, significant has been booked by historical studies examining changes in Muslim attitudes toward the senses following, and oftentimes resisting, the impact of Western modernity (Fahmy 2002; Fahmy 2013). However, Islamic historians are yet to embrace fully the senses as an object of historical inquiry. In regard to anthropological studies, Charles Hirschkind’s 2006 monograph on the “ethical soundscape” that undergirds revival movements in late 20th-century Cairo is inspirational in that it highlights the profound effects of cassette-recorded preaching, not just in the sense of instilling religious ideology, but of shaping the perceptual habits of listeners (2006: 2). In the wake of Hirschkind’s seminal work, other recent anthropological studies make valuable contributions to the scholarly understanding of the role of the senses and sense perception in Islamic contexts (de Koning 2011; Weiner 2011; Güney 2012; Tamimi Arab 2015). What is common to these studies, and what differentiates them from the project herewith proposed, is that they focus on the contemporary period and pay comparatively little attention to Islam’s textual heritage, instead stressing everyday Muslim discourses and practices.

The few studies by textual scholars of Islam that address the senses provide important stimuli, but they do not analyse the cultural history of the Muslim sensorium in comprehensive fashion. The little research that has been done on the physiology of the senses in Islam has focused on optics, and on the Iraqi optician, Abu l-Haytham (Alhazen, d. 1040) in particular (Omar 1977; Sabra 1989). The physiological history of audition, olfaction, gustation, and touch in Islam, by contrast, remains virtually unstudied. In the study of Islamic law, it is the Islamic protocol of the gaze that has garnered the greatest attention. Thus, scholars have studied the scopic regime promoted by the jurists of Sharia law, whether in regard to the rules concerning the obligation to veil certain parts of the human body (Chaumont 2006) or to shield the privacy of houses from the gaze of others (Alshech 2004; O’Meara 2007). Fewer studies exist of the legal regulation of the other senses, despite the promise of such studies to produce fresh insights into the world-making mechanisms of Sharia law.

Finally, some efforts have been made to understand Muslim attitudes towards the senses according to Muslim theology and , although on balance researchers have been more interested in abstract intellection than in sense-based knowledge (Rosenthal 1970). Muslim mystics (Sufis) are known for regularly invoking the senses in talking about experiences of communion with the divine and strikingly use the metaphors of vision (ru’ya), hearing (sam’) and, above all, taste (dhawq), to describe moments of mystic exultation. While Böwering (1996) has written about the relationship in early Sufi thought between audition and vision, taste, a pivotal concept in Sufi literature that contrasts curiously with the Aristotelian hierarchy of - 2 - the senses, remains virtually unstudied. One might also mention a number of studies of the sensuality of the Muslim afterworld (al-Azmeh 1995; Lange 2016), which suggest that the Islamic religious imagination produces a distinct attitude towards the senses in Islam—a far-reaching proposition that invites full treatment.

3. Set-up of the project

SENSIS aspires to develop an intersensory, “synaesthetic” perspective on the history of the senses in Islam, that is, to avoid atomistic examination of single senses and instead understand the genesis of the Muslim sensorium in holistic fashion. The project is structured along a spectrum of epistemic traditions, each resulting in a subproject. An equal spread of the subprojects over Islamic history will ensure that all major periods, from the formative period to the middle periods and all the way to modern times, are covered.

The senses and the individual The senses and the individual The senses and society (inner dimension) (outer dimension) Epistemology Religious Experience Ethics Law Poetry

Subproject 1 Subproject 2 Subproject 3 Subproject 4 Subproject 5

Figure 1: Spectrum of sensory discourses in Islam

Subproject 1: The senses in Islamic epistemology This project unit will develop an understanding of how the Aristotelian hierarchy of the senses was received and modified in Islamic contexts. Aural learning being a hallmark of classical Islamic civilisation (and continuing to be important up to the present), the question deserves to be asked in how far the privileging of sight was questioned by Muslim philosophers and theologians of various stripes and colours. In addition to studying the role played by the senses in Muslim epistemological theories, this project unit will also address the Islamic reception and modulation of the Aristotelian notion of a sensus communis, that is, the seat of the senses, in which all sense perceptions are combined into one (see Wolfson 1935; Gätje 1965), and which is variously subdivided into a number of “inner senses” that complement and enrich the outer senses.

Subproject 2: Sensing the sacred in Islam: The senses and Islamic religious experience This subproject will investigate the Muslim sensorium in as much as it is instrumental, according to Muslim religious literature, in perceiving the divine. The Sufi tradition, which contrary to a common stereotype is by no means marginal in Islamic history, offers the richest vocabulary of sensory encounters with the transcendent and will therefore be given special attention in this axis of the project. While figurative understandings of seeing, hearing, and above all, tasting God dominate in Sufi thought, one should not forget that the body was in many instances “more central to Sufi practice than the intellect” (Bashir 2011: 12-13; cf. Kugle 2007). This project unit will therefore investigate the Sufis’ attempts to bridge the gap between ordinary life and transcendent reality by engaging the senses not only metaphorically, but also corporeally.

Subproject 3: Sensory etiquettes in Islam: The senses in Islamic ethics This project unit will engage with strands in Muslim ethics that seek to discipline the senses and thus attune the body with ascetic ideals. The roots of this phenomenon are located in early Islam’s ascetic movement (zuhd); later, a moderate asceticism became a mainstream feature of Sunni piety, due to the influence of the two seminal thinkers, Muhasibi (Iraq, d. 834) and Ghazali (Iraq, d. 1111). As Hirschkind has noted with regard to contemporary Egypt, pious literature and sermons dealing with the etiquette of listening to the Qur’an hone in on recommendations made in the premodern ethical literature (Hirschkind, 2006: 70), and a broader analysis, including all five senses, promises to shed light on similar long-term survivals.

Subproject 4: The Muslim sensorium in society: The senses in Islamic law - 3 -

This subproject will study the ways in which Sharia law seeks to frame the senses in the public sphere. For example, the Syrian jurist, Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya (d. 1350), in a book dealing with the legal treatment of non-Muslims, wrote about how the call to prayer replaces church bells, in the same way in which the Qur’an supersedes previous scriptures (1961: 718). Some centuries later, al-Ghazzi (d. 1651) issued a prohibition of the alarm clock on the basis that it threatened to supersede the time-keeping function of the call to prayer (2011: VII, 499). Developments in the legal discourse on sight (e.g., the nonvisible parts of the body), smell (e.g., acceptable body smells), or touch (e.g., between sexes, or believers and unbelievers) will likewise be examined in this subproject.

Subproject 5: The aesthetics of the Muslim sensorium: The senses in Islamic poetry This subproject will be devoted to excavating the attitudes towards the sensorium that can be gleaned from poetry produced in the Islamic world. In order to do so, discourses on the senses and sense perception in Arabic or Persian poetry will be analysed: how, in particular, poets of love poetry (ghazal), panegyrics, and lampoons (hija’) frame moments of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and touching the beloved, the ruler, a saintly figure (such as the Prophet), or an abject person. The material is rich: For example, a well-known anthology of classical Arabic poetry, by Sari al-Raffa’ (fl. 10th c. CE), is entitled The lover, the beloved, what is smelled, and what is drunk (al-Muhibb wa ’l-mahbub wa ’l-mashmum wa ’l-mashrub). The ability to paint multisensory poetic images, to celebrate the “partnership of the senses” in poetry, has been identified as the sign of poetic mastery, as evinced by the example of the early Islamic desert poet, Dhu l-Rumma (Agha 2007); later poets of the Muslim world await analysis along similar lines.

4. Methodology

SENSIS will connect its questions and aims to the existing scholarship on the history of the senses not only in Islam but also in other cultural traditions, first and foremost in Western societies, as scholarship on the latter has produced nuanced accounts of the sensory history of, for example, Catholicism and Protestantism (e.g., Mellor and Shilling 1997; Meyer 2009). This cross-pollination will be achieved by inviting selected senior experts of (Western) sensory history to intensive workshops with the members of the project team. Methodologically, the following four approaches will be paramount.

4.1 “Future philology” and digital humanities The research undertaken in SENSIS will be based on the careful and critical reading of texts: philosophical, religious and legal literature and poetry, but also newspapers and archival sources. In the spirit of what is often referred to today as “future philology” (cf. the project Zukunftsphilologie at FU Berlin led by Dr. Islam Dayeh, with whom the applicant collaborates), it is suggested that philology enables the humanistic project of rendering alterity understandable, provided it sheds its traditional, historicist focus on the linguistic and historical analysis of (mostly dead) languages (cf. Said 2004; Pollock 2009). Occasionally, scholars premise the study of “embodied” culture (from which the turn toward the senses derives) on the need to “exit the text”. This project takes the opposite view: it proposes to read embodied culture in and through texts. Where appropriate, such an approach can be combined with new, “distant reading” techniques developed by scholars in digital humanities. A remarkable amount of, mostly Arabic, and mostly religious, literature exists in digital format and shall be made use of, particularly in subprojects 1, 4, and 5.

4.2 Multidisciplinary longue-durée history Rather than proceeding by an examination of the sensory teachings of the various religious ‘orthodoxies’ in Islam (Sunni, Imami, Isma’ili, etc.), SENSIS will focus on the different discursive traditions and epistemes underlying thinking about the senses in Islam. It strives to reconstruct a critical number of such perspectives (epistemological, mystical, ethical, legal, and aesthetic) on the various senses and how they interrelate, and to do so while adopting a perspective of longue durée. This approach might be challenged on the grounds of being overly ambitious, given that it requires expertise and skills of interpretation in a number of heterogeneous cultural genres and forms of expression. However, the focus on discourses on the senses—that is, on explicit written reflections on the senses, not on how the senses are culturally stimulated - 4 - in a general sense—enables the multidisciplinary, synthetic approach that is herewith proposed.

4.3 Postcolonial studies Since the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), scholars of Islam can no longer avoid questioning the ideological underpinnings of the Western (academic) discourse of supremacy over the Muslim world. In studying the history of the senses in Islam, a postcolonial perspective entails the adoption of two methodological principles. First, previous Western accounts of the Muslim sensorium have to be read critically (cf. GoGwilt’s [2011: 4] notion of “postcolonial philology”), and their underlying sensorial biases be brought to the fore and filtered out. Second, Muslim sources must be interpreted with the possibility in mind that a distinct sensorial regime may emerge from them. It is also important, however, to realise that the postcolonial project to capture the autonomous spirit of contemporary Muslim piety (see, e.g. Mahmood 2009), pitching it against the alleged Protestant, liberal bias in the current study of religion, is criticised by scholars, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, who identify with liberal agendas (Abbas 2014: 100-111).

4.4 Sensory studies SENSIS aims to participate fully in what is identified, by some, as the “sensorial turn” in the humanities. Sensory studies, as the preceding literature review has shown, are almost completely unknown in Islamic Studies. The possibilities for interdisciplinary exchanges are therefore manifold. Scholars of Islam can learn from sociologists that processes of modernisation and individualisation play an important role in how the sensorium is calibrated (already Simmel 1907); from anthropologists, that one should pay proper attention to the culture-specific, performative aspects of perception (see, e.g., Hirschkind 2006: 29); from historians, that sources should not be read ‘with an eye to the eye’ only, because the preference for vision was never as paramount as McLuhan and Ong asserted (see, e.g., Schmidt 2000). Reciprocally, scholars not specialised in the study of Islam may benefit from comparing their findings with the Islamic case. In sum, SENSIS is not only about catching up with sensory history as it is practiced in other fields, but about advancing the discussion by establishing Islamic sensory history as a properly constituted field of academic inquiry, thereby providing a corrective, from the point of view of Islamic civilisation, to dominant narratives in sensory studies elsewhere.

5. Planned output and activities

The postdocs will each write three specialised research articles; the PhDs, dissertations. The team will produce a dedicated journal issue in The Senses and Society (Taylor & Francis) or a similar venue. A project website will be created to host information about ongoing research projects, conferences, videos, and other materials. Regular “chapter clinics” with the PhDs and postdocs will be convened. In years 2 through 4, five interdisciplinary workshops, each dedicated to one sense and with the participation of two experts (one in Islamic Studies and one in sensory studies), will be held. Each workshop will be concluded by a public lecture of one of the two invitees. Finally, in year 5, the project will conclude with a synthesizing international conference, The senses of Islam (ca. 50 participants), including several public keynote lectures.

6. References

Abbas, Sadia (2014). At Freedom’s Limit: Islam and Al-Azmeh, Aziz (1995). “Rhetoric for the Senses: A the Postcolonial Predicament. New York: Fordham Consideration of Muslim Paradise Narratives.” University Press; Journal of Arabic Literature 26.3, pp. 215-31; Agha, Saleh Said. “Holistic Poetic Imagery: A Alshech, Eli (2004). “‘Do Not Enter Houses Other Partnership of the Senses in Alliance with Primal than Your Own’: The Evolution of the Notion of a Language.” Middle Eastern Literatures 10.2 (2007), Private Domestic Sphere in Early Sunnī Islamic pp. 107-27; Thought.” Islamic Law and Society 11.3, pp. 291- 332;

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Bashir, Shahzad (2011). Sufi Bodies: Religion and Hirschkind, Charles (2006). The Ethical Society in Medieval Islam. New York: Columbia Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic University Press; Counterpublics. New York: Columbia University Press; Belting, Hans (2008). Florenz und Bagdad. Eine westöstliche Geschichte des Blicks. München: C. H. Howes, David (2003). Sensual Relations: Engaging Beck the Senses in Culture and Social Theory. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press; Bonneric, Julie (fc.). “L’odeur du guerrier: un parfum d’immortalité sur le champ de bataille.” In: Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya (1961). Ahkam ahl al- S. Denoix et al., eds. Guerre et paix au Proche- dhimma. Edited by Subhi al-Salih. Damascus: Orient médiéval (xe-xve s.). Cairo: IFPO Matba’at Jami’at Dimashq; Böwering, Gerhard (1996). “From the Word of God Kugle, Scott (2007). Sufis and Saints’ Bodies: to the Vision of God: Muhammad’s Heavenly Mysticism, Corporeality, and Sacred Power in Journey in Classical Sufi Qur’an Commentary.” In: Islam. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina M. A. Amir-Moezzi, ed. Le voyage initiatique en Press; terre d’Islam. Louvain-Paris: Peeters, pp. 205-21; Lange, Christian (2016). Paradise and Hell in Chaumont, Eric (2006). “La notion de ‘awra selon Islamic Traditions. Cambridge: Cambridge Abu ’l-Hasan ‘Ali b. Muhammad al-Qattan al-Fasi University Press; (m. 628/1231).” Revue des mondes musulmans et de Lewicka, Paulina (2012). “The Smells and of la Méditerranée 113-114, pp. 109-23; Cairo: The Medieval Mediterranean Metropolis as Classen, Constance, ed. (2014). A Cultural History the Culinary Capital of the Medieval Islamic of the Senses. 6 vols. London: Bloomsbury; World.” In: G. Contu, ed. Centre and Periphery within the Borders of Islam. Leuven: Peeters, pp. de Koning, Martijn (2011). “‘Melting the Heart’: 177-84; Muslim Youth in the Netherlands and the Qur’an.” In: N. Boekhoff-van der Voort et al. (eds.). The Mahmood, Saba [2009]. “Religious Reason and Transmission and Dynamics of the Textual Sources Secular Affect: An Incommensurable Divide?,” in of Islam: Essays in Honour of Harald Motzki. Talal Asad et al., eds. Is Critique Secular? Leiden: Brill, pp. 401-19; Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 64-100; Fahmy, Khaled (2002). “An Olfactory Tale of Two Cities: Cairo in the 19th Century.” In: J. Edwards, McLuhan, Marshall (1962). The Gutenberg Galaxy: ed. Historians in Cairo. Cairo: American University The Making of Typographic Man. Toronto: in Cairo Press, pp. 155-87; University of Toronto Press; Fahmy, Ziad (2013). “Coming to our Senses: Mellor, Philip A. and Shilling, Chris (1997). Re- Historicizing Sound and Noise in the Middle East.” forming the Body: Religion, Community, and History Compass 11.4, pp. 305-15; Modernity. London: Sage; Gätje, Helmut (1965). “Die ‘inneren Sinne’ bei Meyer, Birgit, ed. (2009). Aesthetic Formations: Averroes.” ZDMG 115, pp. 255-93; Media, Religion, and the Senses. New York: Palgrave Macmillan; Ghazzi, Najm al-Din Muhammad al- (2011). Husn al-tanabbuh li-ma warad fi ’l-tashabbuh. 12 vols. Necipoglu, Gülru (1993). “Framing the Gaze: Beirut: Dar al-Nawadir; Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal Palaces.” Ars Orientalis 23, pp. 303-42; GoGwilt, Christopher (2011). The Passage of Literature: Genealogies of Modernism in Conrad, O’Meara, Simon (2007). Space and Muslim Urban Rhys, and Pramoedya. New York: Oxford Life: At the Limits of the Labyrinth of Fes. London: University Press; Routledge; Güney, Dogan (2012). “Moral Geographies and the Omar, Saleh Beshara (1977). Ibn al-Haytham’s Disciplining of Senses among Swedish Salafis.” Optics: A Study of the Origins of Experimental Comparative Islamic Studies 8,1-2, pp. 93-111; Science. Minneapolis: Studia Islamica;

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