The aim of 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 environments. This endeavor is premised on the assumption that sensory perception is not only a physical but also a cultural act: how people experience and understand sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch differs according to the historical, geographical, social and intellectual contexts in which perception occurs. How, then, are we to conceive of the Muslim sensorium, past and present?
Practices and protocols of sensation complicate and enrich multicultural coexistence. In the case of Islam, Western and European societies continuously wrestle with this challenge. Western and Muslim sensibilities towards sight inform debates about the Islamic headscarf and about what may or may not be shown in the European public sphere; initiatives to build minarets and to perform the call to prayer result in arguments over how the European soundscape ought to be organised; the symbolic importance of olfaction and gustation (think of halal food and the spices used therein), but also of touch (think of handshaking, but also unsolicited tactile interactions) frames the daily encounter between Europe’s Muslim and non-Muslim citizens. A coherent and properly communicated account of the varieties of Muslim attitudes towards the senses would go a long way in making such sensory encounters more comprehensible and easier to navigate, by raising awareness of the specificities of Muslim discourses on the senses and gauging their historical anchorings. Thus, this project aims to describe and analyze a variety of Muslim discourses on the senses, from the beginning of Islam to the early 1900s, in Islamic law (sharia), theology and mysticism, philosophy and ethics, and poetry.
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? How are the senses activated, controlled, and put to use in Muslim devotional practices? What are the regulatory mechanisms by which the various senses are silenced, restricted, or enhanced, in Islamic traditions, such as ethics, law and aesthetics? How are the senses deployed in the construction of Muslim identity and non-Muslim alterity? 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? In what ways can we speak of a specifically "Muslim" sensorium, and in what ways has this "Muslim sensorium" framed the development of Islamic culture over the centuries?
