Periodic Reporting for period 4 - SENSIS (The Senses of Islam: A Cultural History of Perception in the Muslim World)
Periodo di rendicontazione: 2022-03-01 al 2023-08-31
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?
SENSIS researchers also present their work at the major scholarly conferences in the area of Religious and Islamic/Middle Eastern Studies, such as the American Academy of Religion, the Middle East Studies Association, the Deutscher Orientalistentag, or the Union Europeenne des Arabisants et Islamisants, as well as providing many invited lectures at universities in Europe and the U.S.
Since the fall of 2018, SENSIS has hosted a range of workshops, symposia and conferences. In the framework of SENSIS' digital humanities research, a digital text mining tool was developed (http://arabic-dh.hum.uu.nl/corpus-frontend/about) and the SENSIS team organised a state-of-the-art international conference “Whither Islamicate digital humanities? Analytics, tools, corpora” (Netherlands Royal Academy of Sciences, Amsterdam, 13-14 December 2018). SENSIS also hosted a graduate school of the Netherlands Interuniversity School of Islamic Studies, on “Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies in the Digital Age” (Utrecht, 28-31 November 2019, which included a hands-on workshop on computational methods (see https://sensis.sites.uu.nl/2019/08/03/co-sponsored-event-nisis-autumn-school/).
During its course, SENSIS organised workshops and symposia convering each of the five human senses in Muslim culture(s). At Utrecht, SENSIS hosted two international symposia (6-7 June 2019, “The Taste of Islam: Gustatory Aspects in Islamic Intellectual and Cultural History”, https://sensis.sites.uu.nl/2019/05/13/symposium-taste-of-islam/; 26 October 2018: "The senses in the Qur’an and in early Islam”, https://sensis.sites.uu.nl/2018/10/24/workshop-the-senses-in-the-quran-and-in-early-islam/) and an international conference (12-13 September 2019: "Sufism and the Body", https://sensis.sites.uu.nl/2019/08/06/international-conference-sufism-and-the-body/). In 2019, the PI organised a panel on the sensory history of the Islamic world at the annual meeting of the Middle East Studies Association (New Orleans, 14 November 2019, see https://mesana.org/mymesa/meeting_program_session.php?sid=6ed8a238e4e838059c4407949d39aad5. The Covid pandemic cut a hole into SENSIS's efforts to organize scholarly meetings, but thanks to an extension, SENSIS was able to organize its concluding conference in July 2022 (“Islam, Body, and Society”, 30th meeting of the Union Europeenne des Arabisants et Islamisants, 7-9 July 2022, ca. 100 participants).
Important milestone in this endeavour are the publication of a thematic issue in the peer-reviewed journal The Senses and Society (Taylor & Francis, edited by Michael Bull and David Howes), on "The sensory history of the Islamic world" (published in 2022, edited by the PI). As for other publications, in addition to separate, article-length studies, SENSIS also produced a Handbook of Islamic Sensory History, 600-1500, with 45 chapters, to be published in Brill Publishers' Handbooks of Oriental Studies series in early 2024 (ed. by the PI and one of the postdoctoral researchers in the project).