Periodic Reporting for period 3 - VISIONIS (Visuality in the Qur'an and Early Islam)
Reporting period: 2024-10-01 to 2026-03-31
Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project
VISIONIS conducts in-depth, comparative research on the Qur'an and early Islamic texts and art to explore early Islamic visual concepts, practices, and images in their respective cultural and social contexts. The project seeks to understand how early Islamic visuality was shaped and expressed in various forms, including literature, theology, art, and legal texts. It reviews the perception of what is ‘Islamic’ and what is called ‘Islamic’ in general and of the visual culture of Early Islam in particular. It raises awareness of the specificities of Muslim discourses on seeing and enables an assessment of their historical anchoring.
Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far
We have been studying Early Islamic texts, besides the Qur’an, the exegetical work of Muqātil ibn Sulaymān; the legal hadith compendium of Mālik b. Anas; the historiography of al-Azraqī; the theological hadith compendium by al-Tirmidhī, the medical treatise of Al-Razi, writings on dream interpretation by Ibn Qutayba, and early Arabic poetry among others. We included regional art and architecture in our research, such as the Umayyad desert castle Qusayr Amr (Jordan) with its figurative images and inscriptions, the palace and bathhouse of Khirbet al-Mafjar (Jericho) and Early Islamic art and architecture in Jerusalem. We examine the texts and objects with a focus on several major interrelated themes, including (1) the theory of vision and anatomy of the eye, (2) the rhetorical usage of sight-related language, (3) theological conceptualizations of sight, seeing, and spiritual blindness, (4) the human desire to see God, the Prophet Muhammad, or miracles, (5) dreams,(6) deception of the eye (7) the power of the eye (magic and the evil eye); (8) legal regulations of the gaze; (9) textual references to images and the prohibition of image making, (10) the entwinement of material and text culture
The research of these texts and objects shows a rich repository of different and diverse questions and attitudes that were the subject of debates during the time of the Qur’an’s genesis and in the following first three centuries of Early Islam. Outcomes of the in-depth studies are currently prepared for individual or co-authored articles. The monograph “Memory of the Eye” will examine the breadth of the Qurʾanic modes of visuality, moving between philological, historical, cultural, and theological questions, and will be novel in its approach and within the research in Qur’anic Studies. In 11 planned chapters it will study the different Qur’anic approaches to and utilization of vision and visualities based on a historical-literary, contextual reading, employing theoretical considerations from the fields of cultural, visual, and material studies. It will show the complex web of intersections and crossroads in and between Qur’anic texts, late antique textual and material cultures, and the gateways to Early Islamic visualities in texts, objects, practices, and protocols of seeing.
Besides preparing articles on specific questions and texts, we are working to create a first-of-its-kind digital and interactive reader. The fast-growing development of new ways of knowledge transfer, data collection, ways of learning, searching, and researching, demands to finding new ways of distributing knowledge. Inspired by the innovative project of Aby Warburg's Mnemosyne Atlas, and by Shahzad Bashir’s digital and interactive essays A New Vision for Islamic Pasts and Futures, our project attempts to develop a digital textual and pictorial reader of ways of seeing in Early Islam. The reader will present an assembly of early Islamic texts in English translation and its Arabic original, and material objects, spanning the 1st to the 3rd century Hijri (7th-10th century C. E.). Those texts and objects are arrangeable according to themes, times, genres, and terminology allowing the audience to perceive and explore an array of interwoven practices, questions, and debates that shaped the ways of seeing in the first centuries of Islam. It intends to show pathways of recurring subjects in different genres. It will offer arguments about the development of specific Islamic ways of seeing. As a deliberate montage, it will stay a flexible object of interpretation and does not intend to create a moment of telling a historical truth. It rather presents possible options of reading past texts and reconstructing possible ways of a history of seeing. It seeks to be an instrument for research and innovative research questions. The assembly of well-chosen texts and objects from multiple authors, locations, and times, allows attention not just to the texts and objects themselves, but also, to the gaps between them and between the reader and the texts, in which thought happens in the past and the present. Ideally, a second layer of chosen texts and objects will be added at a later stage that stems from adjacent cultures and religious communities, that juxtapose the Islamic texts into their broader cultural framework.
Throughout our work, we have shared our ongoing results and findings through presentations at international and local conferences and workshops. All workshops included questions, approaches, or disciplines that are not core in our own research, but help to reflect and broaden our approach. The panel “Vision and Visuality in the Qur’an and Beyond”, IQSA Annual Meeting, Palermo, September 2022, organized by the PI included Sense and Emotion Studies; the international workshop “Scriptures and their Visual Faces” Jerusalem, January 2023 included research from Buddhist studies, Rabbinic and Jewish art studies and Byzantine studies; the panel “New Directions in Islamic Visual Cultures”, EUARE Annual Meeting, Palermo May 2024, organized by Or Amir and Yunus Hentschel touched upon paradigm shifts in Islamic Studies; and the planned international workshop “Watching Time Passing By: Time Perception and the Sense of Sight”, organized by the PI in collaboration with the Einstein Centre Chronoi, Berlin September 2024, will be dedicated to questions of visual perception and time perception and will include researchers working on the philosophy of time and psycholinguistics. We established research collaboration with local scholars such as Rachel Milstein (Islamic Art History) or Livnat Holtzman (Gesture Studies in Islam) and international researchers, such as Valerie Gonzales (Islamic aesthetics) or Eric DeVilliers (Syriac and Islamic theology) by inviting them for individual talks and colloquia. We also started research collaboration with the research project Late Antiquity and Early Islamic Studies (LAESSI) at the University of Göttingen, directed by Jens Scheiner.
The research of these texts and objects shows a rich repository of different and diverse questions and attitudes that were the subject of debates during the time of the Qur’an’s genesis and in the following first three centuries of Early Islam. Outcomes of the in-depth studies are currently prepared for individual or co-authored articles. The monograph “Memory of the Eye” will examine the breadth of the Qurʾanic modes of visuality, moving between philological, historical, cultural, and theological questions, and will be novel in its approach and within the research in Qur’anic Studies. In 11 planned chapters it will study the different Qur’anic approaches to and utilization of vision and visualities based on a historical-literary, contextual reading, employing theoretical considerations from the fields of cultural, visual, and material studies. It will show the complex web of intersections and crossroads in and between Qur’anic texts, late antique textual and material cultures, and the gateways to Early Islamic visualities in texts, objects, practices, and protocols of seeing.
Besides preparing articles on specific questions and texts, we are working to create a first-of-its-kind digital and interactive reader. The fast-growing development of new ways of knowledge transfer, data collection, ways of learning, searching, and researching, demands to finding new ways of distributing knowledge. Inspired by the innovative project of Aby Warburg's Mnemosyne Atlas, and by Shahzad Bashir’s digital and interactive essays A New Vision for Islamic Pasts and Futures, our project attempts to develop a digital textual and pictorial reader of ways of seeing in Early Islam. The reader will present an assembly of early Islamic texts in English translation and its Arabic original, and material objects, spanning the 1st to the 3rd century Hijri (7th-10th century C. E.). Those texts and objects are arrangeable according to themes, times, genres, and terminology allowing the audience to perceive and explore an array of interwoven practices, questions, and debates that shaped the ways of seeing in the first centuries of Islam. It intends to show pathways of recurring subjects in different genres. It will offer arguments about the development of specific Islamic ways of seeing. As a deliberate montage, it will stay a flexible object of interpretation and does not intend to create a moment of telling a historical truth. It rather presents possible options of reading past texts and reconstructing possible ways of a history of seeing. It seeks to be an instrument for research and innovative research questions. The assembly of well-chosen texts and objects from multiple authors, locations, and times, allows attention not just to the texts and objects themselves, but also, to the gaps between them and between the reader and the texts, in which thought happens in the past and the present. Ideally, a second layer of chosen texts and objects will be added at a later stage that stems from adjacent cultures and religious communities, that juxtapose the Islamic texts into their broader cultural framework.
Throughout our work, we have shared our ongoing results and findings through presentations at international and local conferences and workshops. All workshops included questions, approaches, or disciplines that are not core in our own research, but help to reflect and broaden our approach. The panel “Vision and Visuality in the Qur’an and Beyond”, IQSA Annual Meeting, Palermo, September 2022, organized by the PI included Sense and Emotion Studies; the international workshop “Scriptures and their Visual Faces” Jerusalem, January 2023 included research from Buddhist studies, Rabbinic and Jewish art studies and Byzantine studies; the panel “New Directions in Islamic Visual Cultures”, EUARE Annual Meeting, Palermo May 2024, organized by Or Amir and Yunus Hentschel touched upon paradigm shifts in Islamic Studies; and the planned international workshop “Watching Time Passing By: Time Perception and the Sense of Sight”, organized by the PI in collaboration with the Einstein Centre Chronoi, Berlin September 2024, will be dedicated to questions of visual perception and time perception and will include researchers working on the philosophy of time and psycholinguistics. We established research collaboration with local scholars such as Rachel Milstein (Islamic Art History) or Livnat Holtzman (Gesture Studies in Islam) and international researchers, such as Valerie Gonzales (Islamic aesthetics) or Eric DeVilliers (Syriac and Islamic theology) by inviting them for individual talks and colloquia. We also started research collaboration with the research project Late Antiquity and Early Islamic Studies (LAESSI) at the University of Göttingen, directed by Jens Scheiner.
Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)
VISIONIS is working to create a body of knowledge on Visuality in Early Islam which hitherto did not exist. We are working on establishing an interdisciplinary methodological framework, that encompasses methods from comparative religious and cultural studies, art history, social sciences, and visual and material culture studies which shall help to establish a firm theoretical and methodological basis for our research and for future research in Islamic visual and sensory culture studies.
The interactive reader will be the first-ever attempt to create a reader that goes beyond the presentation of texts but offers different avenues to explore ways of seeing in Early Islam.
In the second half of the project we expect further results and outputs:
* An MA thesis on Eyewitnessing in Early legal works (Mysoon Furani)
* A monograph: “A Memory for the Eye. Vision and Visuality in the Qur’an” (H. Koloska)
* A Special Issue of Entangled Religions: In/Visibility: The Interplay of the Visual and the Textual in Religious Texts and Images, 2025, with contributions of Y. Hentschel, H. Koloska, et al.)
* Proceedings of the workshop “Watching Time Passing By: Time Perception and the Sense of Sight” in De Gruyter series Chronoi: Time, Time Awareness, Time Management, with contributions of all research members et al.
*Articles in various degrees of preparation and publication:
- “The Senses in the Qur’an” in: Islamic Sensory History, 600-1500, ed. by Christian Lange and Adam Bursi, Brill 2024 (H. Koloska)
- “A vision of Transgression. Visual aspects of Muqātil’s exegesis of Sūrat Yūsuf” (Y. Hentschel)
- “The Seen and the Unseen – Muqātil’s exegesis of Surat al-Anʾām”, planned for Brepols Apocrypha 2026 (H. Koloska)
- “The epistemic challenge of dream visions of the Prophet to Islamic Jurisprudence” (O. Amir);
- “Dreams as Collapsing Time and the Question of Tradition” (O. Amir);
- “Seeing the Practice of Medina. Visuality and Ritual Law in Mālik b. Anas’ al-Muwaṭṭaˀ” (Y. Hentschel);
- “Observing the Moment. Visual-Temporal Considerations in the legal discourses of Mālik b. Anas and Jaˁfar aṣ-Ṣādiq” (Y. Hentschel);
- “Beholding the Unfathomable. Vision and Visuality in Early Islamic Theology” (Y. Hentschel)
- “The Visual Imagery in Abbās ibn Firnās” (U. Aweida)
- “Synasthesia in Bashhar b. Burds Love Poetry” (U. Aweida)
- “Visual language in Early Arabic Poetry” (U. Aweida)
- “Under Male Gaze: Rethinking the Female Representations in Qusayr Amra.” submitted for initial review, Cogent Arts & Humanities (I. Kol),
- “The Experience of Time in Beholding Islamic Architecture” (I. Kol)
- “Ways of Seeing Islamic Art” (I- Kol)
- “Qur’anic Banquets in the Bathhouse of Khirbet al-Mafjar” (Hentschel, Kol, Koloska)
*We will hold international workshops and invite single speakers to our colloquia. The next workshop is scheduled for September 2024 at the Einstein Centre Chronoi in Berlin and will focus on “Watching Time Passing By: Time Perception and the Sense of Sight”.
*Exhibition. We are planning an exhibition (tentative title “Truth and Deception – The Power of the Eye”). This exhibition will present a collection of texts that we studied and examined in the project, objects, and artifacts. We want to invite at least one contemporary Palestinian Muslim artist to create or exhibit his/her existing artwork which will relate and comment on the texts and objects and bridge our research to the contemporary world. The exhibition shall invite a broader audience to explore the significance of the sense of sight in Islamic thought, material culture, and contemporary art.
The interactive reader will be the first-ever attempt to create a reader that goes beyond the presentation of texts but offers different avenues to explore ways of seeing in Early Islam.
In the second half of the project we expect further results and outputs:
* An MA thesis on Eyewitnessing in Early legal works (Mysoon Furani)
* A monograph: “A Memory for the Eye. Vision and Visuality in the Qur’an” (H. Koloska)
* A Special Issue of Entangled Religions: In/Visibility: The Interplay of the Visual and the Textual in Religious Texts and Images, 2025, with contributions of Y. Hentschel, H. Koloska, et al.)
* Proceedings of the workshop “Watching Time Passing By: Time Perception and the Sense of Sight” in De Gruyter series Chronoi: Time, Time Awareness, Time Management, with contributions of all research members et al.
*Articles in various degrees of preparation and publication:
- “The Senses in the Qur’an” in: Islamic Sensory History, 600-1500, ed. by Christian Lange and Adam Bursi, Brill 2024 (H. Koloska)
- “A vision of Transgression. Visual aspects of Muqātil’s exegesis of Sūrat Yūsuf” (Y. Hentschel)
- “The Seen and the Unseen – Muqātil’s exegesis of Surat al-Anʾām”, planned for Brepols Apocrypha 2026 (H. Koloska)
- “The epistemic challenge of dream visions of the Prophet to Islamic Jurisprudence” (O. Amir);
- “Dreams as Collapsing Time and the Question of Tradition” (O. Amir);
- “Seeing the Practice of Medina. Visuality and Ritual Law in Mālik b. Anas’ al-Muwaṭṭaˀ” (Y. Hentschel);
- “Observing the Moment. Visual-Temporal Considerations in the legal discourses of Mālik b. Anas and Jaˁfar aṣ-Ṣādiq” (Y. Hentschel);
- “Beholding the Unfathomable. Vision and Visuality in Early Islamic Theology” (Y. Hentschel)
- “The Visual Imagery in Abbās ibn Firnās” (U. Aweida)
- “Synasthesia in Bashhar b. Burds Love Poetry” (U. Aweida)
- “Visual language in Early Arabic Poetry” (U. Aweida)
- “Under Male Gaze: Rethinking the Female Representations in Qusayr Amra.” submitted for initial review, Cogent Arts & Humanities (I. Kol),
- “The Experience of Time in Beholding Islamic Architecture” (I. Kol)
- “Ways of Seeing Islamic Art” (I- Kol)
- “Qur’anic Banquets in the Bathhouse of Khirbet al-Mafjar” (Hentschel, Kol, Koloska)
*We will hold international workshops and invite single speakers to our colloquia. The next workshop is scheduled for September 2024 at the Einstein Centre Chronoi in Berlin and will focus on “Watching Time Passing By: Time Perception and the Sense of Sight”.
*Exhibition. We are planning an exhibition (tentative title “Truth and Deception – The Power of the Eye”). This exhibition will present a collection of texts that we studied and examined in the project, objects, and artifacts. We want to invite at least one contemporary Palestinian Muslim artist to create or exhibit his/her existing artwork which will relate and comment on the texts and objects and bridge our research to the contemporary world. The exhibition shall invite a broader audience to explore the significance of the sense of sight in Islamic thought, material culture, and contemporary art.