Abstract
How does the text of the Qur’an draw on vocabulary and imagery of sense perception? How does the sensory landscape of the Qur’an relate what is felt to what is known? How do human senses relate to one another, and how do they relate to the Qur’an’s overall depiction of feelings, and feelings in relation to knowledge?
In much recent interdisciplinary literature on the role of the senses in human life, there are claims of a motif of a supremacy of the eye and the visual in modern cultures. This does not mean that, however, if we look to premodern texts such as that of the Qur’an, that we see a reversal of the relationship between the visual and the sonic, the seen and the heard.
We might be inclined to think of the Qur’an as a primarily oral and aural text, one that is heard before it is seen, which might seem to suggest a simple reversal of a modern paradigm of the dominance of the eye of over the ear. If modernity is characterized by hyper-visuality, the Qur’an as a pre-modern text could be assumed to exhibit the reverse, and its orality could be assumed to be evidence in support of this.
A close look at the text of the Qur’an, however, reveals a more complicated picture. Rather than a simple dominance of the sonic over the visual, a reading of the roles of the senses of seeing and hearing in the text of the Qur’an reveals that they are in fact closely intertwined, working in tandem with one another. Together, they form a combined field of sensory experience that contributes to the formation of knowledge and comprehension on the part of those humans who receive messages from God, and who perceive the world around them.
This presentation draws on the assumptions of the interdisciplinary area of Sensory Studies as well as theories of affect and emotion. Specifically, it assumes that ideas of sensation and its meanings are impacted by broader historical and cultural contexts. Building on this assumption, the research here draws on modern literary approaches to the Qur’an (Izutsu, Madigan, Sells), as well as recent work on the Qur’an and sensation and emotion (Bauer, Kueny, Lange) in order to explicate the broader fields of meaning around seeing and hearing.
Discipline
Religious Studies/Theology
Geographic Area
All Middle East
Islamic World
Sub Area
None