In the hierarchical societies of late medieval Iran and Central Asia, different norms and behaviors were expected from different members of society. Certain people were lauded for having particular emotions and acting upon them, while others might be chastised for the same behavior. Understanding how these emotional norms were articulated and maintained gives us a sense of the social and gender hierarchies of the time. Following Barbara Rosenwein’s concept of emotional communities, the permissibility and even virtuous deployment of certain emotions for some members of society marked them as separate from other groups. We get a sense of the types of authority these elite emotional communities—Sufis in the case of this paper—tried to wield amongst a general populace, alongside how they conceived the proper ways that they as Sufis should feel and behave. This paper will examine the language of emotion, particularly sorrow and ecstasy, as it applied to exemplary Sufi saints. It will focus on Abd al-Rahman Jami’s Nafahat al-Uns min Hadarat al-Quds, a comprehensive biographical dictionary of Sufis, composed in the fifteenth century. Jami was not only an eminent Persian poet, but also a member of the Naqshbandi Sufi order. He was a politically, culturally, and religiously influential figure in the Timurid Empire. The way he constructs the emotional feats of saints in the hagiographic stories in his work reflects forms of cultural training that was important to both the target community—here the Sufis—and the larger society in general. His framing of emotional norms will be compared to those presented in the more popular pious hagiographies found in fifteenth-century shrine visitation guides for the cities of Herat, Samarkand, and Bukhara. These works employ simpler language and have different ways of speaking about the emotional virtues of saints. Additionally, they have added sections prescribing proper emotional behavior on the part of lay pilgrims. When reading both Jami’s elite hagiography alongside popular shrine-based hagiography, a deeper view of emotions comes to light. This paper will examine the different ways that the language of sorrow and ecstasy is deployed in these texts to draw conclusions on how these emotions were used to draw boundaries between social groups and between the genders. Further, it will try to make clear how these emotional norms informed ideas of morality in fifteenth-century Iran and Central Asia.

Art historians have generally categorized ornament in Islamic art as the decorative attributes applied to a work of art with calligraphic, vegetal, geometric, or figural patterns. This paper concentrates on medieval Islamic art objects from the Fatimid Mediterranean world (10th - 12th c.) that displayed specific calligraphic ornamental epigraphy that evoked common words or phrases of emotion and sentiment. It argues that Islamic ornament is not only pleasing to the beholder but, as Oleg Grabar has proposed, serves as an intermediary between the viewer and the work of art and the society in which it was created. Rather than suppose that commonly inscribed ornament using words like bliss, joy, prosperity, content, and happiness were inscribed on Islamic art objects primarily for their aesthetic value, this paper argues that the meanings that these “medieval emoticons” conveyed were largely tied to specific socially constructed models of interpreting emotion. This paper examines specific instances from the medieval Fatimid Mediterranean and neighboring regions that culturally interacted with this form of emotionally laden ornament. Using an interdisciplinary approach to art history, material culture, epigraphy, and literary and historical sources, this paper furthers Grabar’s idea of ornament as an intermediary between the viewer and the socially constructed meaning of the societies from which the object originated or emulated. As Wendy Shaw has argued, Grabar’s universal humanism approach to deciphering ornament falls short of an exact method for understanding various culturally coded aesthetic experiences. She writes, “This betrays not only the lack of interest between Islamic intellectual history and artistic practices but a broader prejudice characterizing art making as a non-verbal, non-intellectual, apolitical endeavor.” Keeping these debates on Islamic ornament in mind, this paper looks at objects from the medieval Mediterranean world, specifically those emerging from geographic regions within the Fatimid habitus, and reads their common emotionally phrased epigraphy as conveying a socially constructed yet intentional and purposeful reading of ornament. 1. See Grabar, Oleg. The Mediation of Ornament. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992; 1. Sheila Blair and Jonathan Bloom, Cosmophilia: Islamic Art from the David Collection, Copenhagen (Chestnut Hill, MA: McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, 2006), pls. 9 - 30. 2. Wendy Shaw, What is “Islamic” Art? Between Religion and Perception, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pg. 272.

The eleventh-century poet, philosopher, and traveler Nasir Khusraw (d.1088) conducted a pilgrimage to Mecca in 1046 CE and documented his entire journey across the Islamic world in his travelogue, the Safarnama. According to his prose, his travel was not only through the physical landscapes of the medieval Islamic world but also through the tapestry of human emotion and societal structures of the time. The Safarnama, includes detailed descriptions of cities, caravansaries, and various types of water resources by which the inhabitants of these locations sustained a viable and socially cohesive living environment. Khusraw's narrative serves historians as a medieval work of topophilia because it reflects his emotions and the affectual manifestations of the inhabitants with whom he interacts. His initial impressions of the urban topographies, his treatment of and by others, and his own preconceived and subjective notions and worldviews all paint a picture of a diverse combination of feelings, emotions, and affects in medieval Islamic society. The anecdotal and narrative nature of his Safarnama reveals how water itself, its provision and distribution, serves as a conduit of emotional communication and demonstrates the intimate relationship between humanity and water in the medieval Islamic world. This paper specifically discusses the relationship between human social interaction and water distribution in the medieval Islamic world, according to tenth to twelfth-century Islamic textual sources. Additionally, through an interdisciplinary approach, this paper considers how affect, emotion, and feelings are socially constructed in the medieval Islamic world. How medieval Muslims used water as a communicative tool helps to further understand that water acts not only as a passive vessel of human agency but as an active agent in constructing the social habitus of medieval Islamic societies. I argue that the act of transference of emotion reveals a complexity to understanding affectual communication in the medieval Islamic world. In this ethos, the essential relationship between nature and humanity, one heightened by social and ecological disposition, informs how emotion is conveyed. The research presented in this paper compares Khusraw’s experiences and narratives in relation to water and hydraulics in the built and natural environment of Fatimid Cairo. In doing so, this research contributes a deeper understanding of the emotional landscape of Fatimid Cairo and the larger medieval Islamic world, highlighting the intricate ways in which natural elements, such as water, played a central role in shaping emotional experiences and social interactions in medieval Islamic society.

This paper attempts to excavate 19th century Tunisian understandings of emotions through legal texts and diplomatic letters exchanged among Tunisian and foreign authorities. Specifically, this paper looks at the adjudication of a mid-19th century blasphemy case that took place in the streets of downtown Tunis, a case that hinged on the allegation that blasphemy against Islam unleashed uncontrollable religious feelings among local Muslims. Through a close reading of court documents and archival letters, this paper proposes a particular “Tunisian” understanding (or strategic representation) of affect: as something that comes upon a human subject (and for which the human subject cannot be held responsible). This understanding is compared with the representation of affect presented in letters from European and Ottoman authorities who urged against the prosecution of the blasphemer.