This event is cancelled. Stay tuned for more information regarding a re-scheduling of the event in Fall 2023.

Knox Hall 207

"Registers of Emotion in Late Medieval Islam" by Nancy Khalek, Brown University

In what genres did scholars explicitly discuss religious experience in the Middle Ages? In the pre-modern world, the cultivation of a religious disposition was traditionally seen as the domain of either ethics or spiritual discipline. Indeed, medieval Muslim philosophers, Sufis, and theologians, directly or indirectly influenced by Aristotelian and Galenic tradition, developed a complicated approach to rigorous contemplative and bodily practices for the disciplining of the self. In this talk I will suggest that late medieval scholarly discourses on ethical treatments for spiritual maladies, on the nature of happiness and how to attain it, on pleasure and pain, and on the attainment of spiritual felicity were both connected to one another and to the practices enjoined on non-educated or non-elite believer through popular hadith tradition. The latter, rather than existing in a philosophical or theological register, utilized the ḥadīth idiom, with which everyday people were encouraged toward or discouraged away from certain behaviors. On all levels, the concepts of hope and fear existed across various registers, structuring how piety itself was conceptualized.

This is a closed event; attendees may read the paper in advance, which is distributed to members of the Workshops & Colloquiums Email List.