CONGRESS CANCELED Love, Fear, Anger, Sorrow: Emotions and Diseases of the Soul in Islamicate Literature I

Medieval Institute, Western Michigan University

Description

The study of emotions in the pre-modern Islamicate Middle East is beginning to attract scholarly attention as an emerging field. Since, as in Medieval Europe, the word ‘emotion’ has no direct correspondence to an Islamicate concept, we invite scholars to examine how the term akhlāq (ethics, morals, character traits) can be mapped onto/as a history of emotions. While developed in medical and philosophical texts as ‘diseases of the soul’, emotions are portrayed in various ways across a wide spectrum of literary traditions of the Islamicate Middle East in Arabic, Persian, and Ottoman Turkish, and thus provide ample ground for fruitful collaboration. We especially welcome critical engagement with the concept of ‘emotion’ and the Islamicate term akhlāq so as to determine semantic overlap and differences between the two categories. Furthermore, we encourage studies that assess the feasibility of applying theoretical approaches to emotions developed for Medieval Europe to the Islamicate world. Such studies can focus on emotion in the Qurʾān, illnesses of the soul in philosophical texts, the refinement of the self in advice literature, or on the portrayal of emotion in narrative and lyric poems. We hope that a shared vocabulary will enable future comparative projects between medievalists of various specializations.

Keywords: Islamicate, emotion, soul, ethics, self, literature

Cameron Cross

 
May 7th, 10:00 AM

CONGRESS CANCELED Love, Fear, Anger, Sorrow: Emotions and Diseases of the Soul in Islamicate Literature I

Schneider 1345

The study of emotions in the pre-modern Islamicate Middle East is beginning to attract scholarly attention as an emerging field. Since, as in Medieval Europe, the word ‘emotion’ has no direct correspondence to an Islamicate concept, we invite scholars to examine how the term akhlāq (ethics, morals, character traits) can be mapped onto/as a history of emotions. While developed in medical and philosophical texts as ‘diseases of the soul’, emotions are portrayed in various ways across a wide spectrum of literary traditions of the Islamicate Middle East in Arabic, Persian, and Ottoman Turkish, and thus provide ample ground for fruitful collaboration. We especially welcome critical engagement with the concept of ‘emotion’ and the Islamicate term akhlāq so as to determine semantic overlap and differences between the two categories. Furthermore, we encourage studies that assess the feasibility of applying theoretical approaches to emotions developed for Medieval Europe to the Islamicate world. Such studies can focus on emotion in the Qurʾān, illnesses of the soul in philosophical texts, the refinement of the self in advice literature, or on the portrayal of emotion in narrative and lyric poems. We hope that a shared vocabulary will enable future comparative projects between medievalists of various specializations.

Keywords: Islamicate, emotion, soul, ethics, self, literature

Cameron Cross