Fear and learning in medieval Islam

dread as an affective marker of the scholarly class

Authors

  • Joseph Leonardo Vignone Harvard University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1558/bar.16086

Keywords:

ādāb;, medieval Islam, fear;, piety;, ulema

Abstract

In this article I argue that a specific experience of fear was adopted by the Islamic scholarly class (ulema) from the mid-tenth century onwards as an affective descriptor of their profession. This fear - khashya, which I translate here as 'dread' - appears in the Qur'an as an apprehensive emotion that those who possess knowledge feel towards God. In modern scholarship, it has often been cited as a term used by scriptural and mystical commentators to explain proper piety, usually figured as one of several kinds of fear falling under the broader term khawf. In his commentary on Abu Isma'il al-Ansari's celebrated text of mystical terminology, Manazil al-sa'irin, Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya distinguishes khashya from khawf, citing the Qur'an in order to cast the latter as a baser experience of fear characteristic of common believers. Ibn al-Qayyim argues that it is exclusively the ulema who experience khashya, for only they enjoy intimate knowledge of God imparted by their erudition. While otherwise absent from the Manazil's commentary tradition, this argument appears prominently across works of scholarly ethics (adab) authored by ulema living from the mid-tenth century through Ibn al-Qayyim's lifetime, almost always in reference to the intellectual pursuits that they believed afforded them a unique relationship with God. Attended by a semantic shift in Arabic lexicography favoring this interpretation of khawf and khashya, by the tenth century the affectively resonant language of dread became a pervasive way the ulema justified the social and cosmological hierarchy of Muslims over which they claimed to preside.

Author Biography

  • Joseph Leonardo Vignone, Harvard University

    Joseph Leonardo Vignone is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University, and a lecturer in the Department of Religion at Dartmouth College. He has held research fellowships at the Paris Institute of Political Studies, Harvard Divinity School, the I Tatti Center for Italian Renaissance Studies and the independent Center for Black, Brown and Queer Studies. His research focuses on the medical practices promoted by Arabic ethical literature between 900 and 1400 CE. His wider interests include Mamluk intellectual society, historical certainty in Islamic prophetic tradition, medieval genders and sexualities and the depiction of Islam in video games.

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Published

2020-09-01

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Articles

How to Cite

Vignone, J. L. (2020). Fear and learning in medieval Islam: dread as an affective marker of the scholarly class. Body and Religion, 3(1), 27-51. https://doi.org/10.1558/bar.16086