‘Refresh your hearts so they might better remember’
appeasing desire in medieval Islamic scholarly ethics
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/bar.26527Keywords:
ethics, ulema, affect, heart, spirit, desireAbstract
The education of the medieval Islamic scholarly elite (ulema) required that they memorize and retain countless texts for verbatim recollection throughout their careers. The ulema composed treatises of ethics (adab), in part to describe the resiliences students needed to cultivate in order to cope with the physical and emotional strain of their education. Using such works of adab, this article documents the ulema’s understanding of the role of the heart (qalb, del) and concupiscent spirit (nafs) in memorization from the tenth through fourteenth centuries CE. By the end of the tenth century, the ulema had grown into a discrete class of urban professionals who described the toll exacted by memorization techniques as a virtue of their profession, serving to alienate students from worldly temptations and focus their attentions on learning. They viewed the highly sensitive and apperceptive heart as central to this process, channeling the acquisitive desires of the spirit toward the assimilation of knowledge. While the heart’s sensitive nature and the spirit’s concupiscence were assets in this regard, the ulema also understood that training these faculties for memorization risked exposing their bodies to numerous, unpleasant affective experiences, including intellectual exhaustion, career anxiety, and physical illness. Calls to balance the ulema’s emotional and physical health against the need to continuously integrate knowledge reached its highest pitch in the wake of al-Ghazali, whose works of adab put forward a popular but strident program of discipline designed to empty the ulema’s spirits of errant desires and maximize the heart’s acquisition of divine knowledge. Works of adab written by the more professionalized ulema of the later medieval period substantially tempered al-Ghazali’s program. These treatises urge students to complement challenging courses of study with reasonable periods of relaxation and self-indulgence, in order to maintain the health of their hearts and spirits. By tracing the ulema’s concern over the emotional health of their class as it professionalized across the medieval period, this article documents how central affective considerations were to medieval Islamic scholarly society.
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