The Muslim Sensorium: From the 10th-century Brethren of Purity to Muḥammad Farīd Wajdī (d. 1954)

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In recent years, the senses have become the object of renewed interest in the humanities and social sciences, including within the study of Islamic intellectual history. This talk surveys models of the human sensorium articulated in the Islamic world from the 10th to the 20th century CE. It focuses on chapters devoted to the senses in five major Arabic encyclopedias of knowledge: (1) the Epistles of the Brethren of Purity (Iraq, 10th c.); (2) Avicenna’s Book of Healing (Persia, 11th c.); (3) al-Jildakī’s Proof on the Secrets of the Science of Balances (Egypt, 14th c.); (4) al-Majlisī’s Oceans of Lights (Persia, 17th c.); and (5) Muḥammad Farīd Wajdī’s Encyclopedia of the Twentieth Century (Egypt, 20th c.). The talk traces how theories of sensory perception differed and evolved across a millennium of Islamic thought in the Nile-to-Oxus region, exploring continuities and shifts shaped by Graeco-Islamic philosophy, the magico-theurgical tradition, Shiʿi devotion, and modern Muslim scientism.
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Christian Lange (PhD Harvard, 2006) is Professor of Islamic and Arabic Studies at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. His publications include Justice, Punishment and the Medieval Muslim Imagination (2008), Paradise and Hell in Islamic Traditions (2016), and most recently (as co-editor), Islamic Sensory History, Vol. 2: 600-1500 (2024). Since 2017, he’s been the Principal Investigator of the Utrecht-based research group SENSIS: The senses of Islam, funded by research grants of the European Research Council and the Dutch Science Organisation.