Fear and learning in medieval Islam: Dread as an affective marker of the scholarly class

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...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Body and religion
Subtitles:Special Issue: The Qur'an and affect
Main Author: Vignone, Joseph (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
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Published: Equinox Publishing [2019]
In: Body and religion
Standardized Subjects / Keyword chains:B Islam / Fear of God / Ulama
RelBib Classification:AE Psychology of religion
AG Religious life; material religion
BJ Islam
Further subjects:B Medieval Islam
B Fear
B ādāb
B Piety
B Ulama
Online Access: Volltext (Verlag)
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Summary: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 Ab? Ism?‘?l al-An??r?’s celebrated text of mystical terminology, Man?zil al-s??ir?n, 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 Man?zil’s commentary tradition, this argument appears prominently across works of scholarly ethics (?d?b) 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.
ISSN:2057-5831
Contains:Enthalten in: Body and religion
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1558/bar.16086