Abstract:
This dissertation reconstructs the textual history of the early Islamic emotion of sadness
(ḥuzn) from the Quran until early renunciant and Sufi texts written before the end of
5th/11th century circa. The analysis searches for textual evidence of diversity in the
conceptualisation of this emotion from both a diachronic and a synchronic perspective.
Chapter 1 defines emotions and stages a meeting between premodern Arabic and
Islamic studies and the growing field of the history of emotions. This chapter also
sketches how previous scholarship on early Islam has dealt with “emotions,” and with
sadness in particular. Chapter 2 proposes a method based around networks of emotion
words and identifies a comprehensive corpus of early Islamic texts in which to find
textual appearances of early Islamic emotions. From Chapter 3 on, the dissertation
analyses the textual appearances of ḥuzn – its definitions, values, directions,
interpretations, and functions – throughout the Quranic text and the “canonical” hadith
corpus (Chapter 3), zuhd works (Chapter 4) and Sufi works (Chapter 5 and 6).
The study of networks of emotion words across the corpus of texts opens onto a deeper
historical understanding of the spiritual implications of sadness in the life of the
individual believer, the role sadness has in social and communal dynamics, and sheds
historical light on renunciant and Sufi ethics, senses of belonging, and forms of piety.
