Early Islamic Emotions: Sadness (ḥuzn) from the Quran to Early Renunciant and Sufi Literature

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.