Something stayed with me from the session that I want to think through here, because I don’t think we got all the way to the bottom of it.
We arrived at a distinction — trained body versus involuntary body — and found that it wouldn’t hold. The involuntary response turns out to be partly the product of training; the trained response turns out to produce something that feels genuinely involuntary, genuinely arrived-from-outside. Al-Ghazali says: if the tears don’t come, reach for them, and at some point the reaching and the tears become indistinguishable. William Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling (2001), says: saying “I am moved” participates in the movement. The boundary between what you did and what happened to you is not where you thought it was.
But I want to push at something the session didn’t quite reach. We kept asking whether the involuntary response is more or less authentic than the trained one. And underneath that question is an assumption I’m not sure we examined: that authenticity is the right criterion. That the thing we should be asking about a religious sensory experience is whether it is genuine — whether it really happened, whether it was really God rather than the apparatus, whether the feeling was the person’s own rather than produced by the community’s instruction manual for correct feeling.
Where does that criterion come from? It comes, I think, from exactly the Protestant interior turn that Talal Asad is tracing. The question “was it genuine” is a question about the inner state of the individual — whether the belief was really there, whether the intention was pure, whether the self was authentically engaged. It is a deeply individualist question, and a deeply suspicious one. It assumes that experience needs to be checked against something — against sincerity, against doctrinal correctness, against some standard of authenticity that exists prior to and independent of the experience itself. And that assumption is not Islamic in origin. Or not only Islamic. It arrived in the study of religion through a particular intellectual history that decided the interior was where the real thing happened.
The idea of qalb (arab. “heart”) complicates this in a way I find genuinely disorienting. The heart as perceptual organ — an organ that can be polished or corroded, trained to perceive more finely or allowed to rust shut — is not an apparatus for producing authentic inner states. It is a faculty for perceiving something real. The question is not “did you really feel it” but “could you see it.” Which means the relevant criterion shifts from authenticity to acuity. The question is less whether your experience was genuine and more whether your perceptual organ was calibrated correctly. And that is a completely different kind of question with completely different implications for what religious practice is supposed to do.
A polished mirror reflects accurately. A corroded mirror distorts. The mirror doesn’t decide whether it’s being authentic — it either shows what is there or it doesn’t. The Sufi understanding of the heart is closer to this than to anything like Protestant sincerity. Which means the trained body, in this framework, is not the body that has been conditioned to produce correct feelings on cue. It is the body that has been prepared to perceive accurately. Training is calibration, not conditioning. And this distinction matters.
And yet — here is where I get stuck, and I want to stay stuck rather than moving past it — calibration implies an object. Calibration implies there is something there to be perceived accurately or inaccurately. The polished mirror reflects what is in front of it. What is in front of the qalb? This is not a question that can be answered by methodology. It is a question the whole framework of sensory religious experience opens without being able to close. Tanya Luhrmann, How God Becomes Real (2020), can tell you how people train themselves to experience divine presence. She cannot tell you whether what they experience is a presence or a trained capacity for experiencing presence. And that gap — between the training and its object — is where every account of religious sensory experience lives.
I want to approach the next session from a different angle. We have been talking about the body that responds — to sound, to rhythm, to collective breathing, to the voice that does something before you’ve authorized it. But we have barely touched the sense that Western religious art, architecture, and theology have treated as the most spiritual of all: sight. The great cathedrals are machines for producing particular qualities of light. The mosque lamp is engineered to diffuse illumination in a specific way. Enlightenment — in every tradition that uses the word — is visual. The beatific vision. The light of guidance. Nur Muhammad, the light of the Prophet that precedes creation. We see the sacred. Or we say we do.
But why? Why should sight be the sense that reaches God when smell enters the brain more directly, bypassing the cognitive apparatus entirely? When touch is the most intimate sense, the one that requires actual proximity, actual contact? When the body praying is oriented not toward a visual image but toward a direction — the qibla — which you cannot see at all?
Someone decided that sight was the spiritual sense. That decision has a history. And the history is not obvious.
Before our next session: find one example — from any tradition, any context, religious or not — where sight is treated as the sense that accesses truth. Then find one example where another sense does that work instead. Bring both, and bring one sentence about what is at stake in the difference.
If the session raised questions you want to follow further, two short texts are worth reading alongside it. Clifford Geertz’s definition of religion — the passage that begins “a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations” — is in “Religion as a Cultural System” (1966), widely available, about 40 pages. Read it specifically asking: where is the body? What does this definition assume about the relationship between symbol and sensation? Asad’s critique in the first chapter of Genealogies of Religion will make more sense once you have Geertz’s own words in hand rather than Asad’s paraphrase of them.
On emotives: William Reddy’s concept is developed in The Navigation of Feeling (2001), but the clearest short version is in his essay “Against Constructionism: The Historical Ethnography of Emotions” (1997) in Current Anthropology, freely available online. The key passage is where he distinguishes constative speech acts from emotives — the moment he shows that saying “I am angry” is not a description but an act that participates in producing or modifying the state it names. Read it asking: if religious speech acts function as emotives, what does that mean for the niyya question? Does the intention precede the speech, or does the speech produce the intention?
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OpenEdition schlägt Ihnen vor, diesen Beitrag wie folgt zu zitieren:
Victoria Mummelthei (22. Mai 2026). the body that doesn’t ask permission. Keine Disziplin – No Discipline. Abgerufen am 13. Juni 2026 von https://doi.org/10.58079/169dh

