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Bodies Before Doctrine: Reading Religion Through the Senses

Based on: Simon Stjernholm, Sensing Islam: Engaging and Contesting the Senses in Muslim Religiosity

When we study religion, we usually begin with texts: scriptures, theological treatises, legal opinions. We ask what people believe. But what if belief is secondary? What if the primary experience of religion happens in the body—in the voice that recites, the ear that listens, the skin that touches the grave of a saint?

This book takes that question seriously. Stjernholm works from ethnographic fieldwork in Cyprus, Sweden, and England, alongside analysis of Danish and Swedish Muslim podcasts and devotional recordings. He studies what happens when Muslims approach God through du’a (intercessory prayer) and dhikr (remembrance of God). He attends to how the Prophet Muhammad becomes present through his bodily traces—his saliva, his sweat—in mawlid poetry and ritual. He traces the contested sensory practices around the graves of Sufi saints.

The result is a book that disrupts common assumptions about Islam—assumptions that often come from treating religion as primarily a matter of belief rather than practice, of mind rather than body, of doctrine rather than sensation. But it also raises questions that go far beyond Islamic studies: What does it mean to know something through the body? How does listening create intimacy across distance? What happens when the senses become sites of theological dispute?

For a seminar focused on the Middle East and questions of epistemology, this book offers something essential: an account of knowledge-making that refuses to separate thought from sensation, tradition from innovation, the contemporary from the historical. Stjernholm shows how debates among Western Muslims about shrine visitation or proper devotional practice are not deviations from “authentic” Islam but ongoing negotiations within a living tradition.

We’ll read the book as an invitation to think about what we miss when we approach religion—or any cultural practice—as primarily textual. About whose sensory experiences count as knowledge. About what it might mean to take the body seriously as a site of encounter with the sacred.


Week 1 (April 21, Tue 10-12)

Week 2 (April 28, Tue 10-12): Read the book! (no session on campus)

Week 3 (May 5, Tue 10-12): Read the book and see the task! (no session on campus)

Week 4 (May 12, Tue 10-12): What does naming do to a practice?

Week 5 (May 19, Tue 10-12): What does your body know that you don’t?

Week 6 (May 26, Tue 10-12): Why is sight the most spiritual sense — and who decided?

Week 7 (June 2, Tue 10-12): Can holiness be transmitted by touch?

Week 8 (June 9, Tue 10-12): What does a religious voice do to a body that doesn’t believe?

Week 9 (June 16, Tue 10-12): Why are the holiest things also the most disgusting?

Week 10 (June 23, Tue 10-12): When a community bans a sense, what are they really afraid of?

Week 11 (June 30, Tue 10-12): Can you lose a sense of the sacred — and if so, where does it go?

Week 12 (July 7, Tue 10-12): last session: Is the researcher’s body evidence or contamination?

Week 13 (July 14, Tue 10-12): oral examinations


Examinations

If you take this course in a module that requires a written assignment as examination, the first deadline will be July 31, the second deadline will be Aug 14. Propose a topic until June 15.

If you take this course in a module that requires an oral examination, the format will be a scholarly discussion (means I will not strictly “test” your knowledge) based on one out of three topics/problems/questions that you can choose. It will be 20 minutes and an assessor will be present.

If you take this course in a module that requires a presentations, please suggest a topic and date (from the course schedule) until May 26; the format will be a presentation of ca. 10 minutes with scholarly discussion. An assessor will be present.

If you study the course in a module that requires another examination, please let me know.