The Emotions of Conversion and Kinship in the Qur'an and the Sīra of Ibn Isḥāq

Abstract

This article traces the archetypical development of emotion from individual feeling to collective action by focusing on conversion and kinship as recorded in the Qur'an and the oldest extant biography of the Prophet, the Sīra of Ibn Isḥāq. The article's first part describes an individual's experience of emotions through the conversion story of ʿUmar ibn al-Khaṭṭāb. Conversion can result in tension with kin networks, and the second part shows how the Qur'anic discourse on kinship evolves through time. The third part examines the social impact of conversion, as told through two narratives in the Sīra. Through these examples, this article proposes a method of reading which gives insight into the function and import of emotions and emotiveness in these texts. I suggest attending not only to emotion words, whether on their own or as an expression of social hierarchies, but also to emotional tension, and to the transformation of emotional states. Tension and transformation can indicate a text's emotiveness. Stories themselves can become objects of emotive attachment for a community, and the emotiveness of a story might be why it sticks in the memory and becomes emblematic, or how it becomes convincing. Such stories can bind people together with a shared vision of the nature of their community, its mores, and its history. Emotion is not always simply an expression of individual feeling. Emotive rhetoric can convince people to do something that they do not wish to do, such as fighting jihad, and emotive stories can create an idealized image of a community. Emotion in these texts can thus be considered in three overlapping spheres: as an expression of a religious experience, as an expression of a social power dynamic, and as a means of expressing and constructing community identity.