Feeling Like Lovers: Affect in Medieval Sufism - Paperback

by Matthew Thomas Miller (Author)

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.

Sufism, for many of its medieval followers, was the "religion of love." God was the beloved and the Sufis, his lovers. To become a Sufi meant to become a lover. In this book, Matthew Thomas Miller pursues the radical analytical implication of this amatory metaphysics: If God and his divine secrets can only truly be known in their fullest through the experience of love, then we must analyze how it feels to be a Sufi on the Path of Love. Leveraging insights from the history of emotions and affect theory, this study examines key Sufi ritual practices and poetics to show the central role that affect plays in the process of constructing Sufi subjectivity and knowledge production. It explores the felt dimension of medieval Sufism and why feeling--especially, like a lover--was so important for coming to truly know God and his divine secrets.

Back Jacket

Feeling like Lovers opens up a new dimension in the study of Persian mystical poetry, through its highly original analysis of affect and rhetoric.--Carl W. Ernst, William R. Kenan, Jr., Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies Emeritus, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

"Matthew Thomas Miller's Feeling Like Lovers is heady, joyous, playful, and rich. Making a powerful argument for moving on from metaphysics in studies of Sufism, it insists on taking feeling seriously--while still weaving in attention to the affective power of words and ideas. This book is a banquet of medieval poetry, history, philosophy, and literary theory."--Donovan Schaefer, Associate Professor of Religious Studies, University of Pennsylvania

Author Biography

Matthew Thomas Miller is Assistant Professor of Persian Literature and Digital Humanities at Roshan Institute for Persian Studies at the University of Maryland and affiliate faculty at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities and the Religious Studies and Comparative Literature programs.