VISIONIS

VISIONIS

VISIONIS is a five-year research project running from October 2021 to September 2026 and supported by a Starting Grant of the European Research Council.

The project sets out to write a cultural history of vision in Early Islam. It addresses what is one of the most understudied but highly controversially discussed topics; Muslim attitudes towards visuality in the first centuries of Islam.

Visuality as a comprehensive term denotes the interplay of discourses, practices and artefacts connected to vision, sight and seeing. How people conceptualize the sense of sight? How do they experience and understand sight and vision? How do they use and produce visual images or imageries?

Muslim approaches to visual culture and visibility differ according to historical, geographical, social and intellectual contexts. Nevertheless, the wide-spreading idea of Islam as being an antipode to other visual cultural traditions such as the European goes widely uncontested.

VISIONIS wishes to offer the possibility of reviewing perceptions of Islam in general and of the visual culture of Early Islam in particular. It studies fundamental but neglected aspects of the Qur’an and Early Islamic writings, and develops a holistic perspective on the use and meaning of the visual practices of seeing and concepts of the sense of sight in Early Islamic textual and material culture.