"Different Aesthetics" – A New Approach to Sufi Texts?

The topic of the MIAS-Warburg Symposium was inspired by an interdisciplinary

research project on Premodern Aesthetics spearheaded by the University of

Tuebingen. It approaches aesthetic acts and artifacts not as objects sufficient unto

themselves and hence to be viewed with 'disinterested pleasure' (Kant), but as

agents endowed with an aesthetic energy in which their true purpose resides, and

which explains the dynamic impact they can have on socio-cultural and

psychological processes. The aesthetic acts and artifacts studied by the project also

include Christian mystical texts whose aesthetic energy aims to engender in the

recipient a state of consciousness akin to the beatific vision. A collection of papers

produced by contributors to the Tuebingen project has just appeared in English

translation (Different Aesthetics: Principles, Questions, Perspectives, edited by A.

Gerock-Reiter et al., De Gruyter, 2025). The presentation will introduce the scope of

the project, discuss recent examples of its application to Christian and Muslim texts,

and conclude with remarks on its relevance for the study of the Akbarian tradition.

Stefan Sperl graduated from Oxford (Arabic) and SOAS (PhD 1977), and spent ten

years working for UNHCR in Egypt, Sudan and Geneva. He joined SOAS in 1988

and retired in 2018 as Emeritus Professor of Arabic and Middle Eastern Studies. His

publications include articles on Arabic, Islamic and Refugee Studies, as well as

Mannerism in Arabic Poetry: A Structural Analysis of Selected Texts (1989), Qasida

Poetry in Islamic Africa and Asia (with C. Shackle, 1996) and The Cosmic Script:

Sacred Geometry and the Science of Arabic Penmanship (with A. Moustafa, 2014)

which won the Iran Book of the Year Award (2016). His recent publications are 'The

Qur’an and Arabic Poetry' (The Oxford Handbook of Qur’anic Studies, 2020), the

volume Faces of the Infinite, Neoplatonism and Poetry at the Confluence of Africa,

Asia and Europe with the accompanying website lyrics-of-ascent.net (with Y. Dedes,

2022), and 'Islamic Spirituality and the Visual Arts' (The Wiley Blackwell Companion

to Islamic Spirituality, 2023). He continues to be actively engaged in research and

since 2023 has been teaching Arabic literature courses at the University of

Cambridge.

Recorded by Warburg Institute