Tracing the Contours of the Unseen: Sufi Poetry, Music, and Mystical States asks a deceptively simple question: how does Sufi poetry work? More specifically, how can words, images, music, and performance evoke experiences directed towards a divine reality that, by definition, exceeds description? The book explores this paradox at the heart of Sufi poetic practice, showing how poetry rooted in familiar objects, emotions, and human experiences can, within the religious setting of samāʿ, become a means of reaching towards the unseen.Bringing Sufi theories of listening into conversation with cognitive poetics, Mikko Autere examines the sensory and emotional force of poetry in performance and the interpretive frameworks through which such responses acquire mystical significance. His study draws on literary sources produced by Chishti Sufis from the Sultanate and late-Mughal periods as well as ethnographic observations, moving between historical texts and living practices of performance and listening.Beginning from the encounter with a poem in performance, the book follows the different elements that shape its reception: Sufi conceptions of samāʿ, debates concerning music and Islamic law, multilingual poetic repertoires, the conventions of the ghazal, the communities of poets and listeners, qawwali musicians, the organization and etiquette of the musical assembly, and the transformation of poetic language through performance. Together, these perspectives illuminate how mystical experience is not produced by poetry or music alone, but emerges through the interaction of text, sound, convention, community, religious knowledge, and disciplined ways of listening.At once a study of Sufi poetry, musical performance, and religious experience, Tracing the Contours of the Unseen develops a broader theory of listening: one that brings premodern Sufi reflection into dialogue with contemporary approaches to poetic cognition while remaining attentive to what happens when a poem is actually heard, interpreted, and experienced.
Jay L. Garfield
Jay L. Garfield is Doris Silbert Professor Emeritus in the Humanities and Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Smith College, Visiting Professor of Buddhist Philosophy at Harvard Divinity School, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Melbourne, and Adjunct Professor of Philosophy at the Central Institute of Higher Tibetan Studies, Sarnath. His research spans Buddhist philosophy, Indian philosophy, philosophy of mind, ethics, epistemology, logic, and cross-cultural philosophy, with particular emphasis on Indo-Tibetan Madhyamaka, Yogācāra, and modern Indian philosophy. He is the author of Losing Ourselves: Learning to Live without a Self; Buddhist Ethics: A Philosophical Exploration; Engaging Buddhism: Why It Matters to Philosophy; and The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way: Nāgārjuna’s Mūlamadhyamakakārikā; and has authored or edited more than thirty books.
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