Rhetoric, Emotion, and the Religious Education of "The Multitude”

Join Associate Professor Nancy Khalek Tolan to discuss her paper at 4:10pm on Thursday, November 09 in Knox Hall, 207.

This is a private event: Please email Dalia Atallah (da2999@columbia.edu) to register and receive the paper in advance of the workshop.

Subscribe to the Workshops & Colloquiums Email List.

In this talk, the speaker delves into how Aristotle's Rhetoric was received in the Arabic and Islamic philosophical tradition. The central focus is on "assent," a term denoting a deep conviction related to matters of belief that's engendered in an audience through rhetorical persuasion and appeals to emotion. The discussion then turns to how Arabic philosophers saw emotional persuasion as essential for instilling religious belief and moral values in everyday believers who may struggle with complex philosophy, law, or theology.

Furthermore, the speaker argues that later medieval Muslim preachers and hadith scholars, influenced by thinkers like Al-Farābī, Avicenna, and al-Ghazali, developed a discourse emphasizing the emotional nature of rhetoric as a powerful tool for religious education. They saw it as a means to harmonize Qur'ānic and ḥadīth-based concepts of using emotion for pious education with the philosophical and theological discourse of their time. This talk explores the convergence of these ideas, shedding light on the intersection of philosophy, religion, and emotion in the medieval Islamic context.