Project B8 focuses on the narrative aesthetics of premodern Islamic legal narratives, with special attention given to the Qur’an and to Islamic narratives (qiṣaṣ, Sg. qiṣṣa) on determining justice in historical, exegetical and philological texts of the seventh to the tenth century CE.
Communicating law through formal features and through narratives constitutes the figure of aesthetic reflection at the centre of this project. We analyse how the aesthetics of Islamic legal communication is conveyed both through the narrated practice of determining justice (heterological dimension) and through the practice of narrating about determining justice (autological dimension). The central question we ask is which formal, structural and performative dimensions constitute the narrative aesthetics of legal communication.
It is the goal of the project to deepen our understanding of the linguistic representations and the communication of legal norms, and thereby of the function of these norms in premodern Islamic societies in the broader context of late antique practices and ideas. To this end, we will identify legal narratives in premodern Islamic literatures, especially in the Qur’an and among the classical narrators (e.g. Wahb ibn Munabbih, Kaʿb al-Aḥbār), and we will analyse their compositional modes. The narrative materials will then be compared to Jewish and Christian narrative traditions in order to foreground their cross-cultural entanglements.
