Ninth International Conference on Religion & Spirituality in Society

Abstract

The issue of the determination of the proper loci of many practices that can be hyper-semiotized beyond the “properly religious” as such, like hijab, is now a debate that has crossed over into non-Muslim majority countries of Europe and North America. This is of course neither a purely Islamic phenomenon, nor merely restricted to hijab. It is an essential characteristic of all phenomena in so far as they can be hypersemiotized, that is take on multiple and even contradictory, and hence contested, significations. This paper aims to show that this kind of hyper-semiotization is not new, by showing a parallel debate about the dispositive of wine-drinking in 14th century Iran and Iraq. It explores the intersection of politics and courtly culture with Sufi poetry of the time to demonstrate this phenomenon. The dominant interpretation of Sufi poetry maintains that the function of such tropes as wine, the tavern, and the cup-bearer boy (shähid), is entirely intra-religious; that is, they are deployed as an elements of a high-intensity source domain to transfer an excess of jouissance to the target domain of religious experience. Without passing judgment on the long tradition of Sufi poetry, the paper argues that the dispositive of wine-drinking stood as a politico-ethical symbol in that age’s struggle over politically-relevant cultural hegemony.