Rosewater, Nightingale, and Gunpowder: Toward a Sensory History of the Islamic World, c. 1500–2000
By Suzanne Compagnon, Gianni Sievers, and Yusuf Ünal
This blog entry provides a brief overview of the main questions and themes addressed at three conferences co-organized by the authors between 2024 and 2025 in their capacity as postdoctoral researchers on the SENSIS (“The Senses of Islam”) research project at Utrecht University. Led by Christian Lange, the project aims to produce a cultural history of the senses in the Islamic world, from the seventh century through the twentieth. It challenges common assumptions about Islam and Islamicate cultures, including the idea of a “great divide” between European and Islamic sensory cultures. Phase 1 of this project, “The Senses of Islam”, was carried out between 2017 and 2022, focusing primarily on the early centuries of Islamic history. Phase 2, “Rosewater, Nightingale, and Gunpowder” (2023–2028), has concentrated on the sensory history of the three early modern “gunpowder empires” of the Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals, as well as on transformations in the colonial and postcolonial eras.[1]
The first conference, curated by Gianni Sievers, brought together a multidisciplinary group of scholars specializing in Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal history to explore the senses in the early modern Islamic world. Building on a still largely Eurocentric body of work, it examined how Muslims in diverse contexts experienced, conceptualized, and interpreted sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch. In doing so, the conference highlighted the complexity and plurality of early modern Islamicate sensory worlds and traced sensory concepts, practices, and regulations across time and space. Central to the discussions was the question of whether a distinct Muslim sensorium exists, and which methods, interpretive frameworks, and archival challenges such an inquiry entail.[2]
The term “sensorium” played a pivotal role in the humanities’ “sensory turn,”[3] as David Howes (Concordia University) has emphasized. In early modern Europe, it referred not only to the seat of sensation in the brain but also to the full scope of perception. Media theorist Walter J. Ong used the term to denote “the entire sensory apparatus as an operational complex,” arguing that cultural differences both shape and are shaped by the sensorium.[4] Following Howes, the conference treated perception as socially constructed, foregrounding cultural practices over physiology and experimental psychology. It conceptualized the sensorium as a dynamic whole and approached the senses as relational and interconnected.[5] We welcomed scholars of sensory history and related fields, particularly those studying the history of emotions. Along these lines, Day 1 featured a keynote by Nil Tekgül (Bilkent University), who addressed the challenges and rewards of studying Ottoman history through a combined focus on the body, the senses, and emotions.
The conference opened with a panel on Islamic legal history, which demonstrated how the senses shape law and social life. Ari Schriber (Utrecht University) examined “widely circulated hearsay” (samāʿ fāshī) in Maghribi Sharia courts—religious tribunals that apply Islamic law to specific matters—highlighting how jurists assessed testimony based on what witnesses saw or heard. Interested in the role of sound in everyday life and intercommunal relations, Ali Atabey (UT San Antonio) analyzed a seventeenth-century Istanbul court case in which a preacher sued a non-Muslim neighbor over tavern noise disrupting Quranic recitation, while Hasan Baran Firat (Koç University) explored the wooden semantron (nāqūs) in Ottoman religious disputes, revealing how sound, faith, and state regulation intersected.
Material and visual culture featured prominently in several papers. Mandana Barkeshli(UCSI University) analyzed color as a medium for expressing ideas and emotions in Iranian bookmaking, drawing on artisans’ treatises from the Timurid to the Qajar periods. Mrinalini Sil (Rijksmuseum Amsterdam) examined eighteenth-century muraqqaʿ albums as sites of artistic and sensory knowledge, aesthetic taste, and elite connoisseurship in late Mughal India, tracing their transformation into objects of European collections under British colonial expansion. Amrita Chattopadhyay (ZMO Berlin) studied Mughal illuminants to understand night-time visual experience in early modern South Asia, and Beyza Uzun Kutlay (Sadberk Hanım Museum Istanbul) explored Ottoman palace and mosque smellscapes, showing how incense used in public ceremonies reinforced the sultan’s image as a divine and wealthy ruler.
Theories of the senses were explored through Sufi and philosophical perspectives. Christian Lange examined medieval and early modern Ottoman Sufi discourses on olfaction in Ismail Haqqi Bursavi’s trilingual Quran commentary, highlighting tensions between the universal accessibility of sensory perception and more restricted mystical practices.[6] Sümeyye Parildar (Istanbul University) reflected on Iranian philosopher Mulla Sadra’s theory of perception in relation to the unity of the soul and processes of self-development. Rao Mohsin Ali Noor (Johns Hopkins University) showed how Hakani Mehmed Bey used sensory-rich ekphrasis in a Turkish talismanic poem, guiding readers toward an experience of divine presence in corporeal matter.
On Day 2, attention turned to Persianate South Asia, where Mughal and Deccani courtly cultures provided fertile ground for sensory history. Shounak Ghosh (Vanderbilt University) demonstrated how Mughal envoys to the Deccan orchestrated fragrances, foods, and audio-visual spectacles to influence emotions and enable diplomatic sociability (ṣuḥbat). Karen Ruffle (University of Toronto) examined how the five senses shaped the propagation of Shi‘ism by the Qutb Shahi sultans in seventeenth-century Hyderabad, particularly through Muharram rituals. Anubhuti Maurya (Shiv Nadar University) explored how Mughal courtly texts portrayed Kashmir as a multisensory, paradise-like space, and Neha Vermani (Durham University) challenged colonial stereotypes of Oriental decadence, showing how Mughal elites curated household spaces to cultivate sensory pleasures and display refinement.
Musical connoisseurship and Sufi devotional practices were also central to the discussions. Scott Kugle (Emory University) examined theological prioritization of hearing over seeing in a hagiography of Maulana Fakhr al-Din, a Chishti Sufi scholar in eighteenth-century Delhi. Usman Hamid (Northwestern University) analyzed the development of devotional aesthetics in Mughal Delhi, particularly the Prophet Muhammad’s footprint relic at the Dargah Qadam Sharif. Ines Weinrich (University of Münster) explored the Arabic concept of ṭarab, an emotional response to sensory experience, tracing its historical and semantic evolution. Rachel Colwell (West Chester University) examined ma’lūf, Tunisian Arab-Andalusī music, highlighting its multisensory reception in Ottoman court and café culture, as well as its role in shaping shared Islamic and Jewish memory.
David Howes closed the conference with a keynote on the “Sensorial Revolution in Islamic Studies,” emphasizing the transformative potential of sensory history for the field. Echoing propositions from his “Manifesto for Sensory Studies,” he stressed the pervasiveness of the senses, noting that “they mediate the relationship between idea and object, mind and body, self and society, culture and environment.” Addressing the multiplicity of sensory histories, he observed that “every society and historical period elaborates its own ways of understanding and using the senses” and that “no one sensory model will fit them all.”[7] The keynote thus underscored the importance of engaging with the sensorium in the study of Islam and the history of the Islamic world.
II. Sensescapes of War and Ritual in the Early Modern Islamic World (February 13–14, 2025)
For our second conference, put together by Yusuf Ünal, we invited scholars from history, art history, literature, and religious studies to examine how warfare and ritual shaped sensory experience across the early modern Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal empires. Over two days, presenters explored how different kinds of sensations—both real and imagined—were mobilized to assert political authority, express confessional identities, and mediate encounters with violence, sanctity, and imperial power.
Several papers emphasized the centrality of embodied practices in experiences of war, revealing how violent conflicts generated distinct sensescapes that influenced emotional responses and confessional boundaries. Abdullah Rıdvan Gökbel (University of Tübingen) discussed Ottoman archery treatises that framed shooting as a devotional discipline, blending bodily technique with metaphysical aspiration. Mustafa Sarı (Istanbul University) demonstrated how Ottoman poets rendered the sounds of cannon fire, the clash of swords, and the broader spectacle of battle into a sensory rhetoric that reinforced sectarian identity.
Kahraman Şakul (Istanbul Medeniyet University) examined seventeenth-century Ottoman depictions of warfare in Eastern Europe, highlighting battlefield cacophonies of sights, sounds, and odors. Practices such as communal eating, drinking, or celebration distinguished factions within the army and signaled opposition to unbelievers. Other sources mocked enemy music, labeling the sounds of Habsburg church organs “devilish,” while churches were repurposed as mosques. Yusuf Ünal analyzed seventeenth-century Ottoman-Safavid conflicts around Baghdad, showing how sonic, olfactory, and visual registers—from “flame-breathing” cannons to shrine fragrances and colorful banners—mobilized emotions, reinforced communal identities, and sacralized imperial warfare. Complementing these studies, Hussein Keshani (UBC) explored Safavid manuscript illustrations that aestheticized violence, while Colin Mitchell (Dalhousie University) examined early Safavid war narratives in which the severed bodies of shaykhs became sites of veneration, trauma, and revenge.
Mark M. Smith (USC) broadened the discussion in his keynote on the “martial senses,” drawing on research on the U.S. Civil War to argue that wartime sensory experiences often persist, or “linger,” within collective memory. These lingering impressions, he suggested, continue to shape political imagination long after the fighting ends. His call for a more integrated, multisensory approach to studies of armed conflict and violence resonated well with the discussions throughout the conference.
Day two turned to ritual, urban life, and the sacred. Papers on Ottoman Istanbul by Damla Gürkan Anar (independent), Philip Hahn (Saarland University) and Denise Klein (Leibniz Institute of European History), as well as Işın Taylan (Rijksmuseum) highlighted the value of examining the city as a rich multisensory space. Gürkan Anar analyzed seventeenth-century royal mevlid ceremonies at the Sultan Ahmad Mosque, where architecture, Quranic recitation, incense, lighting, banquet, and carpet textures created an immersive aura of sanctity. Hahn and Klein examined Istanbul’s culinary sensescape and its role in producing imperial identity through hybridized food, migration, and taste. Taylan studied eighteenth-century paintings of Janissary dish-plundering ceremonies, demonstrating how sensory chaos transformed palace courtyards into theatrical stages of diplomacy.
Another panel explored sacred bodies, rituals, and devotional spaces. Zeynep Oktay (Boğaziçi University) demonstrated how early sixteenth-century Sufi hagiographies of Hacı Bektaş framed sainthood as an embodied, sensory experience. Reza Daftarian (University of London) examined the Qajar-era mirror work at the Twelver Shi‘i shrine of Shah Cheragh, showing how light and reflection mediated both devotional presence and political authority.
The final panel focused on Mughal- and colonial-era South Asia. Bronwen Gulkis (University of St Andrews) analyzed ceremonial scenes in the seventeenth-century Windsor Padshahnama, showing how they visualized temporality, affective hierarchies, and proximity to Mughal imperial power. Gianni Sievers used eighteenth- and nineteenth-century shahr āshob poetry to reconstruct Delhi’s auditory past across two centuries of upheaval, demonstrating how sonic signifiers expressed mourning, memory, and shifting cultural identities.
The conference concluded with a keynote by Linda Pearse (Mount Allison University) on sound, ritual, and collective memory during the Thirteen Years’ War between the Habsburgs and Ottomans. She illustrated how processions, hymns, bells, and cannon fire mediated religious identity and political mobilization.
A recurring theme across panels was that war and ritual produced heightened sensory experiences, generating embodied knowledge that shaped communities long after events themselves. The conference underscored how sensory history not only enriches our understanding of early modern Islamicate societies but also offers tools for analyzing the intersections of bodies, emotions, and material worlds in moments of conflict, devotion, and imperial display.[8]
III. Sensing the Materiality of the Early Modern Islamic World (May 22–23, 2025)
The third and (thus far) final conference of the project, planned by Suzanne Compagnon, explored the role of material culture and architecture in shaping sensory and affective experience in the early modern Islamic world. Covering various case studies from Deccani, Mughal, Javanese, Ottoman, and Safavid contexts, papers explored topics ranging from the riverine architecture of Isfahan to the role of mural paintings in experiences of samāʿ (mystical audition, lit. listening) in Mevlevi Sufi shrines, as well as colored paper as a mediator of sensory engagement in Mughal albums.[9]
Several speakers highlighted the primacy accorded to vision in contemporary scholars’ perception of material culture, arguing that this emphasis has created unintentional “blind spots” in much academic work. For instance, Giorgia M. Maffioli-Brigatti (University of Cambridge) noted the lack of interest in the olfactory dimensions of the paintings in the Haft Awrang (“Seven Thrones”) by the fifteenth-century Persian poet Jami, despite the prevalence of imagery relating to smell. This gap in existing approaches was further illustrated by Sukaina Husain (University of Edinburgh) in her discussion of the Persian calligrapher Simi Nishapuri’s 1433 treatise on the epistolary arts, emphasizing the essential role of scent in the etiquette of letter exchange. In a similar vein, Sanja Savić (Columbia University) analyzed how talismanic shirts as material objects are frequently reduced to graphic surfaces in museum displays and scholarly studies.
Concurrently to these efforts to rebalance scholars’ perception of material culture, other speakers delved into the “crossmodal” stimulations offered by architecture and portable objects, reflecting on the entanglement of vision, touch, and sound.[10]
A number of papers explored how material culture was used to shape Muslims’ experience of the sacred. Focusing on the Prophet Muhammad’s mosque and tomb respectively, Yahya Nurgat (Sabancı University) and Simon O’Meara (SOAS) illustrated the centrality of material culture in devotional practice, showing how it created an immersive sensescape that mediated Islamic ritual and worship. Shifting to processes of sacralization and indigenization of “foreign” objects, Nur’Ain Taha (Utrecht University) analyzed the role of sensory practices in calibrating the sacred aura of the royal pusaka (heirloom) of the Keraton of Yogyakarta (Royal Palace of Yogyakarta) in Indonesia. The use of material culture to modulate somatic and affective participation in rituals was also addressed by Karen Ruffle (University of Toronto), discussing the orchestration of wonder through the display of monumental paintings and mobile architecture during milad rituals (celebrations for the Prophet Muhammad’s birthday) in seventeenth-century Hyderabad. Shayan Rajani (Michigan State University) explored how architecture structures human interactions, analyzing how limitations on male sensory access to Mughal royal women—exemplified by the jali (latticed screen)—functioned as a vector of these women’s power.
In her keynote, “Matters of Sensation: The Making of Religious Experience,” Birgit Meyer (Utrecht University) synthesized contributions of the “material turn” to religious studies and discussed how her concepts of “sensational forms” and “aesthetic formations” may help elucidate the role of the sensorium in the study of religion.[11] A discussion ensued, which once again highlighted the value of combining various scholarly perspectives to understand and conceptualize the complex interactions between the body, materiality, and society.
The conference concluded with a panel discussion that further expanded the conversation to museum contexts, with Ashley Dimmig (University of Wisconsin-Whitewater) and Stefan Weber (Museum of Islamic Art, Berlin) reflecting on the role of the sensorium in the context of European and North American museums. The conversation explored the conceptual and practical challenges of integrating sensory histories and experiences into the curation of art and material culture from the Islamic world. It also considered how sensory studies might inform exhibition design to foster empathy across time, place, and cultural context. The panel discussion also addressed how the insights offered by sensory history and sensory studies can contribute to deconstructing the colonial legacy of museums. This part of the program brought together the themes discussed over the two days of the conference and highlighted their contemporary relevance.
Conclusion
While no blog post can fully capture the richness of the many papers presented across the three conferences, we hope that this overview conveys the scope of recent, path-breaking research in sensory history as it relates to the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal empires. As organizers of the events and members of the SENSIS research project, we also hope that the work presented here will encourage further engagement with the methods of sensory history. The networks and collaborations fostered by the project have already opened new avenues of research and facilitated international scholarly exchanges (including sensory history panels at DOT, ECSAS, and MESA), and will continue to be reflected in forthcoming publications—showing just how much potential there is for this field to expand and evolve in exciting new directions.
[1] Funded by a European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator Grant, phase 1 of the project resulted in a number of publications, including a journal special issue in The Senses and Society 17:1 (2022), ed. C. Lange; Islamic Sensory History, Volume 2: 600–1500 (Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2024), ed. C. Lange and A. Bursi; and others. Phase 2 is funded by a Vici Grant from the Dutch Research Council (NWO) and has led to publications such as the forthcoming Islamic Sensory History, Volume 3: 1500–2000 (Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2026), ed. C. Lange, A. Bursi, S. Compagnon, G. Sievers, and Y. Ünal. For a complete list of publications, see here.
[2] See also C. Lange, “Introduction: The Sensory History of the Islamic World,” The Senses and Society, 17:1 (2022): 1–7.
[3] David Howes also speaks of a “sensory revolution” in this context. See D. Howes, The Sensory Studies Manifesto: Tracking the Sensorial Revolution in the Arts and Human Sciences (Toronto, 2022), 10.
[4] W. J. Ong, “The Shifting Sensorium,” in The Varieties of Sensory Experience, D. Howes, ed. (Toronto, 1991), 28.
[5] D. Howes, Sensorium: Contextualizing the Senses and Cognition in History and Across Cultures (Cambridge, 2024), 8–10.
[6] See also C. Lange, “Thinking Through Smell: Theories of Olfaction in Early modern Ottoman and Islamic Culture,” Der Islam 102.1 (2025): 168–210.
[7] Howes, The Sensory Studies Manifesto, 13. For more on the concept of the “sensory model,” see C. Classen, “Foundations for an Anthropology of the Senses,” International Social Science Journal 49. 153 (1997): 401–12.
[8] See also M. M. Smith, The Smell of Battle, the Taste of Siege: A Sensory History of the Civil War (New York, 2015); S. M. Promey, Sensational Religion: Sensory Cultures in Material Practice (New Haven, 2014); M. Bull and J. P. Mitchell, eds., Ritual, Performance and the Senses (London, 2015); K. Şahin, “Staging an Empire: An Ottoman Circumcision Ceremony as Cultural Performance,” The American Historical Review 123:2 (2018): 463-492; B. Rahimi, Theater State and the Formation of Early Modern Public Sphere in Iran: Studies on Safavid Muharram Rituals, 1590-1641 CE (Leiden, 2011).
[9] A special issue showcasing a selection of the conference papers is now in preparation and is expected to be published in 2026.
[10] Recent research in experimental psychology and cognitive neuroscience conceptualizes perception as the interaction of various sensory modalities rather than as isolated “senses”. Hence the term “crossmodal” to describe relations between these modalities. See Howes, Sensorium, 10, 30–31.
[11] For these concepts, see Birgit Meyer, “Introduction: From Imagined Communities to Aesthetic Formations: Religious Mediations, Sensational Forms, and Styles of Binding,” in Aesthetic Formations: Media, Religion, and the Senses, ed. B. Meyer (New York, 2009), 1–28.
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