Qurʾanic Anosmia

Abstract

This chapter examines the Qurʾan’s attitude towards smell. Against the backdrop of the richly scented setting of pagan Arabia, the chapter argues, the Qurʾan is strikingly disinterested in olfaction. There are only two places in the Qurʾan where olfaction occurs: Jacob smelling the shirt of his beloved Joseph (12:94) and the blessed in paradise enjoying the scent of musk-topped wine, camphor, and fragrant herbs (5:12, 56:89, 76:5, 83:26). However, as this chapter argues, both instances have a transhistorical gist, diverting attention from the here and now by cutting through time in two directions: Joseph “smells back,” recalling an ideal past and aromatically enacting his beloved son’s presence; the paradise passages “smell forward,” gesturing towards eschatological bliss in the perfumed garden of paradise. Neither of these two instances of olfaction, therefore, can cast doubt on the fundamentally anosmic character of the Qurʾan. Rather than suggesting, as others have done, that the importance of smell is uninterrupted from Zoroastrian to Late Antique Christian literature and all the way to the Qurʾan, this chapter suggests that the Qurʾan attempts—albeit unsuccessfully, as many hadiths of the formative period of Islam demonstrate—to disrupt smell and introduce a new olfactory regime.