Female Visions: The Religious Visual Culture of Contemporary Female Islamic Mysticism

Dear Colleagues,

Mystical Islam and Sufism, traditions in constant dialogue with society and its political, cultural, and economic dynamics, have the capacity to disrupt gender norms and established hierarchies—theological and political—by giving women a public voice that extends across geographic regions. Even though the mystical or Sufi interpretation and practice of Islam are an arena that provides scope for female participation and leadership, and one in which women mystics have left a powerful legacy, it is male spiritual teachers who have traditionally given voice to women. Little is known about the often-concealed world of place and role of women, and their access to and participation in ‘lived’ Sufi experience, presenting a critical lacuna that this Special Issue addresses.

In so doing, it seeks to recover some of the spiritual heritage of Sufi women as witnesses to emerging visions of female ritual practices and teachings. The underlying goal is a pioneering exploration of visual culture as a key site for examining the trajectories of religion in contemporary female mysticism from a comparative and cross-cultural perspective. Through a gender-sensitive reading of Sufi visual culture, the contributions focus on the role of gender imagery and symbolism, especially the feminine element, and its interrelation with gender differentiation and construction.

In this endeavor, it is essential to develop a more comprehensive understanding of the visual cultures with which we engage in order to present innovative insights into the visual culture of female Islamic mysticism. Mysticism, after all, is often rooted in personal experience: an inner experience that manifests itself outwardly. Textually or visually recording mystical experiences poses distinct challenges. In a Sufi context, “vision” encompasses both the physical perception of “reality” through the eye and the apprehension of immaterial realities or future events through the “mind’s eye.” These semantic fields converge in the concept of “vision”—one is sensory, involving the actual faculty of seeing and engaging with images; the other refers to imaginations, dreams, or visualizations, that is, visualizing practices perceived, emically speaking, by the heart as the organ of spiritual vision. This Special Issue addresses this “inward turn,” evident in the realm of sensation, involving all senses—touch, hearing, smell, and taste—and also reflected in the multisensory nature of sacred artifacts, architecture, and the decoration of sacred spaces. Scholars from different disciplines and research fields such as (art) history, religious/Islamic studies, sociology, anthropology, literature, theology, and philosophy are invited to approach the topic from their own specialism or from an interdisciplinary perspective.

Dr. Sara Kuehn
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Religions is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1800 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.