Musk in Islam: Olfactory Sensuality as Spirituality DANIAL TAJWER
The unmistakable odor of musk — sometimes pungently animalistic in spirit, at other junctures almost effervescently sweet, or even still a rousing mélange of the two — has served as a traditional object of both veneration and infatuation within Islamicate societies, a distinction that arguably harkens back to the very genesis of the Islamic world-system itself in the seventh century (Al Shindagha). This should not be taken to insinuate that the recognition, appreciation, and cultivation of musk can, by any means, be deemed an exclusive feature of Dar al-Islam. The natural spatial distribution of the musk deer1 from which one extracts the aromatic substance is centered, both presently and historically, not in the Islamic heartlands of the Middle East and North Africa, but in a geographic range stretching from the Tibetan Plateau to the easternmost extremities of Eurasia (Mudasir-Ali 137). It comes as no surprise, therefore, that musk figures prominently in the panoply of curatives upon which the folk remedies of the latter region frequently depend. Contemporary practitioners of traditional medicine from Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese backgrounds all continue to ascribe immense importance to the purportedly salutary uses of musk in treatment, indeed to such an extent that “there are at least 884 [documented] traditional Chinese medicine prescriptions and 347 products that use musk in China” (Feng). Although medieval Arabic pharmacologists proved no less enthusiastic about harnessing musk’s restorative properties, I argue that what truly differentiates Islamicate civilization’s preoccupation with musk from its counterparts elsewhere is its articulation of a unique conjugation of smell’s spiritual and secular applications. Far from propounding a rigid dichotomy between two mutually exclusive categories of eroticism and self-abnegation, musk in Islamicate societies owes its position of prominence precisely to its cultural 1 Although the exact species delimitation of musk deer has been subject to dispute, a common estimate suggests that there are approximately eight identifiable species, all sharing the genus Moschus (Mudasir-Ali).
92
EXIT 11
