Talismanic Shirts as a Text, Textile, and Technology: Recovering Tactile Eloquence of the Early Modern Islamic World

Talismanic shirts, once manufactured for the elites of the Early Modern Islamic empires, are today confined within museum vitrines. Typically presented as flat, lifeless surfaces, they are alienated from both their corporeal origins (the weaver’s hand) and intended destination (the wearer’s body). This curatorial choice can be linked to a recent scholarly reappraisal that bifurcates the identity of talismanic shirts between sartorial and bibliographical production— between garments and books. Scholars have drawn functional and stylistic parallels between talismanic shirts and Qur’anic manuscripts, while simultaneously questioning their wearability. The flattened and ironed presentation facilitates the modern viewer’s access to the calligraphic inscriptions, yet much is lost in the satisfaction of this reading impulse.

This paper seeks to recover the wealth of sensory and functional knowledge denied by contemporary display practices. Choices that privilege visuality over tactility reflect the sensory biases of the modern Westerner—namely logocentrism and ocularcentrism—thus neglecting the sensory instincts of the original audiences. Through visual and textual analysis, I reconstruct the premodern Islamic sensorium as a complex domain where visual and tactile experiences frequently intersected. In various ritual practices, text was not merely a visual phenomenon but a fertile tactile zone, one that invited kissing, touching, rubbing, or even ingestion. Reading, addressed to a wide range of organs—lips, skin, stomach—was an activity situated at the nexus of optical, somatic, and metabolic faculties. In other words, the production and consumption of knowledge were not organized along the Cartesian divide between physical and intellectual faculties.