Surah al-Shams: Divinity, Material Agency and Human Cognition

Abstract

This paper discusses the role of ontological and epistemological agency of material culture in the Surah al-Shams as regards transforming humans’ understanding of the world they inhabit. I particularly analyse the intersection of the notion of materiality and the divine to reconsider its implications for human cognition. I argue that the Surah al-Shams not only validates the agency of material culture in the world by associating it with the divine, but also rebuts the anthropocentric approach and assumed agency of humans over material-cultural phenomena. While foregrounding the mutually constitutive positioning of non-human actants, Surah al-Shams helps us understand how landscapes and other natural and cosmic objects inform, impact on and transform mankind’s perception of the world they inhabit. Nevertheless, it is important to highlight that this perception or meaning associated with natural symbols can only be unleashed in relation to divinity as its referent. Taking a cue from Beate Pongratz Leisten and Karen Sonik’s discussion surrounding “a relationship between an agent operating on behalf of a divinity and the divinity itself as referent – and that enables us to speak of objects or images as agents or even (detachable) parts of the composite divine”  and Lorraine J. Daston’s idea of sacral “things that talk”,  I will show how the celestial bodies and cosmic phenomena referred to in the Surah allow an understanding of divinity as composite and capable of distributing its agency into a diverse constellation of (culturally/ religion-specific) indexes