Biting the Fingertips: Embodied Emotion and the Islamic Historical Tradition
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Mustafa Roker | Aljamea-tus-Saifiyah
How does one express overwhelming rage or give voice to inconsolable grief? Sometimes, there are not enough words. Do these two emotions have something in common, save their intensity and the inexplicable, overwhelming feeling they both produce — something that fills the entire body? Separated by their very nature, they converge in a single visceral act: biting one’s fingertips, with the sheer intensity of an emotion the body cannot contain. Raw emotion, devoid of language and expressed through the body alone.
'Aḍḍ al-anāmil — عض الأنامل — 'biting one’s fingertips' is the Arabic expression for this act, known clinically as dermatophagia: a body-focused repetitive behaviour, characterised by the compulsive biting of one’s own skin, an unhealthy coping mechanism often triggered by stress and anxiety. Yet the Arabic expression carries more than a compulsive bodily urge. It is charged with emotion; it is a gesture laden with meaning. The expression appears twice in the Quran, the foundational text of the Arabic literary tradition.
First, it appears in the third Quranic chapter, Sūrat Āl ʿImrān (3:119), where it captures the overwhelming rage of the disbelievers: unable to triumph over the faithful, they bite their fingertips in a fit of fury. The expression reappears in the twenty-fifth chapter, Sūrat al-Furqān (25:27), albeit with a telling variation: where instead of biting the fingertips, the latter verse speaks of hands, for remorse is far more consuming than rage. It describes the Day of Judgement, where a wrongdoer bites their hands in remorse and grief, wishing they had performed deeds befitting a heavenly reward. Two emotional registers, rage and grief, and yet a single embodied expression. The body communicates what language alone cannot.
Some early biographers of the Islamic Prophet Muhammad record a striking report from the Conquest of Mecca, a watershed moment in the nascent Islamic community. The Prophet’s armies, advancing towards the city, gathered near a waterhole named Qudayd. There, he organised his regiments, binding the banners and assigning the flags to the leaders of the various tribes who had joined the march. A leader named ʿUyayna b. Hisn, whose tribe had not followed suit, stood watching from the side. Upon witnessing the might of the army, he bit his fingertips. One of the Prophet's companions present, upon witnessing this spontaneous gesture, inquired: ‘What is it that you regret, O ʿUyayna?’ He explained that his tribesmen had not marched with the Prophet and were absent from this historical moment. The narration simply assumes that the companion required no explanation for the visceral gesture; ʿUyayna only explains the cause of his remorse.
What does this anecdote reveal? Most immediately, it reveals the inner emotional lives of those present at the founding moments of the early Islamic community. ʿUyayna’s embodied gesture speaks to something more than personal regret. It captures his awareness of the moment as a leader who had realised the magnitude of the events unfolding before him and felt the weight of his absence. He recognised that his standing and influence were at stake if he were to not join the Prophet’s cause. All of this was conveyed through the single act of biting his fingertips. Fingers, after all, are the instruments for seizing. Ironically, it was his prestige that was being seized.
From a historiographical perspective, the anecdote demonstrates that early Islamic chroniclers considered such emotional moments worth recording. Reports such as these were not incidental; rather, they were curated to preserve the inner lives of historical subjects and actors. Emotions have always been present in history and in historical writing, though they have not received the same gravity as an analytical category. Nevertheless, in the past century, the humanities, including history, have witnessed an ‘emotional turn’, bringing emotions to the fore as a durable analytical category.
Are emotions universal or relative? Historians of emotion agree that emotions are products of their cultural environments, and thus contingent, and possessed of their own history. Culture does not merely describe emotional experience; rather, it shapes the emotion through language, first by naming it and then by socialising it. In doing so, culture directs how bodies should respond to emotional stimuli. In examining this relationship between culture and the way it trains the body to feel and express emotion through language, historians such as William Reddy have introduced the concept of ‘emotives’. Emotives are words or phrases used to describe emotional states that have a recursive effect: when uttered, the words themselves become triggers for the emotions they name. This helps us understand how emotions recorded in history may produce the same register in a receptive reader. The expression ʿaḍḍ al-anāmil further reveals that beyond literal words, the concept of the emotive extends to the body itself. The visceral gesture becomes the trigger. The emotion is not named — it is performed, embodied.
Barbara Rosenwein, situating emotions as relational and culturally transmitted within communities that share the same heritage, introduced the concept of ‘emotional communities’. An emotional community is a group in which people have a common stake, shared interests, values, and goals, and, more crucially, a shared emotional discourse. The relevance of this concept emerges when we turn to Islamic historiography and its use of ʿaḍḍ al-anāmil across both emotional registers, grief and rage. Rosenwein helps us conceptualise why this Quranic expression appears persistently in Islamic historiography. Its vocabulary was shared as a common discourse, and the body was made to embody and regulate Quranic emotion through both textual and spoken practices. Much like the Quran, Islamic historiography rendered the expression in varied and nuanced ways, at times denoting grief, as the anecdote above illustrates, but also rage, and sometimes leaving the interpretation open for the reader to determine through context.
Shams al-Dīn al-Dhahabī (d. 1348 CE) was a Syrian medieval scholar born in the wake of the Mongol sacking of Baghdad. The destruction of the city shattered the symbolic seat of Islam’s political power and left an indelible mark on collective Muslim consciousness. Al-Dhahabī, writing in a world still reeling from the onslaught, embarked upon a mission to collect and systematise Islamic scholarly heritage. His chief historical work is Siyar Aʿlām al-Nubalāʾ (سير أعلام النبلاء, Biographies of Eminent Nobles), a biographical dictionary containing the lives of eminent Muslim personalities up to his era. This work is a trove of historical information.
In describing the assault of Genghis Khan’s troops as they made their way through the heart of the Muslim empire, threatening the capital Baghdad itself, (although the city fell nearly three decades later, not during the time of Genghis but that of his grandson), al-Dhahabī quotes his near-contemporary source, ʿAbd al-Laṭīf al-Baghdādī: ‘One faction headed toward Azerbaijan, Arran, and Georgia; another faction headed toward Hamadan and Isfahan; and they moved through Hulwan, the strategic gateway between Iraq and Iran, making their way towards Baghdad. They surged through the world, wreaking havoc, biting their fingertips in pure rage at anyone who managed to survive'.
Here, the expression embodies rage in its most consuming form. The Mongol desire for destruction was so absolute that even the survival of a single person became an insult; they bit their fingertips in fury at those who had managed to escape them. It is also noteworthy that the report uses the expression in a way that reflects the third Quranic chapter, Sūrat Āl ʿImrān (3:119), in which the verse refers to the rage of the disbelievers. At the time of these conquests, the Mongols had not yet entered the fold of Islam. It appears that casting them through this expression is a deliberate choice on the part of the chronicler. Rosenwein’s concept of emotional communities helps us conceptualise the resonance of this expression. The Quranic charge is precisely deployed because the writer and the reader share the same emotional discourse inherited from it.
In addition to explicitly indicating the emotional register of the expression, Islamic historiography also allows the reader to perceive the emotion through the context and then experience it themselves through practice. Ibn ʿAsākir (d. 1176 CE) compiled an encyclopaedic history of his home city, Damascus, recording in it the biographies of its illustrious personalities. While recording the life of one Mālik b. Dīnār (d. 748 CE), who spent his life as a pious ascetic devoted to religious sciences, Ibn ʿAsākir reports a brief anecdote. The narrator reports: ‘Mālik b. Dīnār led us in the afternoon obligatory congregational prayers. After the prayers were concluded, he kept biting his fingers, with his eyes flowing with tears, until the sun had set'.
Brief yet poignant, the anecdote concludes without providing further details; the reader is left to infer the reason for Mālik’s visceral gesture and what his body was feeling in that moment. Yet the surrounding narrative completes the portrayal. The entire account is shaped by an image of his piety and asceticism; a man who has just concluded his prayers, biting his fingers and weeping, is almost certainly overcome by remorse and grief, seeking the Lord’s grace and mercy. The emotion is not announced, but it becomes known. It is an example of the body embodying an emotion that the historical record then preserves. Even without explicit context, the body functions as the translator of the emotion.
In the three illustrated instances, (i) the interlocutor present in the narrative recognises and names grief, (ii) the narrator describes the Mongolian rage, and (iii) the reader infers the unnamed emotion. Read together, these inform how historiography embodied and gave voice to emotion. Notably, a fourth instance demonstrates that this emotional feature was not restricted to human beings alone. Emotions were also ascribed to the transcendental and divine, who, despite their divinity, were rendered through distinctly human gestures and dimensions. It also reveals the human tendency to write the divine by imagining it in mortal terms.
An example of such history writing is al-Maqrīzī's work on the Prophet's possessions and biography. It is a text that resists neat classification into genres, at least when genre is understood in its conventional Western sense. Al-Maqrīzī (d. 1442 CE), the Egyptian historian, wrote extensively on Egypt and the Islamic dynasties that governed it. This particular text, however, is somewhat different in character, focusing on the biography of the Prophet Muhammad and detailing at length his possessions, gifts bequeathed to him, and other similar matters, all seemingly within the scope of historical writing. Yet in detailing the signs of the Prophet’s prophecy, al-Maqrīzī engages in polemics, stating that one of the heresies attributed to the disbelievers was their claim that God bit His fingers in remorse over the catastrophe caused by the Great Flood. Here, emotion is ascribed to the Divine, who is rendered through a very human gesture. The expression, with its nuances, had travelled so far into the Islamic tradition that even God was described through it.
Can we reconcile grief and rage? These two appear as entirely different emotional registers, yet some would suggest rage is a phase through which one progresses to come to terms with grief. To what extent is there a relationship between grief and rage remains an open question: is it universal or relative? Historians of emotion would certainly propose the latter.
The historiographical examples explored here illustrate that Islamic authors recognised a relation between the two and used the Quranic expression to show how the body articulates such complexities when words fall short. Further inquiry might extend this line of thinking to other embodied expressions present in our daily discourse and in the historical record. Expressions such as ‘butterflies in the stomach’ and ‘goosebumps on the skin’ are some examples of such embodied gestures that require nuanced interpretation.
The inquiry also raises a wider question: if a language lacks a certain emotional expression, can the body still feel that register? Can the body exceed the language that tries to contain it? These are questions this article does not seek to answer. It suggests something more modest: that emotions are present in history, embodied in the gestures of the living, and written by those who understood that the body, too, is a form of testimony.
Further Reading:
Katie Barclay, ‘State of the Field: The History of Emotions’, History, 106.371 (2021), 456–66.
Jan Plamper, The History of Emotions: An Introduction, trans. by Keith Tribe (Oxford University Press, 2015).
William M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge University Press, 2001).
Chase F. Robinson, Islamic Historiography (Cambridge University Press, 2003).
Barbara H. Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Cornell University Press, 2006).
Barbara H. Rosenwein and Riccardo Cristiani, What is the History of Emotions? (Polity Press, 2018).
Mustafa Roker is an Assistant Lecturer of Islamic History and Philosophy at Aljamea-tus-Saifiyah, a leading Islamic academic institution based in Nairobi, Kenya, with sister branches in India and Pakistan. He holds a Master's degree in Islamic Studies from Aljamea and a second Master's in History from Goldsmiths, University of London. His research focuses on speculative philosophy, narrative trends in historiography, and the theory of history within both Islamicate and world historical traditions.
