In this talk I explore one dimension of the reception of Aristotle’s Rhetoric in the Arabic and Islamic philosophical tradition, with a special focus on notion of assent, a term used to describe a feeling of conviction about non-demonstrative matters (i.e. matters of belief) that is produced in an audience as a result of rhetorical persuasion, and which rests on explicit appeals to emotion. The talk then turns to describing how the production of assent through emotion was precisely the type of device Arabic philosophers deemed necessary for the inculcation of religious belief and morality in the everyday believer, whom they deemed incapable of grasping complex philosophy, law, or theology. I then argue that later medieval Muslim preachers and hadith scholars (especially in the 7th/13th-century), inheriting an understanding of rhetorical discourse partly through the ideas of thinkers like Al-Farābī, Avicenna, and al-Ghazali, developed a traditionalist discourse about discourse in which they also rationalized, as the philosophers had before them, that the specifically emotional nature of exhortatory and emotionally laden rhetoric made it particularly suitable for the religious education of everyday believers. Or, in the words of al-Farābī, when it came to establishing knowledge in one’s soul, “these things are philosophy when they are in the soul of the legislator, they are religion when they are in the souls of the multitude." At stake in this discussion is the weaving together of Qur'ānic and ḥadīth based conceptions of the utiity of emotion for pious education with philosophical and theological discourses characteristic of the later medieval period.
