Skin-to-Skin Violence and Intimacy: Animal skins and human/animal relations in premodern Islamic rhetoric, law, and practice

Using skin as an analytical tool (Ahmed), this study explores how, when, and to what ends premodern Islamic jurists, physicians, and religious thinkers affirmed or troubled customary divisions that separated humans from animals. Close readings of the rhetoric, laws, and practices surrounding the uses of animal skins for water consumption, medicine, prayer mats, disguises, travel accommodations, or parchment reveal ongoing declarations of human uniqueness and dominance, but also the tactile intimacies and health dangers that subverted those claims. Case studies examine several junctures at which Sunni and Shi’ite scholars asserted likeness over difference, or difference over likeness, between human and animal skins to trace deeper considerations of human/animal relations. In deliberations of what skins could touch what parts of whose bodies, under what conditions, and in what ways, we find unresolved tensions over the volatile lines separating humans from animals, and debates about how dis/similitude might best be determined.