I came to this fascinating field of research almost by chance. In ḥadīth classes with the late Dr Isaiah Goldfeld, we encountered descriptions of the Prophet Muḥammad gesturing with his hands, and we attempted to reconstruct these gestures and understand their meaning. Dr Goldfeld referred to these descriptions as “the Prophet’s vocabularyy of gestures”. That class, held in the early 1990s, has remained vivid in my memory ever since. I encountered the Prophet’s gestures again in 2011 while conducting research on anthropomorphic ḥadīth material. Within the framework of the project I discovered a substantial body of texts describing the Prophet performing various gestures as he speaks about God and His attributes.

My current research focuses on nonverbal communication in early and medieval Arabic literature. It examines how gestures, bodily postures, and other forms of nonverbal expression are described across a range of sources, including ḥadīth literature, Qurʾān exegesis, historiography, and adab.

This research seeks to situate these descriptions within broader religious, social, and cultural contexts, and to contribute to a deeper understanding of modes of expression and interaction in premodern Islamic societies.