Hunayn’s Journal
Ibn al-Jazzār & the Ignorant Perfumer
Oud & The Sacred Smoke IWritten by Adill Ali. Read time 15mins. In a dispensary in Qayrawan, in the last decades of the tenth century, a physician set down a complaint about the people who so...
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Ambergris: The Government of an Unknown Substance
On Ambergris and the mastery of its uncertainty. Written by: Adill Ali. Read time 25mins. Abstract For roughly a thousand years ambergris was among the most valued materials in the Islamicate worl...
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On Scent, Language, and the Boundary Between Them. Written by Adill Ali. Read time 25 mins. Abstract This essay asks what kind of knowledge olfaction provides, and how. The Ontology of Olfaction c...
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Written by Adill Ali, with contributions by Khatera Naderi. Read time: 10 Mins On frankincense, the Incense Road, and the script that grew from the same ground The word nisqu does not appear in Ara...
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On the Discipline of Olfactory Perception and the Ethics of Becoming a Perceiver Written by Adill Ali. Read time 30 mins Abstract The preceding essays in this journal have established that olfacti...
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The Ethics of Scent and the Poverty of Notes Written by Adill Ali; Read time 20 Mins Abstract Modern perfumery relies on the olfactory pyramid and note lists to translate scent into language. But t...
Read moreMusk as Medicine, Scent, and Power
A Transcultural History across Chinese, Korean, Indian, and Arab Worlds Written by Adill Ali; Read time 60 Mins I. Introduction: Musk as a High-Stakes Aromatic Among the substances that circulated...
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Written by Adill Ali; Read time: 25 mins. Abstract This essay examines olfaction as a privileged entry into questions of being, drawing together phenomenology, classical and contemporary metaphysic...
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Relational Perfumery and the Mathematics of Scent.
Written by Adill Ali Introduction This entry explores the epistemological relationship between mathematics and olfaction, proposing that both disciplines reveal knowledge through the perception of ...
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The Epistemology of Olfaction: Scent, Knowledge, and the Ethics of Beauty
Written by Adill Ali Introduction Among the five senses, smell has long occupied a marginal position in the hierarchy of knowledge. Philosophers from Plato to Kant treated it as a lower faculty, to...
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