A willingness to play on the boundary of feeling and knowledge is evident, for example, in Debra K. Shuger’s study of Renaissance sacred writings about morals and metaphysics. Shuger demonstrates how appeals to emotion worked hand-in- glove with literary designs that were geared to persuade through references to knowledge. Knowledge in that respect was itself “passionate,” and the emo- tional power of sacred rhetoric was marshaled to present truth in a “nonliteral, nontransparent language.” A similar sort of sensitivity to the ambiguity of emotions language in classic religious texts is visible in Anna M. Gade’s writ- ing about emotions in Sufism, which shows an “affective understanding of the moral order.” The Qur’an and hadith, alongside a cluster of Muslim hagiogra- phies, served in early Islam as bases for the coalescence in Sufism of a process whereby emotions became aestheticized. Emotive experience was conceptually joined with the didactic power of the message of the Qur’an, and that interplay of affect and cognition was practiced through the cultivation of sentiment in the musical recitation of poetry. Emotion was understood neither as merely cognition nor embodied experience but as a technique of joining the individual with the social, the body with thought.