For this presentation I consider the assiduous development of sound worlds in two very different Islamic contexts with preliminary impressions from new fieldwork in Oman as a basis for comparison with extensive research in Indonesia. Key to the rich world of Indonesian Islamic arts and stemming from the recitation of the Qur’an are the aesthetics of Arabic language and music, which constitute a global aesthetic system that Indonesian artists both reference and resist depending on their cultural background and political orientation. In channeling the Word of God through the human body, quranic reciters, women or men, meld mundane and sublime toward a personal experience of the Divine. While the objective is to recreate the archetypal, the result is unapologetically personal, as the voice, more than any other human performing apparatus, is always identified as belonging to a particular body (Olwage 2004). Although it may be represented as a solo and individual act, religious performance is actually a “communal endeavor” (Marcus 2007). First, the performer of quranic recitation or devotional song is doing something that everyone has practiced and experienced (Sells 1999). Second, reception of “language performance” by listeners (Arabic: sami‘a) is as much a part of the aesthetic complex both in idea and action as is performance. Hearing Islam in Indonesia is not an option, it is a certainty and while modernist Islamist forces have tried to mute experiential performance the Muslim soundscape is difficult to legislate as it represents the tripartite axis of hearing, knowledge, and power. Finally Islamic sound practices involve participants -- reciters, singers, and musicians and their publics: connoisseurs and the curious who have worked for centuries to cultivate “literacies of listening” that enable cultural and spiritual engagement among local communities and with a larger imagined Muslim umma (Erlmann 2004). The aesthetics of sound, encompassed in the Islamic practice and philosophy of orality combined with the Southeast Asian proclivity for busy noisiness (ramai) is at the heart of my understanding of reception as a site of production in Indonesia. Yet on the distant Northern shores of the Indian Ocean, in the Arabian Gulf, the original source of Indonesia’s Islamic practices and beliefs, little of this kind of culture seems to exist or is even acknowledged. Rather, the “literacies of listening” under development in Oman implement a nationalist discourse that is as remarkable for its silence as Indonesia is for its noise (Attali 1985).