Despite a burgeoning literature on the role of new media technologies in Muslim societies, many such works continue to situate the problem of authority in the “democratizing” potential of media circulation (Eickelman and Anderson 1999), or to attribute authority to the structures of a single media form (Brinton 2015). Where scholars do engage diverse media, the transfer of authority from one media form to another is often presented as seamless, such as the way sound recordings presumably re-embody “the logic of the isnad” (Eisenlohr 2018) in the voice of the performer. If “the medium is the message,” as the famous media studies scholar Marshal McLuhan put it, how does Islamic authority transform in the shift from one medium to another? This paper engages this question within the context of Morocco’s “recitational revival” (sahwa tajwidiyya) a largely state-driven effort leveraging new media like radio and sound recording to revitalize and popularize two traditional disciplines related to Qur’anic performance: tajwid, the phonetic rules for Qur’anic pronunciation; and study of the seven canonical variant “readings” (qira’at). I engage two historically and materially distinct media forms in particular. First, the textual genre of the ijaza, in which a teacher or Shaykh certifies his student’s ability to teach a particular text or field of study. Relying on examples from Morocco’s rich tradition of scholarly biographies (tarajim), I show how the ijaza functioned as a report of the student’s recitational prowess, demonstrated in a performance for the Shaykh known as the khatam al-qur’an (“seal” of the Qur’an). Thus, the ijaza also inscribes a corresponding form of “aural authority” on the part of the Shaykh, who certifies his student on the basis of this detailed “listening act” (Kapchan 2017). In order to understand the remediation of this aural authority in the contemporary setting, I attend ethnographically to a digital sound recording project at a prominent Qur’an recitation school in Sale, Morocco, involving a young reciter, a dedicated sound engineer, and several Shaykhs serving supervisory roles. I argue that by reducing this collective labor and myriad forms of expertise into the singular, idealized voice of the reciter, the final media object in fact obscures the aural authority of the Shaykh that the ijaza formerly sought to preserve. Far from upholding “the logic of the isnad,” then, the recording in fact radically challenges the structures of qira’at authority and raises vital questions for the future of the recitational revival.