Underlying the ubiquitous textual recitations characterizing most public Muslim ritual—Qur’anic recitation, the call to prayer, Sufi hadra, even canonical prayer (salah) itself—traditional Islam always featured richly expressive paralinguistic sound, replete with modal sophistication, melodic improvisation, and vocal nuance (even if such sound was not identified as musiqa per se). Through centuries of Islamic expansions, affective sonic traditions evolved through human mediation, ramifying and diversifying in accord with local culture, accommodating regional musical traditions and forging local solidarities through musical-ritual participation. Text could be preserved, while sound adapted to generate emotional power in each environment—i.e. the same call to prayer could sound Turkish, West African, or Javanese. A situation of inner unity and outer diversity thus prevailed. Seeking outward Islamic unity as a means to political power, modern reformist Islam has sought to reverse this situation from the 19th century, silencing localized musicality, preferring exoteric social unity as promoted by transgenerational models—permanent and silent—and attenuating the sonic diversity of human mediation. Human mediation links people via sound (thus “oral tradition”), through intersubjective relationships developed through intensive social-sonic interactions forging localized social solidarities. By contrast, the modern reformist position prefers mass exposure to originary models, fixed structures typically crystalized as texts, or sometimes architectural forms, precluding the ramifying genealogies of human mediation, which are charged as bid`a (heretical). Reformism thus reverses tradition, emphasizing an outward unity, without assuring a corresponding inward one. In this paper, I offer three examples: the recent proliferation of text-centric murattal recitation throughout Egypt, attenuating the musical richness of traditional mujawwad styles (Frishkopf 2009); the architectural displacement of traditional Sufi devotions at the mosque-shrine of Ali Zayn al-Abidin in Cairo (Frishkopf 2008); and the silencing of musical Islamic ritual in Canada (Frishkopf 2009 and 2011). Building on Habermas, I theorize reformism’s musical silence as an instance of the colonization of the lifeworld, more particularly what I term the soundworld. Erasure of multiple localized sound aesthetics of global Islam can be interpreted as an instance of modernity’s shift from communicative action (including its spiritual and emotional dimensions) towards strategic action. Drained of musical power, constrained to fixed formal structures, religious ritual becomes coercive more than communicative. The muting of the ritual soundworld instantiates reformist Islam’s broader aim, to promote social unity and power through conformity.