Abstract
Over the past two decades throughout the Muslim ecumene, Islamists and Islamic revivalists have taken up “legitimate Islamic curing” [ruqya shar‘iyya], comprising spirit exorcism and rituals of counter-sorcery. In instructional media and curing rites I have observed in urban Morocco, Islamic curers pose “legitimate” curing as a moral and medicinal antidote to older established curing rites in the Muslim world, including talismanic writing and Sufi-based popular trance. Indeed, in Morocco and elsewhere, Islamic curers explicitly frame their cures as reformist acts of da‘wa—the “Call-to-Islam”—videorecording and disseminating the most dramatic jinn exorcisms online and in local bookshops.
This paper examines the rise of “Islamic curing” as part of a broader contemporary mass mediation—the technologization—of material, ritual Muslim practices, including the older curing rites that Islamic curers seek to eradicate. What relationships can we discern between the technologization of curing rites, the criticism of older ritual cures, and the mass-mediated call for a pious Muslim body politic? Conversely, what does it mean that an explicit discourse and practice of the technologized call in a Muslim polity takes the form of an exorcism? Indeed, what specters are Islamic exorcists expelling when the cure is, explicitly, a video-recorded and disseminated call?
The answers to these questions, I suggest, illuminate implicit elements of exorcism within all reforms of modern, mass-mediated Muslim bodies politic. That is, thinking calls to Islam as exorcisms of mass-mediated social bodies highlights a key political problem embedded in other technologized calls to religious reform: how to promote unified (and uniform) belief and practice among a mass-mediated community expanded, distanced (and thus differentiated) by the very media that would ideally summon and bind them?
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