How does sound encode sacred affect? And how is sacred sound, and thus sacred emotion, learned? While much has been written on spiritual belief from the point of view of narrative and the body, less attention has been paid to the power of “sound” and, more importantly, listening, to shape sacred identities and create community. This paper attends to the aural dimensions of sacred performance focusing on the role of music, chanting as well as listening and utterance in the performance of “Sufi Music” in public venues in France. Moving respectively through the social context, the ritual form and analytical frames, I end by explicating what I refer to as a “literacy of listening” -- the acquired ability to learn other (religious) cultures through participating in its sound economy. How do learned auditory and sound practices transport a once local and ecstatic religion outside its point of origin? What do these communities of sacred affect perform in the larger public sphere of secular France and how do they transform it? There are many places in the Muslim world where non-Arabic speakers learn to recite the Qur’an beautifully (Rasmussen 2001). But unlike pedagogies in Qur’anic schools where phrases are taught slowly and over years, the Sufi initiates in France undergo a complete immersion into the ritual all at once. No one gives them individual lessons. They come to the ceremony and they learn to listen. When I asked S. how she learned the entire liturgy, she said, “just by assiduity.” I asked another young women, “But you, H., you understand Arabic, don’t you?” “Just a little,” she answered. “Then how is it you speak so beautifully?” A force d’écouter, she said, “just by listening.” Il faut écouter avec le coeur, “you have to listen with your heart.” Clearly, it is not an ordinary listening taking place, but what some scholars have called “deep listening” (Becker 2004; Oliveras 2005), and what the Sufis call sama‘—spiritual audition. It is an active and attentive listening that involves not just the ear, but the entire affective and sensate being. Sufi initiates become competent not just in the music of a new language, but in the technique of sama‘. Learning to listen, they acquire a new soundscape as well as a new way of being in the world. This paper is based upon fieldwork conducted in Morocco and France over the span of 16 years.

Despite anthropology’s turn to performance toward the end of the twentieth century, Michael Herzfeld (2001) observes that anthropologists have been more comfortable examining rituals and public (mainly state-sponsored) spectacles than the spaces of cultural expression, especially those of the world of “entertainment,” that fall in-between these two theoretical extremes of the continuum (see also Beeman 1993; Handelman 1998). In this paper, I examine one of these in-between spaces, that of the theatrical “mega-spectacle” El-Hadra, a choreographed concert of Tunisian Sufi songs and imagery conceived of as “recovery” of Tunisian musical heritage. El-Hadra performances have filled sports stadiums on an almost annual basis since 1991, and have resulted in widely distributed audio and video recordings that have, in effect, solidified the construction of a genre—and something of an industry—of staged “Sufi music” in Tunisia. Two aspects of El-Hadra stand out as crucial for any consideration of its mediation of sound and society. First, the performances mix Western instrumentation (e.g., electronic keyboards, drum set, saxophone, oboe) with traditional Arab aesthetics—both Sufi and non-Sufi. Second, the show mainly consists of songs from two Sufi orders—the Sul?miyya and the ‘Is?wiyya—that are considered by many Tunisians to be mutually incompatible socially and ritually: the Sul?miyya, with its close ties to the Tunisian socio-political elite and its physically reserved rituals involving the chanting of litanies praising God, the Prophet, and Muslim saints, is a highly respected institution in Tunisia, while the ‘Is?wiyya, in contrast, with its working class membership and dramatic trance rituals involving acts of self-mortification (such as the eating of nails, chewing of glass, application of fire to flesh, etc.), is considered a far more problematic presence in Tunisian society (see Chelbi 1999; Mizouri 1996). An anthropology of sound perspective provides insight into what happens when Sufi songs—associated with social and ritual institutions with very different histories and identities—are reclassified into a generic domain of “Sufi music.” It asks how the reception of sound can create a new conceptual order out of the “disorder” of the messiness of lived social and political relations, and how ideologies of nationalism and modernism continue to bear on cosmopolitan cultural projects that espouse to “rescue” sacred traditions by reconceptualizing them through aural aestheticization and desacralization.

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.

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).