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.

“The larger political event has made visible, like a prism, a number of smaller constituent questions” says Teju Cole. What smaller, constituent questions does the “migration/refugee crisis” make visible? In what ways does the migration crisis make visible questions of loss and exile, of homeland and belonging, of identity and citizenship, of rights and responsibilities, and also, questions of governance and governmentality, of processes of control and securitization, and of neocolonial and neoliberal practices ? How do various mediating practices and representational modalities constitute the migration “crisis” as an object of (social, political, cultural, economic) struggle and a site of affective investments, through which these smaller questions are refracted? More specifically, what is the role played by images in the articulation of the contemporary migration “crisis” as a socio-political event? Visual culture is not restricted to the image in its exact sense. Rather, as media scholar Krista Lynes argues, a focus on images in contemporary media analysis entails studying texts across genre, form, media and audience – from news reportage, films, museum arts, to tweeting, blogging, journaling and performative activist actions, to academic scholarship even – as “significant sites for the articulation of a social event” which constitute the visual regime as an “interlocking and uneven image field.” In this paper, I engage with a selection of images – across genre, media, form and audience – that are part of the visual field framing the mass displacement of Syrians post-2011, with the aim to investigate the role they play in the constitution and articulation of this phenomenon as a crisis – a site of political, social and cultural struggle – and in making it visible and memorable in the global mediascape. The Syrian refugee crisis, referred to as “the biggest humanitarian and refugee crisis of our time,” has generated (and continues to generate) an abundance of images, and has produced an expansive and dynamic visual field, which has become the object of political contention, has galvanized intense affect, and catalyzed social change. The images that I engage with constitute significant sites for the articulation of the Syrian refugee crisis, and thus provide a sketch of the highly politicized visual field framing the mass displacement of Syrians post-2011 (and contemporary transnational human migration more generally), as well as an entry point to critically understanding how this field is mobilized both as a mode of governance and as political praxis.

Many Lebanese musicians making alternative music have faced allegations of being either too Lebanese, or not Lebanese enough. These musicians often bear the burden of representation— speaking for Lebanon, from some sort of “genuinely Lebanese” subject position. This question of cultural positioning is implicated in the politics of claiming a national history for Lebanon. In the absence of officially endorsed narratives of Lebanon’s past since 1975, the time before the onset of the 1975-1990 civil wars has been constructed as a lost “golden age” of economic growth, cultural cosmopolitanism, and religious plurality. Lebanon’s present, often characterized by a “golden age” nostalgia borne of post-war amnesiac trauma, is construed as precarious and perpetually on the verge of renewed violence. Lebanese art critics and theorists such as Chad Elias (2015) and Walid Sadek (2011) have framed studies of art and artists in Lebanon since the 1990s as engaging these “dominant chronopolitics” (Elias, 2015). Sadek argues that the instability of Lebanon’s present is caused in large part by the forcible severing—through dominant political rhetoric and academic framing—of Lebanese history from real life experience in the present (2011). The work of the artist, Sadek claims, is to search for a “habitable chronotope,” a way of framing Lebanese spatio-temporalities that is commensurate with lived experience. In Sadek’s formulation, a “habitable chronotope” promises to challenge the hegemony of conceptions of temporality that continue to exert force over ways of being in and experiencing Lebanon’s present. In this paper, I examine the work of artists whose music sonically indexes Lebanese cultural pasts. Looking specifically at the music of alternative musicians Zeid Hamdan, Mashrou’ Leila, and Waynick, and drawing from interviews with the artists and various key promoters and organizer’s in Beirut’s alternative music world, I argue that references to, and indexing of authorized musical practices such as Arabic music and fulklur mediates understandings of the trajectory of Lebanon’s history and politics and in so doing begins to imagine and evoke a habitable chronotope for Lebanon. By re-mediating referents from various musical pasts, I argue, musicians draw historical, sonic, and cultural through lines that bridge Lebanon’s past and its present, in order to construct or imagine a future in which the sounds, practices, and values of the past—thought to have been lost to the political and cultural violence of the civil wars and the subsequent decades of officially endorsed amnesia—maybe be relevant and accessible.

On July 22, 2019, an internet scandal broke out in Lebanon when a series of religious activists misread the oeuvre of the Lebanese band Mashrou' Leila, rendering them blasphemous, unruly, corrupt, and even meddling with evil spirits. The band had a concert planned for August 9; but the church released a statement condemning the band and their planned concert, after which religious activists physically threatened potential concert-goers. As a result, the event organizers cancelled the event for "security reasons." Drawing on Gilles Deleuze, Gayatri Gopinath, and Marwan Kraidy, by way of Tarek El-Ariss, this paper explores the religious media rhetoric that the church and various religious activists adopted -- whether knowingly or not -- to make a case for Mashrou' Leila's blasphemy. By conducting close readings of religious rhetoric circulated online, and considering the form with which it is circulated and through which it is mediated, this paper argues that the democratic, unregulated nature of social media allows for arguments -- factual and fabricated -- to spread and be shared widely. El-Ariss argues that social media, while hyper-modern on one level, is also in some ways a return to the beastly premodern times; and this Mashrou' Leila incident is a case-in-point -- a return to the 'beastly' that is further facilitated by the Lebanese state's weakness. Ultimately, this paper raises an ethical question related to dialogue and engagement in our contemporary moment. In a world divided between factual and fabricated, religious and secular, civilized and beastly, how can we, as humans, be empathic, especially in cyberspace -- which is mediated by screens and clicks -- we inhabit in addition to our bodily life, such that we are engaged but also respectful, and argumentative but also reasonable, while realizing that "reason" and "reasoning" mean different things to different people.