In April of 2017, a British DJ named Dax J remixed the Islamic call to prayer (or adhan) into a set of electronic music at a music festival in a Tunisian tourist town. Video footage from the hosting nightclub showed no reaction from attendees when the adhan was played; yet subsequent circulation of this footage on social media websites appeared to garner intense public scrutiny, leading DJ Dax J to temporarily close his twitter account and issue a public apology. Meanwhile, the regional governor of Nabeul denounced the DJ’s “attack on the sacred” and closed the nightclub where the offense had occurred. DJ Dax J was sentenced in absentia to one year in prison. In addition to interviews with plaintiffs, defendants, and festival officials and participants, my paper also relies on documentation surrounding the prosecution to reconstruct this little studied legal case. The prosecution of DJ Dax J is notable as it marks a turning point in Tunisian blasphemy cases: it is the first prosecution of a non-Muslim for blasphemy in Tunisia since 1857. The prosecution of DJ Dax J also marks the first Tunisian blasphemy prosecution since the ratification of the 2014 Tunisian constitution, which, I argue in my dissertation, successfully quelled the wave of blasphemy cases prosecuted from 2011-2013; this constitution featured a new article that both guaranteed the freedoms of religion and conscience while also prohibiting attacks against the sacred, the fruit of a novel compromise among Islamists and progressives in the constituent assembly. My paper therefore uses the case against DJ Dax J to reflect on larger questions about blasphemy prosecutions in Tunisia, including: if blasphemy is frequent in Tunisia as elsewhere, then why was this particular blasphemous act prosecuted (and not others)? What made this blasphemous act both worth prosecuting, and, prosecutable? My paper also reflects on the limits of the soundscapes the sacred call to prayer can merge into and those which it “cannot.”

Among narratives that circulate concerning the call-to-prayer are stories centering on the power of this voiced sound to convert through affective response. One such legend relates the story of Neil Armstrong’s conversion to Islam after hearing the recited call in outer space. Predominantly, yet culturally diverse, Muslim countries have disseminated versions of this story since the time of Armstrong’s lunar landing and such stories are now entrenched in the urban mythology of cyberspace. The Armstrong narratives tend to support and emphasize central pan-Islamic tenets, most specifically the ability of the voice, separately from the text, to imbue a meaningful and persuasive affective experience (since the narratives emphasize Armstrong’s inability to understand and decode Arabic). Moreover, the setting of the lunar landing resonates as a powerful symbol of Islam and its deep connection to the moon. Yet, at the same time, these Armstrong narratives can reflect local, contested, and complicated experiences of Islam in the public sphere, an inherent feature of a public sonic expression such as the call to prayer. This paper highlights the way in which the voice is the persuasive and meaningful object and the way in which the Armstrong celebrity narratives utilize Islamic symbols to engage the wider Muslim community. Simultaneously, local narratives, collected during fieldwork in Istanbul, are examined to see how the story is manipulated to reflect local discourse and contested positions concerning religious authority and aesthetic in call-to-prayer rendition.

Contemporary Rabat is a bifurcated city when it comes to religious sound, particularly the Islamic call to prayer (idhan). While the idhan is almost completely absent from the sonic atmosphere of some affluent neighborhoods like Agdal, the traditional quarter known as the ancienne medina or al-madina al-qadima and surrounding areas erupt five times a day with a barrage of temporally staggered and tonally distinct calls to prayer that give this part of the city a unique acoustic resonance. Using multiple audio examples recorded at different times and from different locations in Rabat’s ancienne medina I attempt to map the temporality and spatiality of these various overlapping calls to prayer. I give special attention to the material conditions of this polyphony, particularly the use and placement of mosque loudspeakers and the way their projection of sound reverberates through the quarter’s dense, physically-hard built environment—what I call “medina acoustics.” I argue that these resonances ring a striking contrast to other nationally- and transnationally-connected forms of religious authority and expression. First, rather than the kind of “ambient faith” through which many modern religious movements work (Engelke 2012), the experiential effect of the Rabat medina’s overlapping idhans is one of immersion or, in the terms of one anthropologist, a form of experiential “transduction” (Helmreich 2007). Second, I posit that this more “immersive” idhan polyphony and its acoustic properties differ from the emphasis of Moroccan state-supported pedagogies in Qur’an recitation—what some have called a “recitational revival” (sahwa tajwidiyya)—which seem to privilege rules-bound vocalization over experiential impact.