Page 136 - Aesthetic Formations Media, religion, and the Sense

Islamic Renewal, Radio, and the Surface of Things 121

instructions on how to pray and fast, commentaries on religious matters
and most importantly, the broadcast of the exegesis or tafsir of the Qur’an.
Conducted from the house of a prominent cleric, a mai bita recites a sec-
tion of the Qur’an and the tafsir mallam (teacher) then explains its mean-
ing to the surrounding audience, drawing on his knowledge of the
commentaries about that section and sometimes making referential asides
to contemporary issues. Each night during Ramadan a certain portion of
the Qur’an will be covered in varying degrees of detail according to the
particular mallam and, over the course of a few years, the entirety of the
Holy Book will be explained to adherents. Tafsir is and has been for centu-
ries a privileged religious activity for Muslims and a powerful and neces-
sary way of securing an authoritative reputation as a cleric. Prominent
mallams will attract hundreds of people to their teachings so that their
mosque fills up and people spill out to occupy surrounding streets.
Attending the tafsir of a particular mallam is a declaration of allegiance
and for particularly prominent clerics only wealthy and important indi-
viduals will get to be inside the mosque itself. Because of its importance,
who is allowed to offer tafsir has historically been tightly controlled by the
Emir and his council, though in recent years the ability to assert that con-
trol has weakened considerably.
Gumi was one of the first clerics to have his tafsir broadcast over the
radio in 1967 and his success led to demands that a Sufi preacher be
allowed to air a Sufi interpretation of Islam. Since that time, radio and
television stations in northern Nigeria air a range of tafsir from differing
mallams who represent contending Muslim traditions. In the 1990s when
I first began my research, for instance, it was possible on alternating days
to hear Gumi’s tafsir on the radio, to watch the prominent Qadiri Sufi
cleric, Sheikh Nasir Kabara broadcast on NTA (Nigerian Television
Authority), and to hear Gumi’s rival the Tijani cleric Dahiru Bauci on
Radio Kaduna.
On one level this broadcast of tafsir seems to present an established reli-
gious event, one familiar to generations of Hausa Muslims and performed
in much the same style as a tafsir from decades before television was even
invented. There is, seemingly, very little change brought about by the tele-

vision or radio: the broadcasters go to a house or a mosque, the sheikhs do
not go to a studio; the camerawork on television is geared toward replicat-
ing the spatial configuration of a single viewer’s experience of the event,
preserving the idea that one views as a congregant. The vast majority of
Hausa Muslims see these broadcasts as an age-old ritual activity made
available to people who, because of social hierarchies and physical distance,
could never have gained access to these events before. Muslim clerics real-
ize the importance of being broadcast on the media, but this rests on a