Page 137 - Aesthetic Formations Media, religion, and the Sense

122 Brian Larkin

concept of media as extension, making it available to more adherents than
can attend the mosque. Audio and video cassettes intensify that broaden-
ing, preserving the event over time as well as moving it across space. But
for most Hausa Muslims, what is being moved is conceived of as essentially
the same thing whether in person, on television, or on video. This was
expressed to me by Sanusi Gumbi, a founder of Izala and one of Gumi’s
most prominent disciples, when he pointed out that Gumi had “been
teaching . . . since the sixties” and that when the new invention emerged
they simply went to “record what he has been saying for a long time just to
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go and spread it more.” Gumbi focuses on media’s ability to disseminate,
seemingly understanding that what is being transmitted remains essen-
tially the same.
In circulating image and sound from one setting in another, however,
the act of mediation transforms that which it circulates. It is a process of
entextualization, freezing the live event as a cultural artifact, objectifying
it, moving it around as a disembodied chunk of discourse where it enters
into new relations with the different objects that surround it. The work of
mediation splits the event into two—the face-to-face performance and its
televised recreation—initiating a connection between the two. Tafsir
broadcasts display a religious event as if it were an ongoing phenomenon
outside of the mediation of microphone or camera. But when these are
framed within the space of a broadcast, before the tafsir of another mal-
lam, or in distinction to the tafsir taking place at the same time on a dif-
ferent channel, this shift in context provides a radical change in religious
practice reconfiguring the deeply religious event of Qur’anic exegesis
within the secular space of the public sphere. For instance, in Muslim
Nigeria the traditional Sufi transmission of religious knowledge occurred
through the personal encounter of a disciple (murid) with his Sheikh
(muqqadam). This allegiance was expected to be total and a person’s sheikh
was to be their source of knowledge and practice. As one Tijani cleric
described, to be a disciple is to be “like a corpse at the hands of the one who
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washes it”; such is the totality of that devotion. Students were privileged to
be able to receive the transmission of knowledge from their sheikh—seen
as a gift—and expected to internalize it without comment or question. By

placing series of tafsir commentaries on television and radio, offering com-
peting interpretations of various Qur’anic passages, the norms of balance
that regulate public service broadcast create a wholly new context for reli-
gious information. In presenting a range of opinions from which viewers
can judge, television enacts Taylor (2007) and Warner’s (2002) argument
that the distinction of a secular public is based on the idea of a collective
potentially open to anyone. It is a movement in which adherents’ belong-
ing is premised not on unthinking loyalty but on the voluntary selection of